Formas e Desígnios do espaço público na cidade contemporânea. Contributo para o (re)entendimento do projecto do espaço público na construção da cidade actual: casos portugueses.

Abstract

This work addresses the role that the public space project can play in building the contemporary city, recognizing it as a system of free spaces with formal and functional qualities, able to give meaning and identity to urban space, to restructure and support the growth of the city. Public spaces are understood here as fundamental components in the structure and recognition of an urban reality of a city under consolidation (heterogeneous, discontinuous, fragmented). The city is considered in this study from a broad perspective (in terms of space and time) and its nature (changing, complex and multifaceted, if not contradictory) taking into account, and starting from the assumption, that the city must continue to be shaped following urban and architectural criteria, that is, considering morphological attributes, scales and methodologies specific to the disciplines of architecture and urbanism and urban design. Specifically this work addresses the problem of the public space project as a positive restructuring factor for the city, centred on project strategies and actions on urban areas that are poorly structured or in the process of consolidation, highlighting the challenges, issues and different but complementary problems that the public space project faces in the construction of the Portuguese contemporary city. In this context, we examine four interventions in Portugal over the past three decades, where the public space project (designed from scratch, or reclassified, and facing different conditions and contexts), reveals similar ability to structure and regenerate the urban areas concerned, and constitutes a factor for the development and reframing, and therefore legibility, of urban space and the city. The case studies analyzed are the project of the new Malagueira district in Évora (designed and built between 1977 and 1997, under the responsibility of the architect Álvaro Siza), the proposed requalification of the Central Area of Cacém (designed and built between 1998 and 2008, under the responsibility of the architect Manuel Salgado), the project for the urban insertion of Metro do Porto in Central Maia (designed and built between 2002 and 2009, under the responsibility of architects Eduardo Souto de Moura and João Álvaro Rocha), and the project of the Waterfront of the City Park in Porto (designed and built between 1999 and 2002, under the responsibility of the architect Manuel de Solà-Morales). In the absence of consistent paradigms / models to intervene and project or plan the city, and in the face of the crisis of meaning that (urban) public space is currently going through (either by giving rise to conflicting interpretations), or by the difficulty of public space to be thought of in the framework of integrated, strategies and projects, these examples mainly reinforce and assert the role of the discipline of architecture and urban design in the (re) construction of the city and its public spaces, particularly in its less consolidated parts.