Porto 20th century urban centralities. Two study cases: Aliados administrative central plan (Barry Parker) and Boavista urban axis. Urban development between town planning and real-estate investment.

Abstract

The urban development processes results from a mixture of town-planning coordination and a rea-estate private investment, strategies that are not always articulated. These two strategies have two different decision makers, one is based on institutional policy and another relies on individual initiative driven by financial interest and market pressure. Until the nineteenth century the supremacy of individual initiative was more expressive. The nineteenth century represents a profound change in the urban development and urbanization's processes, for the emergence of townplanning, as an administratively integrated autonomous disciplinary field. Porto is a national example of this change that took place mainly in the late nineteenth century, but with a historical background in the eighteenth century with the two major Portuguese Enlightenment initiatives in this city and in Lisbon. Porto Municipality promoted a city civic center restructuration between 1880 and 1920, with a urban program of administrative, financial, communications and legal services centralities. As a parallel mechanism of urbanization and the creation of centrality, we witness a rea-estate market process of the west part of the city, whose core, Praça da Boavista, is a part of a urban axis of nearly seven miles that guides all urban development towards the ocean. This communication establishes a basis for comparison between the processes of urbanization of the Avenida dos Aliados area and Boavista Axis, inserting them in a dual centrality system that still characterizes today the city of Oporto.