A infra-estrutura verde da Bacia do Leça. Uma estratégia para o desenvolvimento sustentável na região metropolitana do Porto.

Abstract

The aim of this work is to demonstrate that a green infrastructure strategy for the Leça River basin proves to be an essential tool for the sustainable development of Oporto's metropolitan area. Its frame of reference is the ongoing debate on the potential links between green infrastructure, sustainable development and contemporary urban form. The work stresses the need to point out, on each specific geographical setting, the key characteristics which will enable the green infrastructure to be an active element of a planning strategy; this site focused approach is sustained given the difficulty to accurately picture contemporary urban forms through ideal abstract theoretical models that merge the referred three levels of analysis. From this scope, finding a green infrastructure strategy for the Leça River basin context arises as essential; this strategy should simultaneously embody a sustainable development promoting territorial model and the specific characteristics of the basin, as shaped to its present form by continuous transforming processes. The work maintains that the Leça River system, with its tributaries, synthesises a specific regional solution capable of nesting the multiple functions assigned to green infrastructures inserted in metropolitan regions. It proposes to invert the trend of increasingly neglecting the Leça River system, fore-seeing it as a strategic infrastructure for the sustainable development of the basin and of Oporto's metropolitan region.