Esch-sur-Alzette: A Metrópole do ferro. Do assentamento industrial à construção de uma nova imagem urbana contemporânea

Abstract

In this Master Thesis, entitled "Esch-sur-Alzette: A Metrópole do Ferro. Do Assentamento Industrial à Construção de uma nova Imagem Urbana Contemporânea", it is developed an analysis and reflection on the urban regeneration process, since the 1980´s, formulated and implemented in Esch-sur-Alzette. Its growth, importance and decline are directly related with the development of the steel industry observed in the 19th and 20th centuries and with the gradual and deep decline process of the industrial activities, particulary of the steel production, which affected a significant ensemble of European cities in the context of the international financial and petroliferous crisis occurred in the 1970´s. In order to comprehend the ongoing urban regeneration process in the city of Esch-sur-Alzette, it is developed a reading and reflection on the main moments which appoint to the evolution of the city form in the geographic European space in the context of a consolidated planning culture and practice, since its origins until the contemporaneity. Parallel to this, we add to the reflection an ensemble of European cities, Glasgow, Bilbao and Dortmund, for being paradigmatic cases of urban regeneration, seeking to identify common similarities and transformation axes. Last of all and based on a chronological reading, we seek to characterize the evolution of the urban form of the city of Esch-sur-Alzette by identifying the main moments of its expansion and consolidation process in its relation to the different phases of the steel production development, as far as they are inseparable, which are observed since the settlement of the industrial activities until the beginning of its declared decline process. It was followed a de-industrialization process, which revealed itself ideal to a profound form, urban design and image transformation of Esch-sur-Alzette. This process was managed by the city by an ensemble of planning and urban management instruments that successively formulated a reformulated themselves, since the 1980´s until the contemporaneity. We bring to a conclusion observing that, over the last three decades, Eschsur- Alzette managed to identify the timing, the strategic axes of intervention and the actions, which lead to the implementation of the ongoing regeneration process, as well as, even in partial form, to develop an ensemble of necessary plans and projects to face the different problems that were placed in different city areas. Those plans and projects enabled to deeply reconfigure the tissue of Esch-sur-Alzette, to emerge a new vocation and functional profile and to build a new appellative, modern and innovative urban image, bt preserving the essence of the city´s identity and by rescuing its importance in the national and international context.