Vida e movimento: hipóteses de regeneração urbana a propósito da estrada da Circunvalação do Porto

Abstract

The growth and spread of "speed" were the genesis of the development process of the modern city and its extensive development. The combustion engine, especially in its individual materialization - automobile - represents such a breakthrough in the performance of movements that it seemed to legitimize the organization of cities on their role. Throughout the twentieth century, urban policies devoted to the attempt to enable the utopian road society, subverting all the polysemy of shared human life, according to the increasing demands of efficiency and speed. The inability to adapt consolidated urban centers to the new social dynamics, promoted extensive and widespread development of new clusters, designed to a superhuman mechanical movement scale. When attained awareness of the failure of the road solution as the only answer to contemporary urban mobility, it was urgent to reassess the city, set new commitments and, above all, find answers to the legacies of modern urbanistic. Through in-depth study of a case - Porto's Estrada da Circunvalação - will be sought to determine the PROCESS of transformation of the form and the urban organization according to the mobility system progress - especially individual mobility; ascertain the contemporary CONDITION of adapted or designed spaces according to the road imperative; and prove, at last, the HYPOTHESIS of regeneration.