DINÂMIA’CET-IUL

The latest discussion about Lisbon’s new airport location and the uncertainties associated with this and other new infrastructure planned for Lisbon Metropolitan Area, illustrates some aspects of difficulties between creating new poles of centrality (with new mobility axes and investment attraction) and the predictive capabilities of available instruments to "foresee" and "order" urban transformations and developments today.

If we analyze the river’s South Bank area today, we find several areas of centrality potential within the Tagus estuary banks: natural structures, mobility and transportation infrastructures, industrial parks, several facilities, shopping and sports centers, tourism areas, etc ... In a territory historically dependent on the connection with Lisbon, they represent specific and autonomous elements. Although these areas do not reach national economic relevancy as those determined by prior  announced investments (airport, bridge connection to Lisbon, high-speed train), they could acquire a different type and scale centrality.

Working in a metropolitan scale area, the definition of centrality we seek is not confined to a given urban concentration and intensity, associated to the canonical and consolidated city center. In a broader approach of the concept, we search for elements with a variety of characteristics: such as scale, specific uses, location or attractiveness…, that are able to polarize daily dynamics. These elements are (or could be) urban referents and important units indispensable for our understanding of transformation processes. Therefore, we can consider various aspects related to: geographical location (or specific territory features); exchanging activity areas of high accessibility stimulated by road infrastructure (shopping, logistics, industrial parks); new spaces of articulation enhanced by transport infrastructure (interfaces); location of large facilities or production centers, etc.. Likewise we can include in a broader analysis of centrality potential, not only the elements and structures that are present today, but also the demand for new “opportunity spaces”: vacant but well located, expectant or obsolete areas, elements of metropolitan articulation, of natural, scenic or productive potential, around the estuary.

In this paper we will refer to the long process of formation and growth of this area in Lisbon’s Metropolitan Area, since its configuration as an industrial model, to its suburban development and prospected new forms of territorial occupation, highlighting overtime the key elements and the transformation focus. This process will allow us mainly to verify "hesitant" characteristics of planning and design tools, in the “forecasts” definition of city’s future.

A cartographic register, made from historical and recent maps, planning, design and management documents, and other sources - a Spatial Atlas organized through a Time Line - mapping the growth and identifying the set of permanent elements and territory structures. This work is to be completed by bibliographic and photographic research in relevant aspects on local media, or small interviews to consolidate a broader process characterization.

With this framework as a base, we can identify clusters of past and recent centrality, evaluate correspondent development strategies, location factors (amenities, connections), processes that led the transformation (planning, design or management), and generated effects in surrounding context (housing, urban design, landscape, dynamic mobility, employment).

Faced with this analysis, we may question those clusters resulting from strategic decisions and subsequent processes and those resulting from other unexpected processes (political decisions, external investment, economic interests, illegal occupations, etc ...). From this dichotomy between planned elements (forseen) and unplanned (unexpected or opportunities), we can discuss:
- What kind of processes, tools, actors and scales (national, regional, local), correspond to today’s real or potential centralities on the South Bank of Lisbon Metropolitan Area?
- Is it possible to articulate territorial development policies, as a whole, or are these a result of sectorial, or sporadic events and non-scheduled opportunities?
- What strategies or wished potentialities can we find embodied in planning and design instruments during the period of these changes?
- Do they correspond to transformation processes that we still can identify today in a territorial globally changing economical context?

The contrasted study of the several transformation episodes (both planned and unplanned) allows the evaluation of processes associated to contemporary city’s production and formulate new hypothesis on how to create new relationships and connections in metropolitan contexts.

Key-words: Centralities, Lisbon Metropolitan Area, Tagus’s South Bank, Uncertainty

The paper presents some of the aspects of the relation between time and urban design.
Discourses on space form and image are the essence of architectural and urban culture commonly reproduced today. But discourses produced around this territory, institutional or colloquial, are strongly conditioned by several ways of seeing time. Not only that includes temporal concepts like conservation, revitalization, changing, dynamic or process, what is determinant is how temporal concepts influence the action of urban design and its significance. This is our aim.

The study case is the process of transformation in Baixa-Chiado since 1988s fire, back from Siza Vieira's project until the current ideas, combined with a process of substitution of the central function for a new metropolitan scale. We'll study the different discourses - institutional, professional, political, opinion makers, public opinion - as well as their part in the process of reconstruction. In this case, we can find that relations (representations) between past, present and future are:
- Deeply contradictory: when future construction is at the expense of sacrificing images and elements of the past;
- Strongly linked: when future becomes a representation (a form of false continuity) of the past;
- When there is a compromise for a value creation, associated to recycling processes upon what a positive future image is built.

With this study case we intend to study what are (or can be) the answers of urban planning and urban design, in the urge of a reconstruction and with a perspective of an uncertain future.

Because Urban Design is a territory of integrative synthesis, the “overall view” that it requires comes through the collaboration of various sources of knowledge, some through professional and others through non-professional knowledge of users.
The representation of actors involved in design (be them other professionals, urban deciders or users) is a part of research and teaching culture for several reasons namely because social and cultural interaction in the context of Urban Design management requires several capacities.
CRPOLIS, an research interdisciplinary center on urban studies in Barcelona University is linked to Urban Design teaching at master’s degree level and supports an interdisciplinary research program also at PhD level in collaboration with other centers, in Spain and Portugal (such as CESUR-IST) where some cases of real “hands on” processes are developed. The role of interdisciplinarity in collaborative knowledge is relevant in gathering and interacting in three major directions:
1. In the construction of collaborative interdisciplinary research methodologies
2. In the design process of cities in transformation
3. In the development of design practice and studio teaching methods
We shall see in this paper how interdisciplinary approaches correspond to new and complex urban transformations, focusing on the importance of actors’ interaction processes, combining professional and non-professional knowledge and theory-practice relations. Therefore, we aim at a deepening in public space area of knowledge under the growing complexity of urban life. We see it as a base for further development of collaborative projects and their implications on community empowerment and urban governance at local level. Motivations of this line of work are persistent in several ongoing research projects, aiming to:
- Understand public space as a cohesion factor both in urban life and urban form
- Manage processes and strategies as elements of urban transformation,
- Stimulate the understanding of actors’ roles in urban design practices.
- Favoring the questioning of emerging aspects of urban space production…
The paper presents and analyses processes, methods and results from civic participation projects developed in the neighbourhood of Barò de Viver (Barcelona) and in the District of Marvila (Lisbon).
In the first case, a long process initiated in 2004 and partially completed in 2011, neighbours developed the projects "Memory Wall" and Ciutat d'Asuncion Promenade as part of identity construction in public space, in collaboration with a team of facilitators from CrPolis group.
In the second case, different participatory processes dated from 2001 and 2003 have resulted in the implementation of a specific identity urban brand and communication system with an ongoing project of "maps" construction according to the neighbours perception and representation systems.
We may conclude that processes of urban governance require more active participation of citizens in projects regarding the improvement of quality of life. At the same time, the implementation of these processes requires a clear interdisciplinary approach, both with respect to the negotiation processes and the development of public space as an "urban structuring product" that we can axiomatically define by its multidimensional structure and its interaction with urban social life.
In all these projects neighbors have a prominent role, which in theory and method offers a serious reflection on how to develop participatory processes on public space with actors interaction at the same level, with local governments, experts and politicians, involving nonprofessional knowledge in collaborative environment.

Scattered metropolitan cities are characterized by new urban realities that offer a variety of typologies and services – new centrality areas – that function as cores of attraction, but show a lack of integration between local and wider territorial scales, triggering problems of fragmentation and polarization. In addition, public space is often reduced to its minimal and infrastructural function, ensuring critical connections but lacking design qualities. In this article we will try to understand how it is possible to articulate these multi-scale centralities with local urban fabrics, focusing on the role of public space. We will analyse, within the scope of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, the South Bank, and in more detail, a number of areas of the Almada municipality developing an analysis methodology for identifying problems and opportunities. The hypothesis we place is that public space, in a systemic and multi-scale perspective, as ‘the connecting element’, can link different territorial scales, forming a coherent structure and acting as a reference for scattered urban contexts. We discuss how public spaces as multi-scale connectors can work as binding elements, proposing some design actions and strategies to tackle these urban problems, contributing for the urban design practice.

Far from a modern time marked by the conquest of space and the belief of planning the future, the contemporary world is marked by instability and change. The city of "liquid modernity" - complex, multipolar and polycentric - is difficult to understand, driven by different dynamics which make it dissolve into the territory. Its future is difficult to configure, with unstable balances and unforeseen developments.

How can we design for an uncertain future; project and set up new realities in which all the possibilities are open? We present a discussion focused on the importance of time factors in the specific problems of today's urban design. We seek to understand the effects generated in the process of design by the prevalence of unsafe and unpredictable environments that contrast with a need for certainty to decision making. Can urban design incorporate strategies that facilitate change and integrate uncertainty? Or work with general rules that allow different options at various stages of development?

We study the recent case of the announced project to "Arco Ribeirinho Sul", an intervention described as an urban renewal of waterfront areas on the municipalities of Almada, Barreiro and Seixal, encompassing 900 ha. The focus of the project is the conversion of obsolete industrial sites with urban and landscape potential, in a renewed urban structure, promoting new economic and social dynamics. We will analyze the models, difficulties and challenges for intervention, in search of answers to a project in the prospect of an uncertain future.