O Espaço entre o Bairro e a Cidade - três casos exemplares do Plano de Melhoramento no Porto 1956-60

• Autor(a) principal: Ana Rita Quintela Vasconcelos Estelita Bessa
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/150046
• topic: Artes; Arts

The State-Provider is presently going through a crisis with its public policies ("peace, bread, health and housing") and with the enforcement of the market regulation. In the city of Porto there is presently an accentuated dichotomy between "old destitute and nouveau-riche". The loss of the "city" (proximity, agglomeration, clear boundaries) is caused by the dwindling of housing and jobs - services and businesses move to extensive and distant areas - , thereby dictating the end of the concept of housing estates, closed in on themselves, an important nucleus in the web of society. Hence the appearance of two daily geographic extremes -, confinement to the domestic space and the to and fro to the more distant areas-, thus making it difficult to create a sense of comfort in the urban sphere. Therefore it is important to investigate and understand the meaning of neighbourhood nowadays, their spaces, their customs and habits, in the context of the impoverished population of the housing estates, and what these spaces now represent in the dynamics of the city. This paper takes into consideration the spaces "between" the estate and the city i.e. the collective open spaces of the housing estates that are preponderant in the social integration of the resident population, (when they undertake the transition from home/private space to the "street" or city/public space). The 13 housing estates chosen for this study are those that were included in the Improvement Plan for the City of Porto (1956-66), three of which have been singled out for closer analysis. The method applied to this study crosses the analysis of the urban structure (form/constructed space) with the analysis of present associated social practices (contents/used space), covering a specific residential area, as well as the neighbourhood. The intention is to 1) understand the balance between the form and content of the estate and it's neighbourhood, and 2) study the possibility of harmonising the ambiguity that generally exists in the atmosphere of these estates, in order to allow a collective/communal way of life, and the symbolic appropriation and use of the estates, which is said to have been lost. This analysis showed that the relation between form/dimension and content of the polygons constructed on the estate and the corresponding border-spaces, shows evidence of the morphological (dis)advantages that are capable of cooperating in the (dis)integration, (dis)use and subsequent (dis)qualification of the housing space in the city