Vazios Urbanos. Dimensões dos Vazios nas Cidades - Sobremodernidade e o parque da Cidade do Porto

• Autor(a) principal: Nuno Maria Pires de Miranda Pena
• Data de Publicação: 2010
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/149410
• topic: Artes; Arts

The evolutive process of cities is, as we know, as much a construction through space, as it is through time; inherently complex in its organization, inevitably mutable and variable in the forms and meanings it withholds. Cities are the privileged territory of opportunities, trade, exchange and sharing. Of formal, social and cultural diversity, of the strange, the unknown, the unexpected. Ci- ties should represent the celebration of the possibility of living collectively. As such, the physical, social, cultural and economic formalization of the urban reality sets itself upon a relationship of reciprocity between the agents which participate in it and the level of openness and availability of the morphologies resulting from that participation. The present essay focuses essentially on the traditional city and the realms where its character, levels of effectiveness and modes of organization are manifestly exposed and reflected: public space. Considering the evolutive process of cities, an ever crescent superimposition of layers from diverse stories, cultures, intentions and chronologies, the concepts of place, non place (Augé, 2006) and terrain vague (Solá-Morales, 1996) are firstly approached. On the basis of these principles, in straight relation with the denominated proliferation of both spaces for mobility (Rémy & Voyé, 1994) and a new conceptual spatial reality (Sorkin, 1992), aspects relating to the social, cultural and economic composition of cities are considered and explored. These concepts are, in turn, associated to the identification and explanation of other dimensions of void or emptiness, related to which are phenomena such as disfunctionality and/or limitation, functional obsolescence and emptying, social and economic devaluation and desertification - all intimately related. Based on this theoretical platform, this paper integrates a study specifically focused on Portos' Parque da Cidade: an intentionally qualified void; a public space with relatively unknown and innovative characteristics to portuguese urban and social culture. With this practical component - greatly reliant upon the results obtained from a survey, in which sixty randomly chosen citizens visiting the park participated - an attempt is made at understanding the dynamics developed, both within the individual, as well as with what concerns his relationship with the space and respective elements which compose and surround it. In this sense, this study focuses specifically on this park because the aspects brought to light by it are directly and widely identifiable and applicable to many of the concepts and ideas explored previously - giving way to a more practical, palpable and concise evaluation of their meaning. From the perspectives shared by the citizens regarding the meanings and nature of the processes attributed and involved in this void - of which a graphic representation of the park attempted by each of the surveyed individuals forms an important part - an evaluation of the present status and conditional aspects of the void as place is made po- ssible. This evaluation regards aspects such as identity, representative qualities, functio- nality and, above all, the adequacy of its mutable character in the process of its clarification and consolidation as a concrete reality integrated in the evolutive process of the city.