Established planning practices have proven fragile and inoperative in the face of rapidly changing assumptions: the role of the State, the ability to forecast, the belief in a single techno-scientific rationality, the constant urban expansion. The experience of the last decades and the conditions we face today lead us to seek new formulas for the transformation of urban space, based on the specificities of each territory and the activation of its endogenous values and resources, the result of the actions of multiple actors.

A new role is now expected of the public administration: no longer the entity that defines the image of ideal futures and intervenes directly in their materialization, nor the regulator that determines and oversees rules and indexes that limit and guide a private investment that is thought to be always present; but rather the agent that is capable of inspiring, mobilizing and articulating the innumerable actions of multiple players with different interests and different readings of the territory in which they act.

This change in attitude requires new planning structures and instruments that are closer to the territory and its specificities, better able to involve and work with all those who daily inhabit and transform the urban space, seeking to overcome mistrust and blockages, recognize their interests and needs and create a more favorable environment for their action. And this search for new instruments will be even more relevant in territories marked by demographic loss and the abandonment of public and private investment, where it is imperative to meet other actors who have so far been left out of the urbanization processes and learn new intervention formulas from them.

Recently, new instruments have emerged, particularly dedicated to supporting urban regeneration processes focused on the specificities of each territory and attentive to the social vulnerabilities present therein, which offer the opportunity to test new modes of planning. Territorial management instruments such as the Urban Rehabilitation Areas (ARU), Strategic Urban Rehabilitation Programs (PERU) or Local Housing Strategies (ELH) emerge as agile, open, and flexible tools that give local governments great autonomy to decide how to develop and implement them. These planning tools are also associated with new financial instruments that aim to make the defined strategies viable and, above all, to dynamize the action of the different local actors.

This applied research project aims to test new planning practices that are better adapted to the present context and the territory in which they operate, and, above all, that are better able to leverage the available instruments, activate endogenous resources, and mobilize and articulate different actors.

This process is based on the territory delimited by the Urban Rehabilitation Area (ARU) of Riba d'Ave and Oliveira S. Mateus, which should function as a privileged laboratory, where we propose to promote a local development process, which will be supported by the development of two articulated territorial management instruments: a Strategic Program of Urban Rehabilitation and a Local Housing Strategy.

Team

Nuno Travasso (Principal Investigator)
Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto

Aitor Varea Oro (Co-Principal Investigator)
Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto

Beatriz Merouço

Beatrice Barone

Bernardo Alves

João Costa

Klauss Borges

Luísa Ribeiro