Cidade, Um Drama no Tempo: Uma reflexão organizada, sobre factores temporais, no desenho da cidade

Ana Luísa Gonçalves Brandão

Key information

Authors:

Ana Luísa Gonçalves Brandão (Ana Luísa Gonçalves Brandão Estêvão)

Supervisors:

Pedro Filipe Pinheiro de Serpa Brandão (Pedro Filipe Pinheiro de Serpa Brandão)

Published in

11/04/2008

Abstract

Discourses on space form and image are the essence of architectural and urban culture commonly reproduced today. But discourses produced around this territory, be them 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, but what is determinant is how temporal concepts influence the action of urban design and its significance. This is our aim. Our starting point: today's city is confronted and conditioned by contemporary phenomena such as space-time compression or globalization. Time is a crucial factor. Either connected to global and generic phenomenon, as global competitiveness, the demands of the mass consumption society, or the pressure of development. Or when, the issue is city historical character subject to specific features such as increasing monumental and sacralised heritage. Even in these scenarios, the recognition of the need for change is irrefutable: the inescapable pressures and the very fact of decadence and degradation are a result of the mismatch of the city present shape to current needs. The case study is the process of transformation of Baixa-Chiado since 1988s fire, back from Siza Vieira's project until the present ideas about the area, 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 relations between past, present and future.