Starting Over: a Focused Vision for the Old Suburbs of Lisbon

Original Article Starting over: A focused vision for the old suburbs of Lisbon Jorge Gonçalves*, António Ricardo da Costa and Rui Abreu University of Lisbon, Instituto Superior Técnico, Department of Civil engineering and Architecture, Lisbon, P-1049-001 Portugal E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding author. Abstract The phenomenon of suburban decline is a reality across the western world. In Europe, the reaction to this problem has been slow and unfocused and has also had very limited success. Urban research aims to deal with suburbs not just as devalued urban growth models, or available space for future expansion, but as areas for redevelopment, regeneration and re-invention. Today, within the Lisbon suburban areas, many outlying rural areas remain, alongside derelict factories and residential developments. Several areas show decline symptoms such as population decrease, ageing, deindustrialisation and defunctionalisation. Rescuing the older suburban centres may require a certain mourning of the past, but at the same time it incorporates the mechanisms of new social and productive systems. New ways of local genesis begin to emerge, mobilising involvement in and by the community and investing in emblematic and replicable initiatives. The aim of this article is to present the revitalisation strategy in place in Amadora: an innovative, interdisciplinary and prospective intervention in Lisbon’s outskirts. URBAN DESIGN International advance online publication, 11 March 2015; doi:10.1057/udi.2014.7 Keywords: suburban decline; street improvement; Lisbon metropolitan area; strategic plan Introduction In some cases, the suburb accommodated the middle classes which perceived the detached house On the concept of suburb in a low-density area and having a garden and a car as a distinctive safe and quality life-style – something The suburbs are a manifestation of the active urban that the urban centre and the canonical city cannot and metropolitan dynamics that are the result of offer. This model had its greatest impact in Anglo- private and public economic and financial pro- Saxon countries, particularly in the United States cesses that influence and are influenced by the (Jackson, 1987; Duany et al, 2001; Vicino, 2008). These behaviour of families and companies. This could are monofunctional and monotonous spaces, inter- be seen as a consensual physical approach to the rupted here and there by the presence of shopping suburb, but there are other approaches, of a more centres. social nature, such as that proposed by Stahl, 2008: A different suburban landscape can be found in the suburb ‘as the natural habitat for the nuclear continental Europe, where the suburb was initially a family and a bucolic retreat for the family from the solution to the problem of housing many of those dirty, immoral, and dangerous city’, specifically who had settled during the post-war period to work for the US context, and the suburbs as places ‘long and live in the city or metropolis. With varying regarded as little more than dormitories’ (Phelps, degrees of regulation in the form of planning 2010), in the European context. instruments and laws, the suburban spaces were The suburb results from an urban growth pro- filled with industrial, logistic and residential areas, cess – suburbanisation – that can be founded on applying a conjugative logic that almost always different phenomena, which naturally result in devalued the everyday life practices (Prior, 2012), very different suburban features. as the suburbs did not configure autonomous or © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1357-5317 URBAN DESIGN International 1–14 www.palgrave-journals.com/udi/ Gonçalves et al first-choice spaces to live in since they depended on groups with a low or median income, whether there a city that employs, consumes and seduces. Hence, were adequate planning rules or not. the suburbs are seen as ‘an inferior form of city’ What gave particular importance to these (Kirby and Modarres, 2010), something that is not dynamics was the demographic growth of these the case for other urban forms. cities through immigration or as a result of the rural Between the monotony of the suburban land- exodus that took place in the 1950s, 1960s and scape and its functional poverty, several factors 1970s, giving rise to a high demand for housing. have contributed to the marginalisation of these This led to new investments in road and rail territories in academic research for a long time. The transportation infrastructures, which promote keyword is exactly that: marginalisation. Volun- urban deconcentration from a saturated and expen- tary territorial marginalisation in the United States, sive centre. The resulting urban growth eased the involuntary territorial marginalisation in Europe, problem of the increase in spatial distance between and academic marginalisation in both regions. home and work and, at the same time, justified the Marginalisation can be perceived in several ways. creation of large commercial zones and the reloca- However, in order to effectively contribute to the tion of industrial companies to the outskirts. concept of suburb – and accepting that margin- Because of the very intense and rapid growth, in alisation is one of its main conditions – we have to some cases the Southern European suburb is still consider the spatial definition and the human defi- characterised by a significant degree of illegality/ nition of marginalisation. It would seem particu- informality: an occupation outside the existing larly appropriate to consider the definition rules, which in certain periods benefited from according to which the suburb emerges as a social negligence or acquiescence on the part of the local condition, as opposed to the mere distance to a and national authorities (Rubió, 1997). centre (Domingues, 1994). So, it is possible, in these This is an image of the Fordist city that can be circumstances, to find suburb in the centre and dated to between 1920 and 1960 (Audirac et al, centre in the suburb. 2012). However, other very important models of This concern with the importance of the idea of urban growth were also adopted in this period, for marginalisation might not seem very relevant, but example, the Garden City movement in Britain we believe that it can make a difference when it (Morris, 1997). comes to intervening in the suburb with a view to The 1970s saw the emergence of post-Fordism, regeneration and revitalisation. Gentrification is in which the financial dimension took on a more ample proof of how these areas, whether they are protagonist role following a wide-reaching restruc- in the city centre (Bounds and Morris, 2005) or in turing of the production system. A new suburban the first suburbs, (Adhya, 2013) can take on new wave emerged as a result of the market liquidity status and centrality. and as a good solution for quickly and substan- Given the typologies that contradict the idea of tially making a financial return on the capital. The the monotonous, single and stabilised suburb, it last two decades of the last century and early part was possible to understand that these spaces are of this century still witnessed a wave of urban/ the result of different production/consumption metropolitan expansion. However, there were processes that also give rise to different problems. increasing internal contradictions deriving from a (Audirac et al, 2012). fragmentation of suburban spaces marked by very different genres, characteristics and vocations. Suburbs: Cause and effect of urban growth On suburban decline Thesedynamicshavebeennoticeablesincethe Industrial Revolution, but they gained in visibility in It is very tempting to see the mutations of the the post-WWII period, particularly in Europe, where existing urban space and the new urban forms as the urgency and need for reconstruction in many the results of the life cycles of cities. But this cases followed the principles of the Modern Move- approach would make it seem as if such mutations ment as laid out in the Athens Charter. Accordingly, could not be challenged or shaped, and that there the urban territories were strongly marked by a are no global forces that create/generate new multifunctional, dense and patrimonial centre, while production, distribution and consumption systems the outskirts mainly received large industrial com- and thus create urban spaces that can be either plexes and large residential estates for population attractive or in crisis because of the shortage in 2 © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1357-5317 URBAN DESIGN International 1–14 Starting over financial and human resources (Martinez-Fernandez ● What lessons can we learn from the process et al, 2012). In the latter case, there is a constancy of developed to use in a localised intervention that aspects that justify the decline and that can be aspires to have metropolitan effects? discussed as a shrinkage identity (Reckien and Martinez-Fernandez, 2011). Indeed, this decline is the result of a combination of negative aspects: ‘a ”shrinking city” can be defined as an urban area – The Territory, the Strategic Plan and the a city, part of a city, an entire metropolitan area or a Street Intervention town – that has experienced population loss, economic downturn, employment decline and social Signs of decline in the Lisbon metropolitan area problems as symptoms of a structural crisis’ (LMA) (Audirac et al, 2012). This decline was brought about by dynamics generated by international investment LMA (see Figure 1) is home to a somewhat unique and commerce, which influenced the local and range of most of the problems facing cities today. regional growth processes (Gereffi et al, 2005). Notice Its evolution during the twentieth century shows how similar it is to this: rapid development, thanks to an equally rapid Suburban shrinkage, understood as a degenerative industrialisation process, from a mostly rural per- urban process stemming from the demise of the iphery around the capital city to a modern metro- Fordist mode of urbanism, is generally manifested politan area showing a range of symptoms of both in a decline in population, industry and employ- urban and suburban decline.

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