- Expansion and Abandonment The urban duality in planning metropolitan Lisbon   1259 kb by    Moreira, Ines | ineslmoreira@gmail.com    Short Outline The paper approaches the expansion and abandonment of urban areas related to the presence of economic activities in metropolitan Lisbon, generated by the growth of the tertiary/quaternary sector and by the process of deindustrialization, by discussing their determinant factors, the policies and plans that have shaped them. Abstract The paper presents some preliminary findings of the on-going PhD research in Urban Planning, addressing the specialized landscapes resulting from the concentration of economic activities in metropolitan Lisbon, which are one of the products of the rapid urban changes during the last 50 years. The main objective is to approach the expansion and abandonment of urban areas related to the presence of economic activities in metropolitan Lisbon, generated by the growth of the tertiary/quaternary sector and by the process of deindustrialization, by discussing their determinant factors, the policies and plans that have shaped them. At a moment of restructuration for Portugal, the opportunity to redefine the nature of the relationship between the planning activity and the urbanization process is an issue of great interest in the approach to urban issues. Twenty years after the consolidation of the administrative Lisbon’s Metropolitan Area, its outcomes in terms of a trans-scalar approach to the region are still under development. The planning of metropolitan Lisbon is confronted with a multitude of municipal, regional and special plans, acting at different scales, resulting in fractures and leftover spaces in its confrontation points that become potential interest areas for speculation and spontaneous developments. The consequences of the lack of a territorial unifying vision have an increasing presence in the landscape, resulting in a) the emergence of functionally specialized areas (concentrating offices, technologic industry, retail units and logistic facilities) in strategic points with high infrastructural connectivity, but unrelated to the neighbour urban fabrics or city structure; and at the same time, b) business closures and the abandonment of obsolete industrial areas, with a great potential for the re-signification of the relation with the waterfront, brownfields’ decontamination and, at the same time, the consolidation of a metropolitan identity connected to Tagus estuary. In this sense, the re-colonization and the re-mixing of uses are key-elements in the discussion of metropolitan planning, in order to integrate the abandoned areas and to protect and define areas of environmental quality, contributing to a cohesive development of Lisbon’s territory. Keeping pace with contemporary European cities and regions, Lisbon has been the stage for a set of metropolitan dynamics of rapid urban expansion processes and increasing functional complexity (George and Morgado, 2007). On one hand, after the 90s the pressure to adapt to the new economic and social demands of the emergent knowledge society, along with the setup of the mobility network, the motorization of the population and the resulting changes in the way of inhabiting the city, resulted in a distended urban system with axes of great concentration of economic activities related to the tertiary and quaternary sector connected to the transport infrastructure. On the other hand, the global changes in the industrial production processes and the restructuring of the economic system had consequences in the obsolescence of the vast peripheral industrial complexes, originating a wasteland landscape. Recently, the present economic and financial crisis has aggravated this trend, with the punctual abandonment of medium and small enterprises integrated in industrial and logistic clusters. In this scenario, the main question addressed by the paper is the role of planning for the integration of the segregated, marginal, expectant or abandoned (built and open) areas in the metropolitan dynamics. The uncertain future of this complex metropolitan landscape is approached at multiple scales, by the analysis of the interrelations of the various elements that determine the space – systematized under natural ecologies, infrastructural system, built environment, open spaces and new urban extensions (Waldheim, 2006), as well as the policies and the spatial plans that deal with the municipal, metropolitan, national and supranational realities (Dühr et al., 2010, Ferrão and Mourato, 2011). The research methodology combines a theoretical with an empirical approach, based on analysis resorting to the overlay of official cartography and spatial plans, cross-referenced with analysis of the territorial impact of national and European Community policies. References Dühr, S., Colomb, C. & Nadin, V. 2010. European spatial planning and territorial cooperation, UK, Routledge. Ferrão, J. & Mourato, J. 2011. Evaluation and Spatial Planning in Portugal: From Legal Requirement to Source of Policy-learning and Institutional Innovation. In: Dasí, J. F. (ed.) De la Evaluación Ambiental Estratégica a la Evaluación de Impacto Territorial: Reflexiones acerca de la Tarea de Evaluación. València: Publicacions de la Universitat de València. George, P. & Morgado, S. 2007. Área Metropolitana de Lisboa 1970-2001. De la monopolaridad a la matricialidad emergente = Metropolitan Area of Lisbon 1970-2001. From monopolarity to an emerging matrix pattern In: Font, A. (ed.) L'explosió de la ciutat : morfologies, mirades i mocions sobre les transformacions territorials recents en les regions urbanes de l'Europa Meridional. Madrid: Ministerio de Vivienda. Waldheim, C. (ed.). 2006. The Landscape Urbanism Reader, New York, Princeton Architectural. Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2013: Frontiers of Planning - Evolving and declining models of city planning practice   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper