Almada - Porto Brandão

How Can Porto Brandão Contribute to the Adaptable City?

The aim is put on a reflection about the value of special places, in the process of decay in its lifecycle. To sustain urban design with sensitiveness to relations between space and time factors, the qualities of a place like Porto Brandão must be based on adaptability - the use of these places depend on new perspectives of hospitality: regarding landscape, heritage, economy, interacting in close proximity (University, business nucleus, infrastructure ...) and distance (Lisbon): 

a- To identify values that are in crisis (devaluation or abandonment of industrial activities, precarious housing, heavy traffic, instability of the cliffs...) and possible action on the problems;
b- To contain space consumption, keeping "landscape reserves" in processing changing scenarios: morphology (terraces for agriculture, promenades between high and low grounds) and metabolism (events, activities...);
c- To test a strategy of leveraging temporality enhancing the site’s specificities (vegetation, views, accesses...) and tuning with variations in space and time, in an uncertain future;
d- To act at different scales, in a process that fits the site to new ways of life and economic to social cycles’ sequences towards a better intensity in land use.

City Strategy

The strategy for the area now being studied, includes to restrain the industrial expansion in the north riverfront, by defining an axis of recreational and leisure activities to the beaches to the west and by the expansion of the university campus to the south.
The geographic location and privileged environmental quality at the mouth of the Tagus estuary and the Atlantic front, establishes links between Almada and the water on various potential possibilities. Under the concept of "City of Two Margins", the centrality characteristics, the landscape values, the level of urban facilities and infrastructures with priority to the network of modes of soft mobility (MST light tram network), all support a strategy of "Place for Inhabiting, for Work, of Culture, and Knowledge" and promote the accessibility between the territories’ multiple functions. To enhance the development of the University and Innovation pole, internationalization and articulation with job-creating economic activities, culture and knowledge is also stimulated by transnational connectivity and student mobility in Almada, as an Erasmus City.
Reconversion of obsolete urban areas of Porto Brandão results from the goal of environmental and landscape quality, as part of quality of life in the territory of Almada, consolidating ecological structures and ensuring cultural continuity, in both rural and urban components.

Site Definition 

Porto Brandão is at the bottom of a valley which, from a plateau where lies a University, opens onto the river. It was a village linked to the river activities, open to the beach through a large square that in the late '40s, was populated by houses that withdrew its large cove. Among the existing buildings of greater significance is the church and along the river the old fish cannery.
The picturesque character of this place is given by its ancient way fishing tradition, the fame of its restaurants and the slope located on the west, the existence of two unique buildings, the Lazareto (a sanatorium/nursing hospital) and the Torre Velha (Old Tower -an ancient fortification of Lisbon’s sea defense).
Porto Brandão is very conditioned not only by its morphology between two rugged slopes (one with illegal housing) where straight connections between up and down hill would require future mechanical features), but mainly by its industrial occupation (fuel oil depositories) that limits the experience the sites’ exceptionality and its relationship with the river and the landscape of Lisbon.

Adaptability: Main Elements to Take into Account 

The most relevant partners of these location’ regeneration are the fuel terminal companies that are soon to be disused and the University that like the Innovation Center should boost greater intensity in territory occupation and interweave their action with urban functions (home, leisure, work).
New links and connections may be fostered by soft mobility stimulation and topographic constraints amelioration (todays’ simple upgrading solutions are welcomed in some more urgent points) by upgrading leisure pathways or functional quick links namely from the riverside to the University and existing urban transport facilities: 

1. Interior links:

a. Through the valley - raising new uses and offering activities with time diversity (weekend, summer holidays…) and better connection to the light Metro line
b. Through the east cliff (fuel terminal soon in disuse) until the Innovation center
c. Through the west cliff from the university to the Lazareto and its reallocation to tourism, services...) 

2. Joining "neighborhood" urban fragments, promoting the potential diversity of activities:

a. Possible urbanity upgrading in the Azinhaga settlement and connections down the cliff (to the riverfront) and on top of the east hillside with "quality paths"
b. Improve uses, accesses and public spaces; support communities
c. Attracting new residents of different types and “times”, new users and publics

3. A "Center" at the riverfront:

a. Fluvial (fishing, access to Lisbon’s riverside - sports, production service, leisure...)
b. Creative activities, cultural, gastronomical, recreational
c. Meeting (between University and the river; Almada and Lisbon; locals and travelers; night and day)