desirable image.
It is also part of the associated cultural identity, more
SUB-THEME:
URBAN TRANSFORMATION AND THE URBAN SPACE
(URBAN FORM AND ARCHITECTURE,
URBAN TRANSFORMATION IN HERITAGE SITES,
LANDSCAPES, WATERFRONTS AND PUBLIC SPACES)
“LOST, FOUND AND CONDEMNED – CHANGES AND PERMANENCES IN
THE ‘DNA’ OF HIGH-STREETS”
Thereza Carvalho Santos, UFF
Recent urban renewal programmes have come to discard
traditional high streets on the basis of modernization. Public open
spaces, high streets and squares included, have been thus turned
obsolete as a matter of consequence.
Urban heritage, in those circumstances, has been cut off the
‘picture’ as a matter for “preservationists”, not to be considered as
interrelated part of trends and functional relations our societies
establish through economic, social, institutional practices and their
morphological expressions and spatial distribution. When and where
these fragmented views have been adopted urban heritage and its
corresponding grid has been either revered in shrines or condemned
as undesirable. When this is the case it is defined as obsolete, wasted,
as if there were a “new start” for urban life and its urban form, shape,
grid and value to be attributed at each so proclaimed “age”.
A city high street is part of its urban genetic heritage as much as all
the architectural monuments that have been listed as icons of its
visibly in some cities than in others. High streets have been made
useful, in different historic periods, for multiple economic purposes
establishing, when certain conditions were preserved, new functional
spatial links between different urban areas, and allowed new social
practices of survival. Changes that were made have, in some
circumstances, helped to aggregate new uses and consolidate allowing
necessary links between the existing grid - with all its multiple
functions, shapes and values, and new urban expansions - or, in other
circumstances, helped to condemn the whole lot and lose functional
urban tissue and related networks of uses, meanings and values and
social related constructions and expectations.
The fact that certain urban renewal projects are seen as a threat
appears to indicate that a different approach might be appropriate.
This paper explores the possibilities of another view on ‘inherited’
grids or other street layouts where high streets are the heart of the
matter. It addresses the dynamic tension that makes streets into
public places for multiple public uses. It takes on board six different
‘views’ or qualitative dimensions of the cultural heritage of a city and
its grid, and of the process of sedimentation that intertwine them with
the lives of citizens and city and into the landscape. They are the
economic, social, morphological, environmental, and institutional
dimensions together with accessibility as a determinant condition.
1. Streets – prestige and menaces
“The street is movement: to watch, to pass, movement especially of
people … and (are) places of social and commercial encounter and
exchange… where you meet people – which is a basic reason to have
cities in any way. ” Alan Jacobs, 1993
1
High streets are very meaningful and valuable places. They are part of
the urban genetic heritage as much as all the architectural monuments
that may have been listed as icons of its desirable image. They are also
part of the associated cultural identity, more visibly in some cities
than in others. Several layers of different concepts of high streets have
proved useful to moderate, when certain conditions were preserved,
new functional spatial links between different urban areas for
multiple economic purposes. The conditions are accessibility and a
certain degree of permission, or tolerance, to temporary individual or
collective forms of appropriation. New uses and users follow with
time. The city of Lisbon, in Portugal, has many examples to illustrate
this argument. Changes that were made have helped to accommodate
new social and economic activities allowing necessary links between
the existing street layout - with all its multiple functions, shapes and
values - and new urban expansions. Some of Lisbon finer streets,
meaning more elegant design of street and architecture, offer open
spaces along their routes. They work as breaks for relief. They can be
either the pavement that enlarges to cope with the different
dimensions of an adjacent grid, or with a singular building creating
small squares. They provide stopping places, reference points along
their routes and provide places to sit, to meet, to talk and often to eat,
to drink and enjoy the view. They are community-building places. And
they help shop-keepers to keep their shops and businesses.
In other circumstances, where those conditions were not maintained,
changes have helped to condemn such urban fabric that took so long
and so many to build in practices, meanings and memories. The loss of
functional and meaningful urban tissue and networks of uses and
lives’ related expectations have yet to be evaluated. They will be
further discussed in another topic of this paper.
Prestige
High streets are public showcases, places to do certain kinds of
business. Where the entrepreneur offers and displays the goods and
consumers see, “compare, discuss with a companion, and ultimately
decides whether to enter the selling (and private) environment or not,
whether to leave the anonymity and protection of the public realm
and enter into private exchange”. The ambience Alan Jacobs describes
in his classical work “Great Streets” reveals some of the multiple
experiences that the street fabric of the city can afford. It also points
out the limitations of any attempt to reduce them. Most of the physical
qualities he indicates for a great street – and he emphasizes “all are
required, not one or two” - are directly related to social and economic
criteria. Time and context appear to be, however, not part of his
picture.
Menace 1
Other authors make time and space context their main argument to
justify condemnation. Choay once announced the terminal phase of
public realm. This perspective of doom appears to reduce the city to
an object that can be submitted to uniquely economic and social
criteria whose constant demand for innovation requires reinventing
the city. Technology would have made public open spaces dispensable
as result.
Hall (1994) followed the same trend when he stressed that high
technology production and innovation required specific millieux.
These millieux would have “social, institutional, organizational,
economic and territorial structures that create the conditions for the
continuous generation of synergy and its investment in a process
of production that results from this very synergistic capacity”. The
deterministic approach to the physical environment thus adopted
certainly served the strategic interests of the so called new economies.
On the other hand, following his line of thought, cities future -
perspective as “critical agent of economic development” would appear
2
to eventually turn, once again, into either industrial space as
‘technopole’ - no matter how prestigious it may be regarded by those
who benefit from it but don’t live in it - or slums, or both,
simultaneously. And we have all seen this picture before.
The new globalization entrepreneurs, in Hall’s perspective, would
then appear to have the power to change cities, and our lives as
urbanites, for good - and for bad. But have they?
Menace 2
The main complaint against public open spaces and places is that they
attract the beggars and the homeless, the so called undesirables. Street
design cannot be expected to solve nor hide social problems. And the
future of our public places should not depend on it. There are ways to
solve the real problems behind the issue of the homeless. Building
low-income housing, improving social assistance policies and applying
non-violent, and non-demagogic, public enforcement would certainly
help.
2. Differences in dynamics
The DNA analogy, as opposed to the usual palimpsest overwriting
idea, often used in urban analysis, lies in the dynamic aspect of genetic
networks together with the inherent heritage. Redundant though it
may sound it, hopefully, helps to clarify the matter. It inspires a
different view on the sedimentation process that binds together
different urban fabrics in the city.
The observed process of sedimentation seems to have in its
dynamics distinctive phases of consolidation that repeat themselves in
the same order of succession, when and where certain conditions are
guaranteed for this process to happen. Singularities in different
dimensions may boost the process of consolidation, simultaneously or
in different moments with distinct rhythms.
Four functional and spatial related patterns have been defined
to characterize the process of sedimentation of the former mentioned
genes in ‘action’: attraction, aggregation 1, consolidation and
valorization. The first pattern relies on the necessary existing
singularity - in any of the former six genetic dimensions, which
attracts the eye and the mind of the passing observer. The second
pattern deals with fruition which aggregates multiple uses and
customers. The consolidation pattern follows. It derives from the
multiple invested interests when and where the previous new found
uses and customers were created. Value and identity built in the here
described process, with negative and positive aspects established by
different ‘whoms’ - the rich, the poor, the artists and the
entrepreneurs – finalizes the sequence. Their multiple interactions
create functional networks and establish spatial links.
The DNA is here associated with those recurrent functional
networks, and corresponding spatial links that appear to have
distinctive patterns of interaction and growth. The research behind
this paper explored the possibility that these patterns tend to define a
generative process which distinguishes how each one of the former
dynamic dimensions, or ‘genes in action’, relate to each other and to
the adjacent urban area.
Different movement systems interact upon one another in a
high-street. They are related to the many qualitative dimensions, and
1 Bacon refers to accretion by four different connectors comprising space, axes,
mass and interlocking spaces. He focus on the physical aspect of what he calls
“method of design growth”. The spatial and functional patterns of aggregation and
consolidation identified in Lisbon address the issue of how the physical aspect
interact with the other dimensions considering the specific dynamics of the
inherited ‘genetic’ process of sedimentation.
3
to the different rhythms that distinguish each one of them. Singularity
of the environment and of the manmade topography, the nature of the
economic activities they benefit, their location and the singularity of
the shape and comparative scale of the buildings alongside their
routes, are some of the issues that help to build up the power of
attraction of streets and their complexity.
High streets tend to be, by definition, singular elements in the
urban landscape. With a variety of uses, shapes and forms, and rhythm
of change, they establish a network of links with other streets in the
urban fabric they belong. Together they attract multiple kinds of
interests and flows. The dynamic sedimentation of the inherited urban
fabric can accommodate changes derived from new demands
determined by the process of growth, provided certain conditions are
kept. Among these conditions accessibility is the most important. It
‘irrigates’ shops located alongside the path with potential customers.
It also provides the view from the ‘road’, and of it, with living
elements. Negligence, indifference or a space-fragmented approach to
them can kill the perception of the delicate balance of a high street.
Genetic heritage and space-functional patterns
A brief explanation is pertinent here, why an analogy with the
DNA, dynamic, as opposed to the famous and very much used
palimpsest – static. The difference between the concept is what
explains and justifies the examination of the theme in Portugal, and
particularly in Lisbon, where the genetic capital of the landscape still
have the original signs reminiscent of the various times in which they
were created whose sedimentation in morphological terms Dias
Coelho, among others, describes in detail. This genetic capital, and the
many processes of mutation that characterize it, in the various
dimensions that compose it, distinguishes a given landscape as a DNA.
They occurred in the past and still happen now, and evidence seems to
point out that it will extend itself in the future.
The rhythms of change, that is, the space-time relations on the
Lisbon landscape, have an acceleration that is very distinct from the
ones that occurs in so many cities in Brazil. The steadier pace of
change of the Portuguese capital city allows us to visualize many
phases of these processes of mutation in a clearer manner. On the
other hand, the quicker Brazilian rhythm of change, many times
erasing former signs and traces of older landscapes illustrates some of
the risks in social, economic, cultural and environmental terms, of
allowing radical changes to be made. Permanent mutations may
engender irretrievable losses. To different rhythms there seems to
correspond distinct spatial and functional patterns that apparently
comprises factors of various natures and temporalities. This collection
of factors consolidates in the present and is in a possible state of
change into new configurations in the future.
The focus on the genetic capital of the city has led to the search
of the past in the present and to try to recognize the possibilities of the
future that relate to this heritage. It also emphasizes the networks that
are in action in the city, in the present time, with possibilities of
influencing the future. These networks comprise the flows and paths,
and functional-spatial patterns defined by individual and collective
intentions and corresponding uses of the city. These functional and
spatial patterns intertwine built forms and public open spaces with
some concept of image, meanings and memories, acknowledged by
distinct social groups that have interacted with the city, sometimes
from the remote or recent past, to the present.
3. Case-studies
The first case studied is the Rua Nova (New Street), built in
Lisbon, in the 13th century which has turned into a high-street, a major
linear centrality for many decades and subsequently shrinked into a
non-place. The second case, also in Lisbon, is the street that links the
4
Martim Moniz Square to the Largo do Intendente, the Rua da Palma
(Palma Street). The third case was designed to be the linear centrality
of the capital and it took almost one hundred years to fulfill that goal.
Another example to be discussed in the oral presentation is based on
an ongoing research on the Avenida Rio Branco, the main high-street
in the centre of Rio de Janeiro.
Identities and symbolic representations
The Rua Nova (New Street) built in 1294, under D.Dinis linked
his palace to the ‘duana’ where the intense maritime commerce paid
the regulatory taxes due to the King. The royal prestige that marked
its creation, the social segregation instituted by legal regime
restricting access to some and encouraging it to others constituted
singular characteristics (in institutional, cultural and social terms) that
distinguished its genesis and its existence. Another important aspect
that marked its creation was its geometry, its almost rectilinear form
that distinguished it morphologically from the medieval shape of the
neighboring narrow winding streets and which gave it an easily
perceivable singularity of image. Its location, in the low land, along
Tejo River – the distance from it of a backyard, hence next to the
docks, made sellers, buyers and merchandises physically more
accessible to all engaged in the trade. “It was the strange public
promenade of the 16th century” whose importance was of such
magnitude that, according to some historians would have lent to the
“new” designation – New Street – the meaning of prestige and
abundance.
Political will and enforcement, exceptional economic
concentration of capital and goods, social prestige, singular
morphology, strategic location and accessibility that marked the
multiple genetic dimensions of the New Street “birth” interacted
positively over the years and turned it into “the operational centre of
Lisbon – representative and official – as we would say today – has then
become freer from mercantile Jews and industrious Sarracens. It
became completely Portuguese” (N.Araujo, 1938). The linear shaped
centrality would last for more than three hundred years – visited by
“foreigners of various nationalities that came to get our treat and
commerce”. Trade was apparently a fulcrate theme for the identity of
the kingdom of Portugal at that point which circumstance made the
Street of Commerce its show-case, its morphological image with
symbolic meaning.
Success gradually diminished by the end of the 16th and
beginning of the 17th centuries undermined by a series of disasters
related to successive earthquakes of different intensities and also,
after 1580, to the weight of Spanish dominance and the resulting loss
of institutional singularity associated, together with other related
dimensions, to the former prestige and centrality of the New Street.
With the loss of political prestige the New Street started fading
away. Some commercial activities were maintained, but not with the
same “punch”, as the absence of Royal support and supervision also
reduced social prestige and contracted the area over which the New
Street formerly “reigned”. Restoration in the 17th century brought
some prestige back up to the year 1755 when the earthquake, and the
tsunami that followed it, washed it away together with a large part of
the city of Lisbon. Subsequent efforts of reconstruction later
undertaken introduced significant changes in the former genetic
process that originally made the landscape. Geometric regularity
became the rule for a very large area removing the morphological
diversity that once characterized the morphological singularity of the
“New Street”.
The conditions that made the multiple genetic dimensions
converge to make the centrality of the New Street did not repeat
themselves in the street reshaped in the reconstruction undertaken by
Marquis de Pombal. Renamed Street of Commerce, reinserted in
5
approximately the same place, the new New Street no longer attracts
trade and tradesmen but why?
The claims of valorization of the reconstruction proposed for
Lisbon did not consubstantiate in the new plan produced. The project
presented many features that could be called modernist today such as
geometric regularity, standardization, and homogeneity of façades, all
too different from the original ‘organic’ diversity of the medieval
urban fabric that characterized the city before the earthquake. The
new rationality proposed by the project focused both on the process of
production that the plan would demand, and on the processes of
building construction and of financing, justifiable given the scale of the
catastrophe. The plan disregarded the multiple dimensions that
characterize the urban fabric and the many interrelations between
them that defined their relative positions in the city hierarchy, and the
centrality they defined.
It made the original exceptional morphological features
‘singularity’ of the former New Street, straight and wide against the
medieval maze of narrow and winding streets, unexceptional – the
streets of the lowland area of Lisbon were remade to new standards,
made homogeneous to look alike. The new regulations and
management conditions engineered by Pombal to make the plan
viable also made the former exceptional economic and political
features ‘singularities redundant. Social acknowledgement of the
exceptional cultural value of the street whose singularity had been
formerly perceived as an image of the Portuguese identity was, in
those circumstances, also hard to maintain. The rationality adopted in
the reconstruction no longer cared for individual intentions, social,
cultural and economic practices that have been traditionally
intertwined with the landscape and made into it as part of its genetic
heritage. The loss of the former conditions that made that street
exceptional in the various dimensions took away the ‘operative
centrality’ image and associated meaning of abundance that
distinguished the “New Street”. Hardly any commercial activity
remained in the street. Different municipal bodies made several
attempts, with little or no success at all, to favor trade. To turn all
“Baixa” streets to exclusive pedestrian use is one of the more recent. It
has not yet proved to enhance commercial activities. Accessibility
means allowing public transport vehicles (of some sort) to go through.
It defines the possibilities to interrelate with other areas and to allow
the many different flows of users, their purchasing power, information
and interests, to come by. That is a determinant condition to keep
pace with the different rhythms of change that distinguishes the
dynamic sedimentation process. The suppression of the conditions
that support the singularity in one dimension may significantly affect
the others and not, necessarily, in any positive way. Different streets
analyzed illustrate the argument.
Coming on to the 20th century, the comparison with the Rua do
Benformo which used to be the axis that linked the Largo do
Intendente to the Martim Moniz Square, located in the city of Lisbon,
revealed how suppression of vehicle accessibility, hence of
“irrigation”, even over a short period of time, reduced the number of
residents, users and uses, and future prospects, with negative ripple
effects on the whole of legitimate commercial activities and their
positive attraction of interrelated social practices and
acknowledgment. Shops along Benformoso have closed. The very
elegantly designed Largo do Intendente (Intendente Square), that
once attracted the finest porcelain shops and shoppers, and tourists,
changed clientele – it became a hot point for drug dealing and
prostitution. The street has been actually blocked by the local
authority on account of a promised large public investment which
would have turned the Martim Moniz area into the new administrative
centre of Lisbon – a prospect which never materialized. The
singularity of this prohibition has been since perceived attractive to
criminal uses and has also proved to aggregate more of this kind, with
6
clear signs that show tendencies to consolidate those illegitimate
practices into specific spatial patterns with unwanted related
complementarities defining links with other areas in the city. It has
since gradually contaminated the older and shorter streets that
connect Benformoso to the parallel axis, Rua da Palma (Palma Street).
Shops
The comparison with Avenida da Liberdade, where the
singularity of the designed shape of the street and of the buildings
located on its margins, the different typologies of architecture, the
elegant design of their facades together with both large underground
parking areas and good public transportation facilities, have attract
the richer segments of the Portuguese market and larger scale
enterprises. Big companies and business of capital intensive nature
have, now, their major offices in the Av. da Liberdade which has
turned into the major linear centrality of Lisbon – certainly the most
refined image of a high-street in that city. The singularity of the large
physical scale of the original design, its huge width and marginal
gardens, its intentional resemblance to the Champs Elysées, therefore
very different from the urban grid around, inherited from different
Portuguese past times, did not attract any trade for many years since
its inauguration at the end of the 19th century, at which time the most
prestigious centre was the Rossio square and marginal buildings and
the Restauradores square and marginal buildings, where the best
hotels, restaurants and teahouses were concentrated, at walk distance
from major public equipments.
The intended high-street was designed for the foreseen and
desired prestigious expansion. It has fulfilled its destiny when the
future came. The exceptional conditions of accessibility created the
necessary conditions to establish the interrelated complementarities
between the Avenida and the two squares. The links with the urban
grid around, and the many morphological, economic, social and
institutional features and meanings, and diverse functions, that
characterized it, took time to build into the landscape.
The original prestigious image and centrality designed for the
Avenida da Liberdade materialized, when and made that
morphological image and associated functional features very
attractive to new business developments. The individual car oriented
urban planning and related social and spatial patterns of use and
abuse certainly contributed to the significant change in the perception
of the positive aspects of its design and location features. But the
pedestrian scale of urban environment was certainly preserved in the
Avenida da Liberdade with its comfortable sidewalks and linear
gardens, and rich and beautiful shops and their attractive windows. It
also revealed how the synergic conjunction of the singularities in each
qualitative dimension, determinant of abundance and prestige, is also,
on its turn, determined by time and space specific contexts.
4. Preliminary conclusions of an ongoing research
Social sciences have traditionally resisted the possibility to consider
that the physical environment is an operative factor in human
relations. Architects, on the other hand, tend to often believe that
design by itself can create communities and places. Both professional
standpoints appear to define the whole system according to one
disciplinary insight. The ecological approach to systems, however,
include as their field of studies, organisms and their environment. One
main difference between human ecology and animal ecology lies in the
purposive action 2. Early writings on the subject, those of the Chicago
School of McKenzie, among others, emphasized that the “collective
2 McKenzie defined human ecology as “a study of the spatial and temporal relations
of human beings as affected by the selective, distributive and accommodative forces of
the environment” (1924, p.287)
7
effects of individual actions” (which include most aspects of the city)
“are neither designed nor anticipated”. This understanding that
purposive actions also establish unintended systematic relations is a
crucial insight to understand how high-streets are made and, by the
same token, to understand the dynamics of change in the process of
sedimentation of different “layers” of urban tissue and street heritage.
The unique position of streets in the environment -
“intersecting public and private, individual and society, movement and
place, the built and the unbuilt, architecture and planning” - demands
that simultaneous attention be given “to people, the physical
environment, and their numerous interrelations”. These multiple
readings (Anderson,1978; Jacobs,1993; Vernez Moudon,1987; Cooper-
Marcus, 1986) challenge disciplinary segmented views and their
institutionalized categories of problems and professionals. They have
induced a different approach to people and the spatial and functional
patterns they define in their environment as they interrelate. This
approach emphasizes another sense of the ecological wholeness of
streets and of the spatial and temporal contexts within which those
interrelations occur. This paper follows a similar track.
The dynamics of the process
The sedimentation has been here understood as a dynamic
process among distinct parts that encompasses various phases of
transition that are cumulatively altered and that interrelate through
various means including the perception of citizen and city, observer
and observed, along with time. The hypothesis of the intermingled
process of the evolution of the city, and therefore of the woven times
and spaces, is grounded on Bernard Lepetit (1998) 3. In this study, the
3 “The analyzed processes come from a more remote past and did not end with the
steam engine, the train, and industry that continue to interact independently of the
idea that has been explored is that the valued permanence of urban
forms creates conditions for these to continue to serve other
functionalities and to influence in some manner urban growth and
morphology while defining the rhythm of change in the dynamic
process of sedimentation. They coexist potentially through the
mentioned conditions with distinct temporalities, with technological
innovations that distinguish them, in different times in different
places. There is disagreement, therefore, with the perspective of the
three time-frames or phases adopted by Braudel - the long time-frame
considered immovable and confused with the historical dimension of
the geographical space; of medium time-frames of social groups and of
the economy where the internal characteristics that distinguish the
urban space are neglected in favor of the external differences
concerned with questions that the authors with this focus intend to
study (and hence the city comes in only as frame or dwelling); and of
short time-frames – of events apparently not as contemplated by
urban historians in previous times. When F. Thomas, grounded on Le
Petit, affirms that the “history of cities cannot be told by disassociating
the citizens from the concrete territory where they live and which
they contribute to produce and transform”, he consubstantiates the
understanding that this study defends.
Ripple effects
The perspective adopted in this work understands that a
singularity (an exceptional condition) once perceived (therefore
observers and physical accessibility are required) in one or more of its
qualitative dimensions it attracts changes in all the others, in a ripple
effect that will reshape the ‘townscape’ accordingly. Be it a
characteristic that defines its exceptionality a natural feature, or
arbitrary “periods” that some approaches to urban history define that privilege round
numbers” B.Lepetit, 1998.
8
produced by sedimentation, or preconceived from scratch to that
purpose and, in this case, when it manages to be perceived as such.
This paper adopted six different ‘views’, or genetic dimensions,
of the cultural heritage of a city and its grid, and of the process of
sedimentation that intertwine them with the lives of citizens and city
and into the landscape. Together they have influenced all the stages of
sedimentation of the streets selected, with different weights, in
different time and space bound contexts, and have distinguished their
interrelations as they consolidated.
The first, the environmental dimension, is here understood as one or
more geo-morphological feature of the terrain - topography, coastline,
solar incidence, and climate - which attracts the attention of
observers, individual intentions which may grow into collective users
in a given time and space context. It must be perceived as exceptional
to a certain degree, whether the feature or the location, or both, and it
or they start the process. The social and economic dimensions follow.
They comprehend different forms of appropriation practices and uses
of potential values perceived in the area. Market activities and social
encounters go hand in hand and they literally make place for more
complex events and users who will benefit from their location.
The fourth dimension, here called institutional or normative
addresses the rules that establishes the power to rule and that
regulate uses and users, mobility and public access, the building
activity and the built forms and changes allowed. Public sector with
bigger or smaller political prestige, its normative and control
mechanisms, and symbolic presence in the built landscape, are also
part of the city genetic heritage.
The last dimension is morphological and it characterizes the
singularity of space and form in the light of a mix of different
references - formal repertoire, location in relation to axes of
accessibility, quality of building materials, functional and symbolic
contents related to the previous dimensions. Morphology synthesizes
the interrelations among the previous dimensions in built forms and
shapes that tend to last longer than the former purposes to which they
were designated. At the same time it enhances them. The many
successive uses and built in values that usually follow are aggregated
to the area. The relative permanence of these earlier forms and later
uses enrich the process of sedimentation of heritage with new
interventions, when the perceived image and identity are positively
regarded.
Accessibility constituted the basic condition that allowed for
those qualitative dimensions to interrelate, with distinct rhythms of
changes in different time and space contexts.
Dreams and nightmares
The challenges of creating a process of establishing (new)
movement systems interacting with existing ones and messing it up
when it all goes wrong. The ripple effects of permanent negative
changes can jeopardize social, economic, management achievements
that may have taken hundreds of years to consolidate into a certain
level of urban quality environment. The ecological risk of permanent
changes in the genetic heritage of streets and of processes has yet to
be evaluated in financial terms to be taken more seriously by those
who have the power to avoid them and to properly redirect present
and future investments towards adequate useful preservation and
innovation compatible policies. The Rua do Benformoso and Lisbon
lowland grid illustrate the point of the ripple effects as negative
impacts of changing the balance between the six qualitative
dimensions here considered to the point of mutation.
The inter-relations between squares and streets, and
associated functions and usages, do change as cities change. The whole
of these elements, new and old signs and meanings, and the forces that
intertwine them, sometimes juxtapose themselves sometimes overlap
and hide, sometimes are valued and maintained, sometimes
9
abandoned, complete the city’s heritage that is here called the genetic
capital of the landscape. It is appropriated differently, along with
various times of sedimentation, by different social groups, adapting to
new and old functionalities under distinctive manners and
management that rules over its use and changes. The city sometimes
expands itself, sometimes contracts and sometimes it recreates itself.
The changes introduced in any given era, understood as innovations,
leave traces and signs in the ‘townscape’. The individual and collective
intentions that have successfully materialized into changes, and that
are still happening, go into sedimentation, intertwining with new uses
and users and public open spaces have not ended until now, and they
are still associated with a community identity and symbolic imagery,
in spite of technology.
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ANNEX - Illustrations
10
Photo 1,
Av da Liberdade

Phot 2: Rua do Benformoso (Benformoso Street) and Rua

da Palma (Palma Street)
Map 1

11