Could be considered urban
disasters inherent in the own notion of city?
Are some cities a heap of
transformations and projects realized in emergency situations?
Which are the urban priorities
that frame the processes of reconstruction and his results?
Throughout the centuries the urban disasters have formed and form a part of the
history of the cities. There exist innumerable examples that nowadays
unfortunately continue increased: inflamed Rome, like London …; earthquakes in
Bam, Gibellina, Lisbon, Chile, Haiti …; floods as in New Orleans, Australia…;
cities destroyed by wars as Rotterdam, Tirana, Berlin …; tsunamis like in Japan
… Though some of these cities are still for reconstructing, the knowledge of
the historical already consolidated examples turns out to be very interesting
at the moment of thinking about the future of the destroyed landscape.
Undoubtedly, every destroyed city represents an experience different from
reconstruction stimulated by the need of re-composing her urban studding and
her memory.
In occasions these interruptions have appeared as opportunities to imagine again
the city and to incorporate different landscapes, to form a different studding
and to offer new urban perspectives that differently had never been possible.
The unexpected break concentrates an energy of overcoming that does not exist
in any other moment in the history of a city. It allows to recognize the places
of different form and to introduce in them other parameters related to the new
uses and infrastructures according to the epochs.
Though they do not constitute the only way to reinvent the city, the discontinuities
represent the situations that more have favored the integral transformation of
the urban spaces, providing an unrepeatable occasion to return to be imagined.
No opportunity has been so favorable as the one that offers the city
interrupted to propitiate a transformation in which they become condensed
different times in the only time, that of the project.
Along this thesis one could have verified that the urban alterations provoked in a city
for a disaster acquire a major dimension, not only for the urban discontinuity
that they generate, but for the difficulty that supposes elaborating with
success the decisions and criteria to intervene, as well as for the
repercussion in her future development. The interrupted city is a place for
inventing, and her transformation, a collective space of debate brings over of
the conservation or destruction of previous structures, which can modify
completely her urban structure and the landscape that we perceive in her.
In the course of this investigation Lisbon
was chosen because she represents a paradigmatic case of destruction and urban
reconstruction in different epochs, an example of city that has been capable of
being reborn constant of her ashes. The numerous disasters that have concerned
to Lisbon along
the history (earthquakes, fires…) theses are approached in this one as
explosive to imagine it again across the projects that in her have developed.
The Portuguese metropolis has met obliged to be reinvented again and again to
continue existing so that, the most important transformations have taken place
always after an urban disaster, managing to raise innovative solutions in the
way of approaching the restitution of a destroyed zone, the recovery of the
local memory or of raising new constructive solutions and ways of living.
However, this thesis does not try to give finished a chapter of the history of Lisbon. It is a question
neither of annotating possibilities, nor to emitting definitive conclusions on
the transformations of the city after a project so "innovative" as
the pombalino (1758) or so "classic modern" as that of the Chiado
(1988). The aim of this investigation has been to find in the interrupted city
an argument prolonged to continue drawing the different ways of living and
interpreting the urban events of the city across a project opened in the time.
The history of a place is written from the projects
constructed or imagined on it. For this reason this thesis is not a historical
thesis that describes a few happened facts. It is an investigation on the
history of a project in a city interrupted by a disaster and the reasons that
gave place to it. The intention has been to look for the arguments that
constructed the new city
on the ruins of the previous one, developing sometimes of implicit form and
others explicit, a parallel discussion on the modern city and her current
landscape.