Routes to Campanhã Research in-between modern social housing towards an inclusive public space

Abstract

Suburban areas planned in the 1950s for public and cooperative housing urbanization created available public spaces in-between the different modern neighbourhoods. During the last 50 years some of these urban areas with agricultural and industrial patterns were fragmented by motor or rail infrastructures increasing the difficulties of mobility. Nowadays, these empty and informal spaces often integrate routes on the suburbs, from the suburbs to the centre and vice-verse. At the URBiNAT project, these in-between spaces, with lack of publicness, are seized as opportunity to co-create with local citizens and stakeholders an inclusive public space, that we call “healthy corridors”, integrating nature-based solutions, harmonizing material and immaterial dimensions. Distinguishing between two different time phases: one pre-pandemic, when an intense collective activity of 15 participative actions was developed on Campanhã’s public space and schools, and the current time, when a semi-virtual activation of the project was forced by the Portuguese multiple declarations of state of emergency – this text relates these different periods of curfew and non-curfew, with the two of the main working routes of the researchers: a coordination route and an interaction route. The aim of the article is to describe different views of this process through the lens, routines and drifts of the researchers – before and during the effects of the Covid-19 virus – comparing the work evolution during these different moments and contributing to the upcoming debate of the existence of a post-pandemic new consciousness about urban practices.