INSERT COINA | E13
Europan 13, Portugal, Barreiro.
Runner up project (second prize).
The site area has become a clear example of enclave inside the urban territory of Barreiro. We are in a grey zone, whose memories kept by the inhabitants are slowly fading away. Here the edges barely communicate with the city and with the river. What affects Barreiro is a “disease” common to many other disused European areas, traceable to an uneven urban growing process strictly linked to a unsustainable wasting-producing urbanistic choises. We have tried to conceive our project in a different way, investigating the perspectives Europan 13 has proposed: self-organization, sharing and process. Since the beginning, our main goal has been to consider the city as a process rather than a static object. We had the need to clarify the future transformations of Barreiro and the possible key-forces linked to that transformation. Consequently, we intend to involve social and economical actors, together with architectural and natural ones, in order to coordinate both horizontal and vertical strategies. We are not pursuing any sort of populist urbanism. We are instead proposing a series of design actions and reactions that could make of this site an “adaptable”, coherent and open-structured part of the city. Barreiro has to go back to speak again with its territory and people. To this extent, a first fundamental operation has to be a re-appropriation of its borders. We worked on a gradual, step by step process to define identities and places and to finally re-know them.
