Adaptpolis - Beyond urban fragmentation: infrastructure, landscape and territorial design for Lisbon Metropolitan Area

Adaptapolis is a research project aimed at developing knowledge regarding urban fragmentation and metropolitan regeneration to tackle ongoing socio-economic adjustment, based at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Lisbon.

The project finds its rationale in current societal transition, in which adapted policies and practices are required to respond to fast changing times, with strengthened cooperation between research, public administration and development stakeholders. In a context of limited financial resources, particularly in South European countries, the relevance of adjusting spatial policies to optimize infrastructural management is paramount.

Lisbon Metropolitan Area is the territorial focus for the project. Its infrastructural development has attained a rather mature level, but critical gaps remain still at the intermediate levels of connectivity, cohesion and local integration.

In order to develop further urban and territorial regeneration strategies, it is our goal to consider and decode the processes behind the multiple phenomena of fragmentation: in the process of urban growth, in the laying of heavy infrastructures, in the disruption of landscape and environmental continuities, in the clashes of everyday's mobility.With a forward looking perspective, the project's aims and providing smart combinations between spatial development, network cohesion, landscape regeneration, its financing and alternative land-uses.

A specific Characterization of study-site (Massamá-Cacém, in the municipality of Sintra, west of Lisbon), provides focused insight on the spatial, functional and ecological structure of the site, in relation to the wider metropolitan scale, its morphological and land-use evolution, in order to explain processes of change and its current status, the actors (owners, public authorities, users) with relevant roles in processes of change and the varied expectations regarding potential uses, as well as the physical, procedural or contextual obstacles to those expectations.

Main outcomes include:

1) The characterisation of specific patterns of change in LMA, namely those concerned with spatial fragmentation and land-use vacancy;

2) A contribution to the process of adjustment in the spatial management system (policies, projects, management) to tackle critical areas of regenerative potential in LMA and, specifically, in the area of Massamá-Caçém;

3) The development of academic based research (Workshops, International Conference, Post-Doc, PhD and MA Theses) with reinforcement of international networking and partnership with LMA institutions and urban development stakeholders.

Final report available here