Ricerc@Sapienza

Six architectures for the urban rehabilitation of Mouraria

Within the policies of relaunching Lisbon at the international level there are numerous urban rehabilitation interventions in the historic districts, promoted by the municipal administration. Mouraria, a neighborhood of Arab origin, multi-ethnic and strongly degraded from a social and physical point of view, is the subject of numerous interventions. These allow new uses of public spaces and abandoned buildings, entrusting the development of the district, the re-appropriation by its inhabitants and the inclusion of the neighborhood within the tourist flows to the creation of events and places for culture.
Architects play a decisive role in this rehabilitation process, which takes place involving the inhabitants and creating or recovering small architectures that manage to modify a piece of the city. The six architectures described in the essay - different in size, use, type of financing, meaning that the designers attribute to them - are linked by being the result of a method based on a deep knowledge of places, of their physical and social evolution and from creating a strong relationship with the surrounding urban space or with that created within them.