ABSTRACT
The history of Chelas is a mini-urban cycle: from agronomic colonization, through designed habitations with unintended allotment gardens, back to designed agronomic inhabitation. In the end, the fertile soil, and its use, could not be denied. The landscape, itself, has agency. The Plano Urbanizacao de Chelas barely acknowledges this core value of the valley. Chelas and the surrounding district of Olivais, areas just south and east of the Lisbon's airport, was a loosely occupied agricultural area in 1959. The Chelas plan is dominated by the housing-centric, technical concerns of the Gabinete Técnico de Habitação (GTH). The present-day agricultural activities fit within a long history of landscape cultivation in Chelas. The Plano Verde de Lisboa (1997), a plan and publication led by landscape architect G. Ribeiro Telles, proposes an ecological structure for Lisbon's metropolitan area. In the Chelas valley, the farmers form teepee-like lattices to support beans, a necessary ingredient for the Cape Verdean specialty Cachupa.
