ABSTRACT
Porto Metropolitan Area (PMA) is the core of a region characterised by diffuse urbanisation, which is hard to grasp and classify due to its diversity, both morpho-typological and of coexisting land uses. An intelligible structure connecting the whole area is lacking. Under this argument, the ‘open space’, particularly brought into light under the paradigms of mobility and environmental sustainability, has a fourfold potential to be one of its strongest components: by acting as an identity feature both on a local and metropolitan level, as an urban sewing over a pattern of built fragments, as a territorial infrastructure responding to climate change challenges, and as a public space taken as a physically lived system. This chapter briefly presents public space interventions in PMA from 1998 to 2001 to date, inquiring about the ‘open space’ structuring ability arising from the potentials above. Selected examples illustrate the most representative transformation dynamics within the referred time span, framing its main objectives, the diversity of setting, from whom the initiative stems and the scale from which they are built, to set the ground for critically assessing its contribution to the whole. A clear, shared, and still missing idea of the Metropolis could be one of its outcomes.
