The aim of BioValue is to leverage transformative change in spatial policymaking, planning practices and infrastructure development. Doing so, it upscales opportunities for valuing biodiversity in support of EU strategic actions. Transformative change is a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values. Biodiversity loss is one of the persistent problems Europe is facing. But transformative change in spatial planning can help biodiversity to be better valued while developing new ways to reach sustainable development goals.

Spatial planning policy and decision-making take place at different levels, from local to global. Therefore, many are the players who can drive transformative change in spatial policy and planning processes – researchers, the public, policy makers, businesses and third sector organisations.

The project aims to safeguard and increase biodiversity by focusing on key steps of the mitigation hierarchy, addressing indirect drivers, renewed EU finance strategy within spatial planning, and better articulated instruments for mainstreaming biodiversity concerns into other sectors across different levels of governance.

To have access to the BioValue official website click here. https://biovalue-horizon.eu/project/

The background of the project is that environmental assessment (EA) is applied at the early planning and design stages of a proposed activity so that authorities, the public and other stakeholders can form a view about how acceptable the activity’s sustainability performance is, and what conditions need to be applied to mitigate potential negative impact and support sustainability. EA is legally required and recognised as a critical part of authorities’ development approval process and of public and private developers’ design of strategies and projects (European Commission, 2018). However, current EA practice has a series of shortcomings that the project will address:

• SDGs are not very well addressed in EAs and there is a lack of framework for a thorough and systematic integration.
• Climate change initiatives are not strongly considered in terms of other sustainability objectives, and there is a risk of negative trade‐offs and sub-optimisation.
• EA processes are characterized by manually collecting and compiling existing data for EA reports, which is costly and time consuming.
• The highly manual processes in the preparation of EAs leads to a variation in quality of the decision support that depends on the professional’s experience and knowledge.

DREAMS project aims to promote progress on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by digitally transforming the way society accesses and communicates information about environmental impacts of projects and plans in order to enable the best decisions towards green transition in a transparent and inclusive democratic process.

To have access to DREAMS official website click here.

The interactions between people and their surroundings play an important role in the construction of their identities. We know the landscape we live in, we interact with it daily and in doing so, we make it our home. Feeling at home in our surroundings plays an important role in our quality of life. People sometimes struggle severely with being displaced when for example peoples’ landscape is being turned into a nature area or when people have to flee their home due to war. Even when people voluntarily migrate, it often proves a struggle to settle in their new surroundings. The places in which people have lived previously, shape how they are connected to the landscape they live in. Migrants for example often value features in the landscape which remind them of their home. Also, people’s cultural background and values shared with the local community have an impact on how they perceive and value their surroundings. Major differences between how migrants and natives view their landscape can contribute to segregation. This research will, therefore, address these issues, investigating differences in how migrants and natives identify with the local landscape and trying to uncover underlying factors that influence the effects of migration on people’s landscape identity. This research project is divided into four different phases: participatory landscape character assessment, focus groups, surveys, and in-depth interviews. These steps will be applied in rural and urban areas in both Belgium and Portugal to understand the processes of landscape identity formation across different contexts.

STREETS4ALL is a project funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) led by the Instituto Superior Técnico – University of Lisbon and the University of Coimbra (Project Ref. PTDC/ECI-TRA/3120/2021). The project aims to evaluate how to allocate road space dynamically over time according to multi-modal and multi-functional street uses. Urban space is often underutilized. Traditional designs plan the road network to support maximum demand. While in peak hours, streets can be saturated, in non-peak hours, space is often idling.This space has been inequitably preferring motorized modes, in particular cars. Today, many cities target the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by favoring people-centric planning after decades of car-centered planning.

The objective of the project includes proposing methodologies for site selection of equitable allocation of space, street design and technological solutions that can adapt its function and use equitably for all modes over time, according to some periodicity (e.g., an hour, few hours, or days) and at pre-timed periods (e.g., peak or off-peak, day or night time).

You can access the website of the project by clicking here.

The purpose of the Erasmus+ SEA ASIA programme is to strengthen cooperation between the universities in the EU (Denmark, Portugal and Sweden) and Southeast Asia (Bangladesh, Laos and Vietnam) and strengthen the capacity of universities to carry out high-quality higher education in strategic environmental assessment (SEA).

“Siza Barroco” é um projecto de investigação que visa pôr em evidência a relação entre a ideia de Barroco e a obra de Álvaro Siza. O que com este projecto se pretende é, justamente, pôr à prova esta possibilidade interpretativa que, a nosso ver, trará ganhos de conhecimento consideráveis na compreensão: do método de projecto de Siza, do seu percurso ao longo do tempo, do metamorfosear da sua obra ao longo desse tempo e da própria metamorfose dos seus projectos. Cientes de que a colocação lado-a-lado da ideia de Barroco e da arquitectura de Álvaro Siza trará também ganhos de conhecimento do lado da revelação do que é afinal o Barroco, cremos, igualmente, que a investigação programada será uma ocasião particularmente fecunda para compreendermos mais e melhor o que tem sido descrito, com certa relutância do autor, enquanto “o génio de Siza”. Desdobrar – à maneira de Deleuze – a obra arquitectónica de Siza e procurar, primeiro, observá-la e, depois, dá-la a ver através de uma lente barroca é o objectivo primeiro e último da investigação proposta.

The research project ‘The Critical Monumentality of Álvaro Siza – Projects of urban renovation after the 1998 Lisbon World Exposition’ (SIZA/CPT/0031/2019) aims to identify, characterize, debate, and reflect about the works of Álvaro Siza, within the urban policies launched in Portugal in the early 2000s.

This research project has two general goals:

The first goal aims to discuss the importance of the Portugal Pavilion within the scope of Expo98, reflecting on its episodic neglect and the current rehabilitation and adaptation project, while the second goal aims at a comprehensive reading of the works of Álvaro Siza in the context of urban renovation processes developed in the course of the Polis programme and other similar initiatives, while debating their impact on the urban and architectural context.

To know more about this project access this link.

BRIDGE is an action-research project aimed at developing an approach to integrate different forms of knowledge and action in order to reduce wildifre risk. Local populations are not mere repositories of information from generalist information campaigns. Rather, they hold experiential knowledge that should be crosschecked with scientific information for a more detailed risk assessment. In the action plan, rural fire risk mitigation measures need to be incorporated into local governance logics and the daily routines of forest users.
At the methodological level, the development of this integrated approach will be implemented through a participatory-action research (PAR) applied to a specific territory, Monchique region. Participatory action research is understood as a process by which science and scientists, regional and local governance agencies, decision-makers and public officials, communities and local leaders cooperate with the dual objective of: i) assessing the vulnerabilities and resources of their territory; and ii) identifying the various risk reduction alternatives. This local involvement is a way to build knowledge with the community, raise wildfire risk awareness and foster a more enduring commitment with wildfire risk reduction policy. BRIDGE’s
participatory action research will be applied to a pre-selected pilot-area, Monchique region, and will comprise two major moments: one of participatory socio-territorial diagnosis and a local capacity-building process embodied in the form of a collaborative laboratory. The activities developed in the collaborative laboratory of BRIDGE (Innovation Lab for CBDRR) will be materialized through the adoption of collaborative methodologies, namely the participatory mapping. The involvement between local communities, local/regional technicians and scientists will occur through the construction of a local scaled map where relevant elements for wildfire risk management, such as socio-ecological vulnerabilities, local resources and capacities, will be identified. This map will subsequently be adapted to digital format so that it can be used for other purposes, such as spatial planning and wider public awareness.The development of BRIDGE will be ensured by a consortium of three institutions, respectively the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), coordinator of the project, the Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia Civil (LNEC), and the University of Algarve (UAlg).

The housing theme (re)emerges in the political and mediatic agendas as one of the main global priorities, as shown by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development or the Urban Agenda for
the European Union (2016), reflecting a world housing crisis. Whatever the specificities of each context, this symptom results from the consolidation of global housing financialization process.
More than a human right, housing tends to be read as a commodity and a financial asset, hindering access to adequate housing for an increasing part of the urban population and, consequently, worsening its general housing conditions. Considering the current urban scenario, the European Union announced in 2017 a future Agenda for Housing, underlying the necessity of a better articulation between the European policies and the housing policies of its member states. In Portugal, the government launched a New Generation of Housing Policies (2018) and it defends the universal access to adequate housing, through the ‘First Right’ – Housing Access Support Program (Decree-Law no. 37/2018), engaged to resolve the housing precarity in the country. Unlike its predecessor, this program presents a broad sense of habitat and a wide range of housing solutions based on integrated and participatory approaches. Following this inflexion, this research proposes a critical and reflexive lecture of the processes and projects carried out in the scope of the ‘First Right’ program, evaluating their contribution to a more spatial justice, from the policies and projects developed, to their implementation and space appropriation. It aims to inform more inclusive and sustainable policies and practices committed to universal access to an adequate housing, at the European and national levels, in line with at least two goals of the 2030 Agenda: 10. ‘Reduce inequality within and among countries’; 11. ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’. Given these goals and targets assumed, the proposed research could contribute to: new ways to read, plan and project housing models and typologies; new theoretical and methodological frameworks in light of the spatial justice; underline innovative and sustainable urban housing solutions.

The general aim of this project is to study the transformations in Siza’s collective housing over the past 5 decades, focusing on the linked analysis of: a) the projects (social and private housing) and the respective social and urban condition framework; and b) their residents and the relationships they develop with the projected space. The research follows an intensive methodology: comparative study of 3 Siza’s cases/collective housing projects. Each represents a moment on the architect’s professional life and corresponds to a moment in the life of society and the city; the 3 together, and their temporal sequence, represent (part of) Siza’s trajectory and that of contemporary society and of the city. The cases are: 1. Bouça/Porto – started following the 1974 revolution. Symbolising the Revolution, Architecture and the Right to the City when it was in decay; 2. Terraços de Bragança – Chiado, Lisboa, started in the 1990s. Symbolising the national real estate boom, modernization launch and procrastination of urban renaissance; 3. Building 611 West 56th Street – Hell’s Kitchen, New York, began in the 2010s. Symbolising hyper-globalisation, the rise of the city, financialisation of real estate and the incontestability of the value of architectural authorship. The greatest innovation in the proposal is in the temporal sequence of the 3 cases, which allows us to answer the following questions: what has changed in the production and appropriation of Siza’s houses and how do these changes relate to social transformations and the architect’s career? Who promoted the housing at the different times, locations, to what end and for whom? What are the formal, functional and contextual differences/similarities between the projects? How have transformations in the urban context impacted on the occupation of dwelling in social, use and value terms? What is the social profile of residents, their evolution and differences between cases? How do these residents live in Siza’s houses? Why do they choose to live in Siza-Pritzker houses, and what does it mean?

The research acceleration projects in CiTUA Thematic Lines are projects designed for one year, which have as objectives:

1. To promote intra-CiTUA cooperation, creating synergies among the various researchers – integrated, collaborators and others – and their research interests;
2. To reinforce the scientific production and the public dissemination within the Thematic Line;
3. To provide solid bases for the expansion of research developed within this scope through a future submission to national or international funding;

Acronym: ROLE

Underlining the contribution of architecture/urban design to the construction of a new “narrative” to guide the creation of these platforms/infrastructures of non-formal learning, in distinct socio-economic and cultural contexts, the research has as central objectives: (a) reflection, identification and systematization of the challenges and demands that knowledge spaces face in the current political, social, environmental, cultural, demographic contexts, among others; (b) recognition of the educational dimension of built environments and public spaces, encouraging debate that will provoke reflection and the involvement of professionals, public entities, communities and society in general.

The research aims to explore different typologies of built spaces and urban/territorial spaces, analyzing their potential for educational practices, knowledge transfer, their value as educational opportunities, and their role as context, agent, and educational content. The approach focuses on the educational needs and expectations (formal, non-formal and informal) of different target audiences (compulsory education, extracurricular education, adult and senior education, lifelong education), considering socio-economic implications and contexts of permanence, temporality or unpredictability. The central motivation is to contribute to the (re)design of innovative, effective and meaningful educational environments, anchored in the values of a sustainable attitude at the social, environmental, economic and cultural levels.

For more informations about the project access this link.

Acronym: Lis|PIH

One of Lisbon’s cultural significance lies in the architectural and urban values of a substantial number of early modern residential buildings, “Lisbon pre-industrial housing” (PIH), that build-up urban consolidated areas of the inner city. In the last decades, these buildings have been submitted to demolitions and scattered refurbishment actions with negative impacts, driven by the real estate pressure, related to the growth of urban tourism and to the construction of new high standard residential buildings. Main consequences can be observed at the cultural, environmental and social levels: the loss of cultural significance of the built heritage within these areas, the increase of seismic vulnerability, the raise of materials/energy consumption and carbon emissions caused by demolitions and introduction of systems with high energy needs, the expulsion of residents due to the increased unaffordability of housing, reducing social cohesion in several neighbourhoods of Lisbon. This trend can and must be reversed.  In opposition to past recognition of vernacular/rural architecture in Portugal, PIH is still awaiting a systematised study, which responds to the urgent need for technical knowledge to better support rehabilitation and conservation actions. Lis|PIH follows the assumption that the adequate rehabilitation of the housing stock, by assuring high levels of material conservation, can lead to cultural heritage preservation and enhancement, environmental efficiency and circular economy and to the supply of affordable housing. To this end, Lis|PIH will be developed in the following major stages: SCOPE DEFINITION and SYSTEMATISATION, characterizing these building stock on a systematic and illustrated inquiry; DIAGNOSIS of potentialities and vulnerabilities of PIH focusing on cultural, constructive, environmental and housing values, supported by the use of assessment methodologies and data basis on a set of representative case studies submitted to assessment; DISSEMINATION of results and RECOMMENDATIONS for public policy and urban governance.

Acronym: reHAB

reHAB proposes to investigate the built environment, design and construction processes considering all the participants from architects to politicians and inhabitants. The research addresses rehabilitation, renovation and reuse as actions for a sustainable decarbonized circular design regarding the inheritance of a built world. As underlying action, knowledge on the existent-built environment in mandatory, the reading and understanding of the built legacy is crucial for its transformation and adaptation towards the contemporary demands of comfort, security, safety, wellbeing addressing climate crisis and the human body that emerges from that urgency. Depicting and interpreting modern housing buildings the investigation of the Habitat engages the understanding of collective housing and the domestic space in a holistic approach where public areas are considered signifying for the contemporary reflection on the renewal of local communities’ strengths. Contemporary resilient healthy neighborhoods must address design and social porosity in order to achieve a timeless lesson from vernacular architecture, where the awareness of climate conditions together with the acknowledgment of social sciences built a humanized balanced sustainability. The world has changed and it is mandatory to filing the gap of the massification of modern construction in a moment of history where the housing crisis, the housing models research and the recognition of the quality of public space are here again. Simultaneously, climate challenges are calling us towards the maintenance of civilization, as we know it. Therefore, reHAB proposes to be a contribution where heritage is engaged as cradle for innovative sustainable communities crucial for the future.

Acronym: Fire-B-aware

Fire-B-aware intends to investigate the wildfire risk perception and preparedness amongst school children and their families in Portugal. To do so, two main objectives were established to guide the development of the project:

• Understand how middle school students living in Portugal perceive wildfire risk, how they are prepared to respond to wildfire risk events and how their attitudes and behaviours shape their preparedness.
• Understand which is the middle school student’s families perception of wildfire risk mitigation in the scope of spatial planning.

One type of questionnaire will be conducted to collect the required data for each of these objectives. The first questionnaire will be applied to the 7th grade middle school students within the class of citizenship and considering a representative sample of 4 schools per district of the mainland Portugal (expected N = 3600 students). This sample of 4 schools per district intends to collect data on students in all of the following 4 situations: being in a fire risk area with previous fire event experience; being in a fire risk area without previous fire event experience; being in a non-fire risk area but having a previous fire event experience; being in a non-fire risk area and having no previous fire event experience. The second questionnaire, to be applied to the families of the 7th grade middle school students, will be delivered to the students in the citizenship class so it can be answered at home by their relatives. A digital version of this questionnaire will also be prepared attempting to reach a wider sample of data. As Fire-B-aware outputs, it is expected to submit two papers in scientific journals, to present communications in international conferences, to develop a guide for schools rising awareness on this subject and to organize a seminar on wildfire risk perception.

Acronym: TRAGOF

Forests are complex territories involving multiple interactions between social and ecological systems that affect each other, influencing and being influenced by the social, economic and political context. Non-natural forest fires represent “pathologies” that usually result from a complex dynamic of problematic interactions in social-forestry systems, that have been occurring over time in Portugal. To address this complexity and the non-linearity and uncertainties inherent to forest fire risk management, a transformative approach in the forest governance model is being sought. This approach can be understood as a key strategy to reverse the unsustainable patterns of use and management of forest territories connected to the current increasing trend of severe fire events in Portugal. Monchique (case study) is located in southern Portugal and has extensive areas classified as “very high” risk of forest fires and has therefore been classified by the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF) as a priority intervention area for Forest Fire Defence (DFCI, 2021). An expected outcome of the research is a critical and in-depth analysis of the current forest governance structure in Monchique, an identification of constraints and opportunities, as well as possible strategies to guide a transformative governance approach of fire risk forest territories. Such results will be consolidated and presented to stakeholders, scientific community and society in general through a scientific publication (paper), communications at Conferences and the dissemination of a Roadmap to enable its replication in others fire-prone forest in Portugal, Europe and elsewhere.

Acronym: CidadeTejo

The challenges posed by climate change and, in particular, the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the present decade (2020-2030), designated by the United Nations as the “Decade of Action”, make evident the need and urgency of new paradigms of transformation at the level of the planning process and governance systems. In this sense, this project has as its first objective to develop a critical diagnosis concerning the Tagus estuary waterfront, in order to identify: (i) the urban dynamics that led to the current land uses; (ii) the main characteristics and features that these territories present, particularly with regard to opportunities and threats to sustainable development and response to hydrological risks; (iii) the visions and strategies that integrate the different instruments with spatial incidence on these territories, analyzing their effectiveness as instruments of urban transformation, their internal coherence and also their spatial and temporal articulation with other IGT, programs and projects.

Acronym: Território.justo.pt

The Território.justo.pt project aims to be a transdisciplinary knowledge production exercise that applies the concept of spatial justice in its complexity to the reality of Portugal, on a municipal basis. This work focuses, firstly, on the most relevant dimensions that explain the territorial asymmetries and, secondly, on the possibilities of mitigating them through the implementation of public policies or others, using the rationale (objectives, targets, indicators) present in the Sustainable Development Goals 10 and 11 of the Urban Agenda 2030. The diversity of the team, consisting of CiTUA integrated researchers and collaborators, but supported by consultants from external research centers and also by experts linked to the different fields identified as key, will give a broader dimension to this research.