The Public and the Private in the Street-making: Joints, Links and Networks in Lisbon’s Downtown

Abstract

Streets are fundamental urban elements, defining continuous armatures and framing the sequential organization of private spaces, i.e. parcels and buildings. Nevertheless, the possibilities of using hitherto subsidiary private space elements as urban joints to create new public space articulations can be of interest in contemporary processes of urban transformation and adaptation. 

The article explores the possibilities of assembling and recombining different public and private urban elements to devise and structure a new ordering layer in the city. Lisbon’s Downtown and surrounding hills are used as a case to illustrate the argument using recent public space and urban requalification projects to link relevant nodes and sites, assemble new important pedestrian paths and therefore complexify the Lisbon’s ground plan in a truly three-dimensional frame.

Resorting to a diversified set of urban interventions, a fundamental axis between Lisbon’s Downtown two hills was reinforced, becoming a three-dimensional streetscape that now permeates through both the existing streets and the new vertical connections that belong(ed) to the private domain. In this recombined streetscape, buildings become infrastructure and the porous nature of the built fabric becomes a potential source for urban publicness.