Urban regeneration trajectories in the historic centre of Porto, Portugal. The role of EU urban policies in Bairro da Sé.

Abstract

The European Commission underlines the major impact of urban areas on the sustainable development of Europe, as they possess the power to solve a number of challenges that currently threaten the European populations. Since the 1990s the European Union, together with Portuguese urban poli-cies, have influenced the processes of spatial development within the city of Porto, and one might ask if the urban regeneration actions that have been deployed actually brought-about the anticipated changes. While the chal-lenging territory of the historic centre of Porto has been the stage of several urban interventions since the late 1970s, this case study aims to identify the different strategic and financial instruments that were supposed to play a key role in the spatial transformation of the area. However, the urban re-generation process has seen irregular trajectories and various authors em-phasise that past and existing problems have not been effectively tackled and solved. Among the reasons for such state of affairs could be political strategies leaning towards more neoliberal urban policies, the presence of a fragmented legislative framework, or erratic planning choices associated with constant adjustments from within the main urban regeneration actors. Reflecting upon the different events and interventions that have been taking place since the early 1990s in the historic district of Bairro da Sé, it is pos-sible to characterise the urban regeneration trajectories in the historic centre of Porto, based on descriptive insights of the spatial dynamics and its rela-tions with EU and national urban regeneration policies.