O campo da arquitectura na costrução da cidade democrática: Processo SAAL/Porto

Abstract

This research explores how the field of action of architecture can contribute to the democratisation of the city, considering that, if spatial structures reflect the social and political organisation, such practices are also conditioned by urban form. Although architecture is inevitably at the service of the power structures, it may also act as an instrument of resistance, as experienced in several housing programmes carried out in contexts of political change. The SAAL (Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local - Mobile Service for Local Support, 1974- 1976) was a housing programme implemented during the Portuguese revolutionary process which defended the right to the city and presented an alternative path for addressing the housing needs of the working classes via the transformation of their run-down neighbourhoods. This dissertation takes as its object the SAAL Process developed in Porto, seeking to reconstitute its functioning and its achievements and to analyse them both as punctual or fragmentary interventions and as proposals that integrate an overall plan. In this way, it traces the politics of the plan underlying the various interventions, and how the discussion of the city took place based on the interaction between the different actors, with the focus on the role of architects. Firstly, the precedents that led to the launching of the SAAL and the specific context of its implementation in Porto are discussed. Then, the processes of the 33 formalised operations, 11 of which were partially built, are systematically analysed based on similar criteria. Finally, a cross-referencing between the several interventions is made in order to ascertain how a political position was demarcated through the processes and the materialization of the projects. Within this framework of political and social transformation of idealistic propensity, urban management criteria were centred on the needs of the inhabitants and on a city's collective idea that recovers and values its architectural and social heritage. The relevance of this study does not lie, however, in the possibility of reproducing the methodologies developed under the SAAL programme today, but rather in the contribution they can bring to the development of new possibilities of action, reiterating the political responsibility of the architect in exercising his function.