The paradigmatic Praça de Lisboa, at the core of Porto Historical Centre, seems to be of greater relevance to launch a first debate about interventions in public space, promoting, simultaneously, a global reflection about the process of city’s rehabilitation and about our participation as citizens in that process. Launching an Ideas Competition to Praça de Lisboa, under the name NO RULES, GREAT SPOT: WANTED, IDEAS FOR PRAÇA DE LISBOA (No rules, great spot, is a sentence written on a wall of this space) seems, in this sense, a fundamental action, able to provoke an in-tensive and ex-tensive debate around urban rehabilitation as a shared and informed, participated and discussed city project.

The competition has, therefore, a double purpose: on one hand, involve the community, the city, in the discussions of its projects, gathering and articulating those who were always the fundamental agents of the city construction and problematic: architects; by the other hand, to critic the intervention processes that have been developed both by the City Hall and the Urban Rehabilitation Society (Porto-Vivo), specifically the highly exclusive nature of the competitions (like this particular case) of conception, project, construction, maintenance and exploitation, that, guided by a single speculative logic, annulled any possibility of debate and discussion, and also drew the path to a growing divorce between city and citizens.

For more information visit the competition’s official website.