Santo Tirso. Portugal
2015
COMMON GROUND
Santo Tirso is located in the north of Portugal halfway from Porto and Braga. It is a medium size urban center, known chiefly for the importance of its textile industry and its agricultural production, due to its geographical position next to the Ave river. Its evolution through centuries has been closely related to its productive activities, becoming a well connected industrial hub in the area of the Ave Valley.
The strong geographical landscape provides magnificent natural spaces along the river that have become part of its heritage already.
Although green spaces are abundant, the mobilty network has failed to achieve a general cohesion with both the urban and the natural, currently segregated by an irrational unhierarchied road system and parking spaces with no regulation whatsoever.
Santo Tirso has landscape and heritage potential, combined with a remarkable urban quality of attractiveness, particularly in residential quality functions, recreation and leisure in creative entrepreneurship through the pole developing in ‘Fábrica de Santo Thyrso'.
The village’s urban morphology is presented as a pseudoradial organization, and a gradient of different activity rings can be noticed. The agricultural, very closely realted to the water course; the insdustrial, well connected to the inter-urban roads; the residential, working as a buffer from the industry; the public building , filling in the residential fabric and delimiting a village centre; and the commercial, that spreads out from the central market square.
Through an analysis of the mobility system we easily spotted some hierarchy incongruities. An inter-urban road was cutting through the centre of the city passing next to the project site, the intra-urban road system was not rationally organized and didn’t take in account potential urban and activity poles. Also, public transport only arrived to the village limit with only car priority connections with the city centre. Therefore first step was to reorganize road hierarchy to foster sustainable, and human scale transportation.
The car parking issue is highly important as well. Cars are parked in all roads, at least on one side of the street and there is no parking fare regulation and makes the several urban voids hardly appropriable. We spotted potential free car parking areas close to the centre (within 5 min radius), that were actually half empty.
We propose to regulated a payment parking system in some streets and areas of the strategic area, except for Santo Tirso’s neighbours to move out the rest of the cars to the spotted parking ares, whic will be fare free.
The analysis shows a system of segregated voids with very different character. Farming land voids, parks, public squares (filled with cars or not) and empty lots.
We seek to connect farming lands to the infrastructure network, to be able to reach natural and artificial parks from the town centre, also weave public voids to the urban fabric and complete the city tissue filling in the two potential empty lots with public activity in the ground level. to reach out with a redefined void in order to consolidate mixed urban fabric (change streetscape, stretch the market square’s identity to the voids connecting the poles.
The limited presence and current status of open spaces fail to make up a city centre. Through an analysis of the public voids within the urban fabric, opportunity spots are located and linked together by a publicly appropriable network.
w/ Xavier Isart, Maria Dominguez, Ferran Iglesias.