How Porto’s “city ground” shapes life, says urbanist Vítor Oliveira

The way a city lays out and manages its ground makes a tangible difference to people’s quality of life - and to safety too - according to Porto urbanism specialist Vítor Oliveira.

Porto’s familiar streets of houses with narrow façades and long, thin plots are more than a nineteenth-century planning cliché. The so-called Almadino Plan, led by João de Almada e Melo in 1784, brought a single logic to the city’s expansion beyond the medieval walls - and it also set out a way of living together.

As Vítor Oliveira, principal researcher at the Centre for Research on Territory, Transport and Environment (CITTA) at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), puts it: "There was very intelligent, very rational land use; it wasn’t a matter of taste." In his view, that approach shaped both economic progress and social development.

Vítor Oliveira on Porto’s “city ground”

Oliveira argues that how land is used "shows a lot about what a society is". This year he published On New York’s Ground: Dense, Diverse and Sustainable, but he says Porto was the first place where the ideas were tested.

"What I call the city’s ground in the book are decisions that will have a major influence on environmental sustainability and also on social and economic diversity," he adds.

Parcels, ownership and a city for everyone

For Oliveira, plot structure is decisive: "The issue of parcels is fundamental, because it decides whether the city will be defined by big landowners, who have more voice, more influence; or whether it will be like it was under the Almadas - although it doesn’t need to be with such narrow parcels - to have a ground that allows more agents, with more interests, with more diversity."

He warns that these choices are being missed in Porto: "In these ground options, the opportunity to turn Porto into a city more for everyone has been slipping away, which is particularly worrying in a city that, if not through administrative means, has no way to expand."

Against the backdrop of a housing crisis, the skyline of cranes spread across Porto points to a city under reconstruction, with works on buildings along almost every street - some of them with ill-fitting bulk.

"There is greater sensitivity to building heights, which is sometimes justified, but there is none regarding the fact that an investor buys four or five parcels and builds a building with a volume that has nothing to do with what is around it," Oliveira notes, reminding us that "afterwards it’s hard to fix" things when a "monstrosity" gets built.

Building higher

On the height of some new developments, Oliveira believes that "planning" has too often been treated "in a simplistic way". Stressing that the topic should be "discussed a bit more rationally and less with emotion", he argues that towers may or may not make sense depending on the space available.

"The definition of heights should suit the street where we want to intervene," he says, sketching the example of a wide street lined with low houses. "Bad use of space," he calls it.

While the historic area is off the table, Oliveira considers that in other parts of the city, building upwards can be a valid option - particularly in areas "that have metro stations nearby".

Oliveira splits Porto into two key zones: inside and outside the Inner Ring Road (VCI). Beyond the VCI, he says, there is "a vast territory" with "a lot of room for the city’s vertical expansion".

According to the academic, it is in places such as Boavista, outside the VCI, where the public-space network could be improved - "not allowing each new development to have to be accessible only to a Russian or Israeli investor, that is, allowing more agents to intervene and to have more strategies for the city".

Find out more

Tourism: the loss of shops needs debate
Oliveira says the discussion about residents leaving the city is "more appealing", even though Porto is gaining inhabitants. Census data puts the population at 230 thousand in 2021. "The loss of shops, which hasn’t managed to attract as much attention, is absolutely fundamental, because it is part of us that is lost," he says, regretting that Porto is "losing traditional establishments" in exchange for shops that look the same everywhere in the world. "Maybe some people want an experience identical to what they have at home, but it’s a slightly strange kind of tourism. You don’t gain much and you harm the lives of so many people."

Traffic: the VCI cut the city in two
"All cities with any complexity have an inner ring road. The existence of the VCI was inevitable," Oliveira accepts, while criticising how the route was designed. "It could have been a bit better because there are sections where the VCI disconnected many relationships that had been built up over centuries, like this relationship between Campolindo and the square by the Church of Paranhos. Suddenly, a heavy infrastructure is laid over it that doesn’t adapt," he says.