Reimagining Porto's Inner Beltway: A Regenerative Urban Transformation

Abstract

Porto's Via de Cintura Interna (VCI) is an urban motorway that, paradoxically, contributes to the territory's integration and fragmentation. Its urban and environmental impact extends across a vast area along its edges, threatening the city's decarbonisation objectives. Expressways, a type of road associated with the mass use of cars, have become a determining factor in shaping the urban landscape, often disrupting the urban and social fabric. The car-centric model has had devastating environmental and social effects, creating physical barriers and segregating communities. The adversity of pedestrian movements is a consequence of these ruptures in space, which is now discontinuous and hierarchical. The urgency of promoting more sustainable cities calls for the consolidation of urban policies to enhance the system of collective spaces, along with the transition to balanced and inclusive mobility alternatives. This proposal invests in the regeneration of the urban (and social) fabric by integrating the VCI and its banks into Porto's natural and urban systems, recovering the territory's memory and reinforcing relations of solidarity between communities. This research project, developed in the Integrated Master's Degree in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, seeks to offer a plausible vision for restoring urban quality and street life, with the environmental goals of decarbonisation as the motto for urban regeneration centred on sustainable mobility.