The urban and rural transformations that are taking place in the territory of Campanhã, in the city of Porto, where the coexistence of low socioeconomic status neighborhoods articulates with new aesthetic and artistic rationalities constitute, in a way, a reference for so many other cities and territories at national and international levels. I would say that it is a moment characterized by a certain liminality of urban time, where Campanhã is, for now, a hybrid territory, with very different characteristics that are the accumulation of various periods, uses, programs and strategies or, as the geographer Álvaro Domingues said, a transgenic landscape.
This work is the first part of an ongoing project to be developed in that territory. Produced in the scope of an artistic residency in Porto, Portugal, this initial moment had the objective to follow the construction of healthy corridors in a specific socio-economic deprived area, researching the impacts and transformative effects they have on sustainability in, and from, local communities. A sustainable corridor “can emerge as a critical approach that integrates planned infrastructure with local environmental and social concerns, focused on transformative development through community participation at a metropolitan scale.”
Currently, in its second phase, the project is now approaching questions of identity in a territory that so far has offered me multiple pieces of evidence of the particularly complex relationship between spatial and social structure, individual and collective memory, and the symbolic significance of space. Drawing from anthropological literature and methodology, this project is eliciting citizens’ narratives as a performance of restitution of their right to the city.
