Towards a Metropolitan Public Space Network (Project Thinking on Design)

This book explores the hypothesis that public space – if conceptualised, imagined, and shaped at the metropolitan scale, through innovative territorial design approaches – offers the possibility to interconnect and integrate various systems in search for synergic responses to emerging societal challenges that impact large, urbanised landscapes.

The book offers a multidimensional and multi-geographic framework to discuss the role of public space on contemporary metropolitan territories, as part of MetroPublicNet - Building the foundations of a Metropolitan Public Space Network to support the robust, low-carbon and cohesive city: Projects, lessons, and prospects in Lisbon research project. The reader will find a critical and overarching perspective on the conceptual, methodological, and empirical lenses that unfolded throughout the research process, namely a systematised decoding of the public space projects, policies, and rationales that shaped the recent transformation of Lisbon Metropolitan Area. With a diverse range of authors actively engaged in academic research and professorship, in design practice, and in policy-oriented roles, the book concludes with the outlining of forward-looking guidelines, policy recommendations, and design experimentations.

This book will be of interest to researchers and students of architecture, urbanism, landscape architecture and geography.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

João Rafael Santos is Architect and Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Lisbon School of Architecture, Universidade de Lisboa. As a member and co-coordinator of URBinLAB research group, his interests include urban and territorial design with a focus on the relationship of infrastructure with public space, especially in the scope of metropolitan territories. João is the Principal Investigator of the FCT funded research project ‘MetroPublicNet: A Metropolitan Public Space Network to support the robust, low-carbon and cohesive city’. He received the Metrópoles Ciência Prize in 2016, for his research on Lisbon Metropolitan Area.

Maria Matos Silva is Assistant Professor and coordinator of the Master's degree in Landscape Architecture at the School of Agriculture, Universidade de Lisboa (2022-). She graduated in Landscape Architecture (Universidade de Lisboa, 2007) and has a Master’s (2010) and PhD degree (2016) from the University of Barcelona, where she focused on Urban and Public Space Design. Since 2016, she has been an Integrated Researcher at CIAUD. Currently, Maria is the Co-Principal Investigator of the FCT funded research project MetroPublicNet.

Ana Beja da Costa is a landscape architect with a PhD degree in Landscape Architecture and Urban Ecology from the School of Agriculture, Universidade de Lisboa (2020). She is currently a full-time Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the MetroPublicNet research project, at the Lisbon School of Architecture. She has continuously practiced as a landscape architect in Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal, and participated in research projects on landscape design and ecology applied to human settlements, in Timor-Leste, India, Ghana and Mozambique.