Changing the Landscape into Valley Areas

^1. Introduction.

A valley is a topographic morphology that can occur at different scales and shapes. It is a core landscape element, and understanding its functioning is crucial in designing changes.

Linked to the shape and size of the valley and the resulting parameters and weather conditions, we can describe the water metabolism in the landscape, its flows, its origin, its two positions and their variability over time, seasonal variations, long times, variations in size and, consequently, in the position of water lines.

Water has always been fundamental as a resource for animals and plants, as raw material for production, as a vehicle, and as energy to run mills, watermills, fulling mills, sawmills, and factories.

The river water was valuable energy used to move, transform, produce, and distribute. When we started to get alternative forms of energy and supply for urban centres, we turned our backs on rivers and slowly let them turn into sewers, whose only function was removing what we did not want in the city. Roads and mobility infrastructures became the focus of city construction.

Other systems were overlaid with the natural water line systems, which were diverted, closed, and covered to provide more city space. This change, considered a more abstract and conceptual aspect, discusses the idea of “continuity” and priority and hierarchy allocation to the different continuities in the landscape.

Do we want to advocate the functional continuity of the water line or the continuity of its design? Do we endorse the priority of the continuity of the water line or that of the highway that crosses it?

This is the core negotiation linked to the sudden change of scale, and way of life, which has made consumption areas related to production areas through physical systems developed in the valleys. How can fresh produce get to cities? How can people get to the Cities? How to set priorities in space competition in the valleys whose area will not be enough for everything?

Let’s look at the landscape around Lisbon. We realise several valley saturation issues, saturation and competition among the different functions compete for space with the water lines in limited valley spaces.

And it is only when this saturation happens that cities are made aware of the increasing drainage issues. The biggest problem of climate change in cities is not the rise in sea level but the radical change in rainfall intensity and the flow of rainwater in systems currently under-sized.

The issues deriving from the rise in sea level are mitigated by the natural adaptive processes of coastal sedimentation, which will respond seamlessly to the slow increase in sea level, which in other climatic cycles will decrease; moreover, they can be actively counteracted through simple constructive actions.

As cities become denser and our infrastructure construction processes worsen rainfall water drainage conditions due to climate change, reducing basin concentration times, accelerating flows through pipelines, waterproof surfaces and collectors, thus increasing the probability of floods.

In the Alcantara Valley in Lisbon, there is an issue related to the direct use of land and infrastructure and a case of size. The infrastructures linking the country’s north to south flow through this valley. This is not a Lisbon problem, it has to do with the whole continental territory, and the pressure that large infrastructures have on the basin is not a local issue but a national and regional issue.

We must start analysing the city regarding its areas (freguesias), neighbourhoods and streets, and large territorial infrastructures. Otherwise, we will not understand the problem as a whole.

The infrastructural issues in the Alcantara Valley must be included in a national planning discussion.

When we analyse the city of Lisbon, specifically the Alcantara Valley, we can understand that the territorial planning aimed to define borders when Lisbon began to expand. Look at Monsanto Park, for example. It is a border that uses the physical discontinuity of the valley to block, cover, and close.

It was not aimed at establishing continuity but rather the opposite – to control the irregular expansion of the city. At that time, and in that context, this idea made sense.

Issues and solutions are rooted in time, which is how the world moves forward. We are here to work, to find an answer in a specific dynamic and context. However, in twenty years, what we discuss today will be utterly outdated as new ways of living and understanding the city and its territory will emerge.

So, if what interests you in architecture is the formal definition of an object, you are wasting your time. This is not the tool to solve issues. It has never been one. The mechanism to solve problems is to think about how this vocabulary, this language, can transform a territory through the relationships it establishes and how these relationships can adapt to new conditions whose needs we cannot predict.

We are designing relationships today; we are interested in something other than objects. Objects are of interest as tools to create and solve issues, and their formal value is part of a culture that I consider entirely outdated.

I believe that, at this moment, we have to look at architecture as a producer of active relationships and not as a producer of objects meant to be photographed rather than lived in or to fulfil a function in a social context; they are symbols of themselves or of the vanity of architects. Relationships that encourage people to interact with each other or with other communities, that is, to build the city.

“Establishing relationships” is the most current theme we can imagine in a world dependent on the Internet.…

The school where I teach, the Academy of Mendrisio, is now working on the city of Brussels on the topic Diploma – building culture.

For a few days, we were immersed in the City, trying to figure out how the city had changed and how the city had built relationships among people. We realised that much of this change had taken place through culture. Culture is construction.

In Brussels, we admire a culture that claims to be “one”, but we know that there are ten thousand cultures underlying. The true cultural manifestation is people’s lives, which are much more interesting than the objects produced by the dominant culture.…

The fact is that, when we talk about Brussels or do research on Brussels, two things appear: the role of Brussels in European politics and the role of Brussels in culture; the role of Brussels in culture is an objective intentional construction. Hundreds of millions of euros have been invested in building the city’s cultural identity. Artists have become values and aware of who produces a product. And the relationship that makes the artistic dimension of these groups has become much more relevant than the objects.

In Portugal, we tend to resist recognising values and accepting heroes. Our heroes only get recognised when they are dead and do not threaten anyone…During their life, the community they served and served well does not acknowledge their value… If we were to go against this trend, we could perhaps build collective values that would help create a cultural identity built on admiration and based on celebrating rather than envying others.

In the Alcantara Valley, the territory discussed in this workshop (which is taking place in the scope of the seminars on “Inhabiting the Public Space”), we want to transform the existing construction radically: the border around the city of Lisbon – Monsanto park – which states “the city ends here”. And we are here saying that it does not end there, that the consistency of this border can be discussed…that it perhaps makes sense to look at the park from another perspective. Monsanto is a forest park; it is not an urban park. It wasn’t designed for people to walk around, spend the day with friends, or have a picnic. The equipment in the park does not visually relate to its surroundings; it has nothing to do with walking around, and it is not there for human activity. We have a stadium to which we arrive by motorway, i.e., it leads to temporary rather than continuous, repeated meetings.

When Monsanto Park was designed, Joaquim Rodrigo’s practical challenge (he was better known as an extraordinary painter and a forest engineer) was to plant trees in what was a desert due to centuries of intensive grain farming for Lisbon. The conceptual challenge was to devote considerable space to an almost invisible social function – the green lung – and thus materialise a hygienic design of space and the relations between major city areas and mark the city’s borders.…

Our challenge today, when Monsanto Park changed from a Forest Park to an inhabited Park, has been to reverse the idea of border, reinterpret this function and invent a new relationship with what existed before.

The second challenge is to completely reverse the idea that the structure of the Alcantara Valley is longitudinal because it is the support of successive infrastructures that overlap and find their meaning through different transversal profiles.

The studies made for the WWTP resulted in an exciting amount of documentation on the successive changes in Alcantara, namely on the relevance given to longitudinal connections, following the largest dimension of the valley, in opposition to the transversal ones, which were initially more relevant.

Alcantara tends to be infrastructural because of its positional, topological, geological position, stability, and border situation.

Everything infrastructure is in the valley, starting with the first railway lines, given the place’s topography and geology.

The Alcantara hydrological basin is relatively small. Still, it plays a vital role due to its shape and slope, making this a rich and productive valley, but also demanding in terms of the space for drainage.

Competition for space for the different functions that develop longitudinally – infrastructures and drainage – is typical of this valley, evidencing the continued weakening of cross connections, entirely erased by the extensive longitudinal links and replaced by large-scale links, with highly concentrated flows.

The hydrological issue is topological since different areas of a hydrological basin are linked together and share everything that happens within, regardless of the linear distance between them. Even if they are immediately connected, the headwaters of contiguous basins work in different metabolites and have fragile relationships.

Geologically, the Alcantara valley is a basalt-limestone mixture, very typical of this area and some areas on the Campo de Ourique side and the Monsanto and Tapada da Ajuda sides.

The mother rock is basalt, derived from volcanic eruptions, and limestone, pieces of previous sedimentary strata that “float” in eruptive materials and offer beautiful contrasts between very dark lands, with black stones with white limestone flecks. I believe that this geological condition marked several aspects of the City’s architecture, for instance, the designs of the sidewalks.

How basalt and limestone respond to water, erosion and infiltration issues is completely different and causes different plant strata. These contrasts extend to all aspects of city life and generate great diversity characteristic of Lisbon.

When we analyse the topography of the valley and overlap this topography with the geological plant, we can very clearly perceive the direct correspondence between the topography and the genetic reasons for this topography.

A German geographer, Alexander Humboldt, was interested in scientifically explaining the relief and understanding the shape… Before him, relief was observed, drawn and celebrated in landscape paintings, it was technically represented in topographic surveys, but it was not explained.

Just as the landscapes change, so does scientific knowledge.

Everything is constantly moving – an ocean expands while another ocean contracts. For us, who studied after the sixties, this is part of our cultural heritage and is an indisputable idea.… We were taught to consider Pangeia’s theory, which explains the movement of tectonic plates.

But this theory was presented at the beginning of the 20th century, when Alfred Wegener observed the shape of South America and Africa, whose coastal lines formed a perfect fit, and suggested that they had been together at some point in the geological past. This theory was ridiculed for decades, and its representation model was scientifically discredited.

Only after WWII did the theory earn some credibility, recently being taught in schools.

This increase in knowledge, as it occurred regarding plants and bacteria and fungi, will make the world in which we imprint our signs, the landscape that we build in light of this knowledge, become a different world because it was created based on the concept of a unique and dynamic world, in contrast to a divided and static world, made of differences and barriers.

Likewise, our generation and yours, therefore, cannot, upon deciphering the DNA helix and discovering that the stranger who travels next to us on the subway, who has a different skin colour, hair texture, eyes, height, etc., shares our DNA, not much different than our blood brother, after knowing all this we cannot build a world the same way as before.

The awareness of a unique and dynamic world inhabited by a humanity that is a large family, genetically very similar, is a starting point for transforming the world that will undoubtedly lead to surprising results.