Water-Related Projects for the Urban Environment. The Case Studies of Lisbon Metropolitan Area

This work highlights how water is becoming a support for landscape and urban projects that tend towards a better liveability of inhabited areas. While analysing how in densely urbanised areas public spaces along the watercourses become terrain where urban policy aspires to build a greener and habitable metropolitan future, the intent is to emphasize the potential of urban regeneration projects bound to water. The case studies of this research are regeneration projects located in the city settled along the Tagus Estuary hydrographic system—dubbed the City of the Tagus Estuary (CTE, Lisbon Metropolitan Area, and Portugal). The article investigates the design action implemented by the public realised interventions and, at the same time, the context-based design processes that support them. The work emphasises that, regardless of whether they are natural or artificial / visible or invisible (because currently canalised and buried), estuarine water spaces—potentially the place par excellence of the sensitive territorial project—are today a resource for the design of the CTE, above all as generators of new urban facades and triggers of territorial greenery.