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Th e growth of mobility and the development of communication technologies, have both worked to reduce the importance of the limitation of distance on human social interaction. Th us, the fragmented post-traditional urban landscape no longer consists of physical objects in relative proximity to each other, but is composed more and more of invisible networks individually established by city users. A relative dissociation between the scale of the local and everyday experience, has come to characterize urban life in the latter half of the 20th century. Th emes such as hyper-stimulation and alienation refl ect a decentered urban life within today's fragmented urban fi eld.
Today urban life is a product of the time-budgets of diff erent individuals and their movements. Th e individual is a body of experiences and a cognitive perceptor and mapper. Th e way in which he intervenes in the urban fi eld, is a product of individual modes of selfhood, more and more detached from a collective vision. Th e urban social fabric becomes a simple summing up of individual activities.
Évora is a city with a metropolitan urban physical form – with a strongly defi ned multi-functional historical center (in this case a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and suburban-peripheral mono-functional settlements. Th e relation between place and self and space and time is organized as a multi layered matrix with diff erent scales of uses and movement and diff erent experiential and mobility modes as in most of the great historical European cities. However, Évora, with 32 000 inhabitants does not have the scale of a great metropolitan city and almost all distances fall within the range of walkability. Th e fragmented environment and the disarticulation of center and periphery, interrupts perceptions of continuity and proximity within the fabric however, generating a fabric of disjoint places served by specialized mobility networks. Distances relate exclusively to time, as is usually
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the case with car-driving conditions, and not to a continuous movement experience grounded in collective urban life patterns.
Peripheral fragmentation disturbs the power of the city to integrate the urban experience. Today, Évora is a medieval citadel in a peripheral archipelago of neighborhoods rather than a city with a medieval center. Left-over spaces are lost spaces which no longer play a role in grounding an urban society. Th ey become a residual territory; the gaps in an urban lifeworld; the empty space in-between the named places, the identifi able lived urban elements. Th ese in-between spaces are not called places because they do not have a 'place' in individual or collective maps of urban life; they belong to the unnamed spaces of the urban fi eld.
Th e thesis proposes to identify the diff erent components of Évora's physical urban state (physical fabric) and their place in its diff erent users life patterns (social fabric), in order to understand the relation at diff erent scales between place and self and space and time. It tries to insert diff erent social rhythms into the void spaces that surround the identifi able places. It tries to strengthen the web of relations and to consolidate the fragmented urban fi eld, 'socializing' the residual spaces in order that these can become places.
Th e questions become: How can in-between spaces become recognizable places in Evora's urban environment? How do we construct an image of the self through these voids. How do we construct an experience of continuity through a landscape of voids? Is it possible to make the individually-lived, time-budgeted spaces of the periphery part of the recognizable and collectively-lived city? If so, on what terms? What can happen to the actual hierarchy of units-neighborhoods? What will be the balance between the medieval city and the peripheral developments?
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126 Th e design intervention was a product of a refl ection on the scales and patterns of urban movement, informed by time related ideas of the 'moment' and the 'urban sequence', and ideas of appropriation, of place-making, and of a 'diff erent' space intended to play a social-grounding role.
Th e 'moment', understood as an increment in time, can correspond to two diff erent ways of reading place. On the one hand places and their features are tied to a location and relate to a space of places;
the particularity of a 'moment' corresponds with its exact locality. On the other hand in the network of places, fl ows are marked by general and particular speeds and rhythms in distance and in time and are a product of movement from place to place.
Th e relation between time and space is here distinguished by 1: 'moments' of any duration associated with a specifi c location-bound place; and 2: the 'sequential moments' resulting from the movement through a relational space, in-between places. Th is last brings us the notion of urban sequences, series of related 'moments' or 'events'. As Whitehead tells us “…space-time is nothing else than a system of pulling together of assemblages into unities. Th e word 'event' just means one of these spatio-temporal unities”.
Th e notion of 'view appropriation' results from the understanding and taking cognizance of 'in-between elements' in in-between spaces. An in-between element, through establishing a momentary particular centrality in itself, reorganizes surrounding empty spaces giving them an orientation and transforming those spaces into spatial settings. Th e perceptual dialogue between the subject and environment is established.
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Th e project explores the potentials and overlaps of space confi guration, rhythms and speeds, through 127
uncovering patterns of social use and physical connectivity in relation to city network position.
Th rough processes of overlapping appropriation region-networks of places turn into social spaces of collective use and collective recognition – public spaces of encounter, co-presence and acceptance.
Th e project attempts to optimize the social value of particular spatial conditions, creating a diverse networked collection of places open to diff erence. Diff erent spaces and diff erent places gathered together by movement networks generate the conditions of unity and variety enabling spatial perception, collective use and the production of image.
Th e intention of the project is to investigate ways of supporting the social and perceptual integration of urban components, transforming in-between spaces into moments of a continuous urban experience. Évora as a whole maintains its diff erent units and identities and, in plan, a fragmented structure of voids. Nevertheless, these voids are woven into a structure of urban-life connectivities and overlaps that allow for the appropriation of the emptiness and their transformation within life-patterns into named places.
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