It’s Time to reUse! Explorative Design Strategies to Inhabiting the Built City

Abstract

Contemporary times present us with challenges that we sometimes fail to predict. Some that we can consider extreme, such as climate events, military conflicts, and intense migratory flows; others that result from altering the behaviour of our societies, such as tourist pressure and digital nomadism, manifesting in the lack of affordable housing or refuge spaces, which should make us all consider different living strategies.

Through an innovative pedagogical experience at FA.ULisboa’s Summer Schools, over three years, based on a design explorative approach, we raised awareness among the students on the fundamental topic of “reUse the built city”, understanding it as a process of appropriation, transformation, resignification, and even transgression of preexisting built structures.

Considering demolition outdated, existing built structures can be transformed into affordable, updated inhabitable spaces that preserve resources and even collective memories of urban spaces. Methodologically, each year, we selected different case studies to test design-based solutions to similar problems: ruined and abandoned built structures in 2021 (fortresses and city walls of Setúbal); decommissioned urban fabrics under transformation in 2022 (eastern riverfront of Marvila in Lisbon); underused buildings with recognition of high heritage value in 2024 (Convento de Cristo in Tomar).

Bearing in mind that these intensive experiences bring together students and professors from different European schools of architecture, design procedures, from concepts to their materialisation, were held through alternative paths.
The results of each workshop become an exhibition that provides each place with a new critical view of itself, based on a comprehensive model that gathers the design studio projects. Each design studio builds a piece of the common ground, representing a proposal for inhabiting built structures. Each proposal is based on an integrated vision of the preexistence and an articulated relationship with the projects and with each of the groups. In this sense, all the outputs from each design studio become fragments of the collective proposal. The goal of each design immersive experience in inhabiting existing buildings is to constitute a working manifesto for the reuse of the city.