Atelier da rua: A participated street design process

Abstract

Streets are key elements on the city urban structure. Despite the importance of this structural and living urban element, the contemporary Portuguese situation is characterized by the lack of investment in the realization, use and maintenance of many streets. Moreover it is noted the local authorities difficulties to deal with citizens everyday life problems within the street and to approach diffuse and weakened civic structures. These are some of the problems encountered in small and local scale architectural projects of the public space of the streets in Portugal. Participated project processes tackle these issues through the understanding of the existing problems and promoting new processes to face them. This paper is done in the scope of the research of Atelier da Rua (Street Atelier) that is developed to meet contemporary needs of intervention in the street public space. The methodological hypothesis is to use the strategy of Atelier da Rua, a citizen participative process applied to propose effective design projects in order to improve community living and physical spaces. This paper aims to explore the combination of street intervention methodology of Atelier da Rua (Pita, 2014 b) and the values presented in the text A ladder of citizen participation written by Sherry Arnstein (1969), focusing in the particular issue of achieving “partnership” on the Atelier da Rua investigation and practice.