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Lisbon Begins a Review of its Architectural Patrimony

1 January 2018

The Lisbon City Council approved the creation of a scientific council that will define criteria to include properties in the municipal register of historic real estate.

The Lisbon City Council took the first step in reviewing the Municipal Charter for Heritage and Landscapes, a document which includes all buildings and architectural assets that the municipality considers deserving of special protection. The review will not necessarily increase the already long list of protected real estate and may even result in a decrease.

“The current charter includes roughly 4,000 properties,” the councillor for Urban Planning, Manuel Salgado, said during discussions of the issue at the city hall’s public meeting this Wednesday. “It is an open document; assets can be added or withdrawn.”

For now, the constitution of a scientific council to establish criteria for the inclusion of real estate in the charter was approved, to define the degrees of safeguarding and to classify the properties by asset type. That work was already underway but only sporadically. “It is territorially circumscribed to the areas for which an urbanisation and detail plan has been drawn up and has as a starting point that the territorial areas of each plan are not sufficiently representative of the gamut of asset types identified in the charter,” the approved proposal reads.

The same document states that the scientific council “shall also be responsible for the future validation of proposals for inclusion or exclusion of assets, their degree of safeguarding and the identification of the spatial, architectural, urbanistic, artistic, decorative or programmatic aspects to be safeguarded, as well as unnecessary additions that should be eliminated.”

“This is a temporary measure that is intended to complete a job during a short-period of time,” said Manuel Salgado, suggesting that “six months” is the ideal time for the existence of said council. The total amount of work, however, will take longer. The council estimates that three months will be required to define the criteria, 18 months to evaluate the buildings one by one and, later, without definite term, will include the study of the patrimony t0 be added to the charter.

A motion put forth by the PSD was also approved at the same time, which determined the creation of a virtual museum of the city’s architectural heritage. “The revision of the charter is an excellent opportunity”, councilman João Paulo Costa stated, who believes that the museum has an “enormous potential for the development of the city” in cultural, educational and tourist terms. The Social Democrat party’s proposal, unanimously approved, calls for the creation of a website and a mobile phone application that will permit interaction with the properties included in the charter.

The approved scientific council will consist of five people. The presidency was given to Ana Tostões, a specialist in History and Theory of Architecture and the current leader of Docomomo International, a modernist architecture conservation society.

 

Original Story: Público – João Pedro Pincha

Photo: Rui Gaudencio

Translation: Richard Turner