The City, The Suburb and The Rest. The Earth

Abstract

This article examines the urban condition created by a new habitat that emerged in Portugal in the last decades: the suburb. In sharp opposition to the stasis of the historic centre, this article offers an optimistic gaze into the suburbs as a space where new opportunities for inclusion and co-existence could come about. The suburbs are portrayed as the real monument of the twentieth century, a human creation that should be maintained and preserved as such, in an age where the global virtual city will become the new locus for exchange and intercourse. This article also examines the dangers of removing the historic centres from the wider reality of the expanding city. Its survival condition is to contaminate the suburb instead of the other way around. The instrumentality of design - informed by politics -, is addressed as a key contribution to project the articulation of the diffuse limits of the [European] city, the suburbs and the rest.