The dependence on imported food and fuel today is an acute urban challenge. Automobility altered the dynamics of urban living in a vicious cycle of producing urban sprawl, causing major environmental damage, and contributing to atomized living and loosening of community ties. The 15-minute City (15mC) is an alternative to the suburbanization model that seeks to generate hyper proximity by optimizing accessibility to services. This project will Hype Agriculture and Transit (HAT) in the 15mC paradigm exploring the potentials of urban agriculture, placemaking and green city visions combined with Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) as leitmotif for driving urban transitions towards green Proximity Oriented Developments (PODs). Hyping implies promoting or publicizing intensively urban (and peri-urban) agriculture supported by active and shared mobilities. The HAT project will link academic research with the business sector (for profit and non-profit organizations) to encourage, drive, and catalyze urban transitions towards with top-bottom green 15mC city planning policy and bottom-up food-related placemaking initiatives. It will produce empirical evidence and design knowledge on urban agriculture and TODs in a context of 15mC and develop viable business models for green PODs seeking to decrease the need to import food and fuel, as well as the dependence on the automobile.

The research project called 'Grand Projects - Architectural and Urbanistic Operations after the 1998 Lisbon World Exposition' aims at identifying, characterizing, debating, and reflecting the urban policies and architectural works produced in Portugal after the 1998 Lisbon World Exposition (Expo98). The study is grounded on the conviction that the effects of this 'urban laboratory' cannot dispense a predominantly analytical and interpretative work, capable of mapping and qualifying the urban, projectual, and technological culture implemented in Portugal in the two decades that followed the Expo98 ventures. In 2008, a decade past over the Lisbon Exposition, the Lisbon Municipality presented its 'General Plan for Waterfront Interventions' (Plano Geral de Intervenções da Frente Ribeirinha - PGIFR), aiming at establishing new urban continuities, by extending the model of the exposition from the West part of the city to the East (between the Trancão River and the Pedrouços dock), through the adaptation of some harbor infrastructure under the state administration. The dynamics generated by PGIFR framed the development of projects of both great scale and major strategic importance, e.g., the Champalimaud Foundation in Pedrouços district, designed by Charles Correa (1930-2015); the National Coach Museum in Belém area, designed by Paulo Mendes da Rocha (b. 1928); the EDP Headquarters at Boavista embankment, by Manuel (b. 1963) and Francisco (b.1964) Aires Mateus; the Ribeira das Naus public space, by João Ferreira Nunes (b.1960) and João Gomes da Silva (b.1962); or the future Cruise Terminal in Santa Apolónia, by Carrilho da Graça (b.1952), currently under construction. The research project 'Grand Projects - Architectural and Urbanistic Operations after the 1998 Lisbon World Exposition' seeks to deepen the relations produced by urban interventions with specific contexts in which they operate on. The distinctive feature of this project consists in the launching of a critical ...

In recent years the entire legal and regulatory basis of the Portuguese Planning System underwent an ambitious and far reaching reform. However, today like in the past, the major effort in the production of new legislation and regulation was not accompanied by a similar effort in the production of planning doctrine, here understood as a vast and coherent set of planning policies and implementation measures, able to improve, from a technical and scientific point of view, and under an evidence based approach, not only the quality of planning practice but also, and foremost,its proactive role, incorporating new and emerging topics and societal challenges and concerns, promoting change and opening new transition avenues into the future. This proactive role of planning, advocated here, contrasts with its traditional conservative standing in Portugal (and in other EU Member States), of looking backwards and passively accommodating, if not slowing down, change and the social and physical reform of our cities and metropolises.   Planning can, and should, constitute a transformative device in our cities in Europe and elsewhere, particularly in the present times and with a view into the long term. Indeed, current changes seem far more deep within the existing urban tissues experiencing profound recompositions of functions and activities, than in physical terms, strictly speaking,where past investments in infrastructures and in the built environment seemed to have exceeded the real demand and generated a surplus of the building stock that, some years later, still remains partially empty or underused.   The Spatial Planning for Change (SPLACH) programme draws on some of the main areas of knowledge of thre eresearch centres CITTA, DINÂMIA'CET-IUL and GOVCOPP. Two to three main areas of knowledge were identified for each centre: post carbon cities, transformative policies, spatial planning, socio-technical system, food security,services of general interest, tourism and modeli...