A former civil engineer and a lifelong student of city planning, I am deep in thought as I walk around in this city – immersed in it deeper than I would like to be but comfortably pondering the familiar and favorite topic – the enormous potential Porto offers as a city. As a former – and very much crumbling – industrial hub, now thankfully in the midst of a reassuring transition to its post-industrial future. From local structural retrofits, invisible from the outside, to small scale cleanup and redevelopment, to repurposing of old facilities, so much can be done with the city’s historic housing stock and its unique installed base of light industrial structures. All while leveraging the high density of its built environment, its interconnected local grids of colorful tiled facades and undulating fields of terracotta roofs – undulating due to structural deficiency of roof membranes no longer able to span without sagging and in need of repair as much as due to natural terrain of the city – its traditional materials, its quaint construction techniques, its dramatic changes in elevation, its amazing light that permeates every nook and cranny. Each of these idealized projects I am imagining brings yet another excuse to capture and consecrate the city’s inspiring skyline of ecclesiastical belfries and secular towers, to capitalize on its challenging terrain and rewarding topology, to celebrate the city’s ultra-picturesque natural setting – in a way that maximizes daylight and multiplies the depth of views and perspectives. I can’t see how anyone with some ambition, anyone who has done a bit of homework would fail to see Porto‘s exceptional wealth of potential, of promise, of opportunity.
The hospitality industry – Portugal’s largest, most entrepreneurial and thriving sector, and often the bellwether, the leading indicator, the canary in coal mine of things to come – seems to be catching on to this realization. Even if the achievement so far seems limited to a few panoramic terraces on the other side of the river and an occasional gem of a renovation in the city center. More to come, I am sure, as the city capitalizes on the country’s first post-austerity years and global fuel price deflation. Let’s hope that Porto can accomplish this without significant damage to the city’s authenticity and local character. Perhaps its merciless terrain and demanding vertical drops will prove that moat that protects its authenticity against indiscriminate occupation by hoards of tour buses and their entitled occupants? Let them take their retirement savings, condescending smiles, and air-conditioned comfort elsewhere, to flatter pastures they could descend on and master on foot.
Is it FOMO that is making Porto skip a step, past the physical layer and straight to the digital and the virtual? Porto is joining larger, richer, more progressive, more crowded, more significantly more traffic-choked cities in this self-imposed journey towards all things smart, connected, and data driven. Head first. This is old Porto we are talking about, the country’s clear second city but a distant second, one that seems miles away from the regal splendor of Lisbon, a mid-size city with no shortage of very real Industrial Age legacy – and therefore very tangible problems of rundown housing stock, aging population, falling revenues, and chronic lack of opportunities within its old comfort zone – requiring very real, old-fashioned, tried and true solutions. Solutions that warrant dusting off the old ‘dumb’ city playbook – of basic integration, amelioration, restoration, gentrification, all still lagging or lacking in some respect, all with room for improvement and still unrealized potential.
But what city wants to be dumb, what city chooses to fall behind? Porto seems determined, rushing precipitously ahead – not bothered with that unpopular ‘what problem are we solving?’ question – towards an amorphous and still vaguely-defined but irresistibly progressive agenda of ‘smart’ – full of well-intentioned statist promise. An agenda offering little concrete behind buzzwords or, at best, solutions in search of problems, much more relevant elsewhere, to metropolises of full-size dimensions, first-rate cities with first-world problems. Porto wants to be a hub on the European map of smart cities, a hub of cloud-based sensing, a hub of connected community – university-sponsored and university-centric – of smart planners pondering smart cities. I guess there is no shame in ambition, even if it runs ten steps ahead while ignoring the real issues, and Porto’s recent rebirth and signs of creative renewal suggest that it can tackle the mundane, albeit incrementally, as it sets its goals higher.
Who knew grit could be so cool? This exceptionally gritty place makes you realize it can be. Porto is gritty – it post-industrial all you want, plenty of grit remains here to fill several cities – and black and while, uncharacteristically for this exceptionally colorful country. Broad swaths of its facades, whether freestanding monumental buildings or rows of townhouses from the 1700’s, are entirely in grey and dark grey, despite all the bold, deliberate, intensive inclusions of color in some of the older facade features. Even Avenida dos Aliados, Porto‘s brave ‘big city’ face and Portugal‘s most monumental corridor by far – its oversized pretense oddly out of character in this city of small forms, short perspectives, and objects ‘in the way’ – is no exception, it is flanked by two rows of superbly ornate facades that are entirely monochrome, black and white, and more precisely, different shades of grey.
Lisbon it is not, even if monumental equestrian statues are top notch in this town. Attempts to create a second Rome – or the capital’s ubiquitous white marble, dignified limestone or imaginative patterns in colorful azulejo tiles – are nowhere to be seen here. The facades of Porto are more timid – most of its building elevations are narrow, strict, and stoic – and all granite. This darker, rougher, and tougher cladding – it would seem drab elsewhere but in Porto it carries a certain dignity and gravitas – is a proper embodiment of this city’s character, a fitting juxtaposition with the softer, more noble, more pliable Lisbon. The dusty look of Porto owes more to the historic choice of materials than to the city’s industrial past, as much of this look predates the industrial age. Pre-Pombaline architecture – with all its quirks, irregularities, shortcuts, and drawbacks – reigns unchallenged in old Porto, unaffected by anything like the great earthquake, the awful tsunami, and the menacing fires that shook, engulfed then consumed much of central Lisbon in 1755. Residential buildings of so-called cantilever construction – ineptly overhanging upper floors and clumsy timber frame, strangely ad hoc choice of materials like stone-filled interior walls build of wood – project little in the way of a silhouette on the skyline, other than a series of flattish roofs, where attic headroom is too shallow for proper mansard space or even for a dormer window. To be fair, color ceramics are not uncommon along the main historic commercial streets of old Porto or down in the Ribeira, but they too are a bit dull. Where color tiles are featured, they are dwarfed by the grey pilasters and paneled windows, reduced to a small part of the elevation’s real estate. As a result, entire old city blocks here actually read as black and white – or, more appropriately, grey and black. Sometimes I think that the egg yolk-filled pastry in local confeitaria windows – and the red logo of Leica’s flagship store – are the only things in vivid color in central Porto. Apart from the exceptional gold carvings of its church interiors, the impressive Palacio de Bolsa, and the red paint of the Art Nouveau wrought iron structure of the old market nearby. But what the city center lacks in the color of its townhouses it more than makes up in its exciting topology, in its vintage shop signs, in its busy skyline of church belfries and Belle Epoque building spires.
