Handmade calcada pavement is one of those inventions – original, distinctly memorable, uniformly likeable for its ability to capture the unique spirit of place, and generally a no-brainer – that finds you scratching your head. Specifically, about why is it that back in the day they didn’t adopt a decree simply mandating the use of the patterned black and while cobblestones for all pavements, pedestrian streets, and piazzas across Europe. A simple rule could have been put in place: towns that fall short of a requisite content of cobblestone pavement or whose cobbled sidewalks are short on creativity and imagination would be taxed by their 19th century authorities at a higher rate. Or better yet, reparations and indemnity obligations of a defeated state could be redeemed, in part, through public works across the victorious country’s main cities, labor naturally supplied by the losing side and and materials reimbursed.
If you are still unconvinced that even today in European cities art tends to be more present, permeating every aspect of urban life, following you around, Portugal’s cities should help dispel any doubt. Art here is easier to define broadly – art has taken over more surface area in this country, claiming storefronts, walls, and pavements – and has more ways of reaching you through a myriad details as you make your way through the streets. Even if you don’t bother with museums and churches and simply choose to lose yourself in the city, whatever the city, you will have to work hard not to be within reach of some impeccably preserved signage, azulejo mosaics, or calcada pavement tile pattern.
Calcada cobbles do not just shine when Portugal basks in the bright sun. When the sky darkens before storm, on a cloudy, misty, or foggy day, when the silhouettes of facades and rooftops fade into obscurity, the contrasting patterns of wet cobblestones often remain the brightest and most visible of objects around. Rain or shine, the traditional Portuguese pavement rules, a thing of beauty, a source of embellishment for all seasons.
It behooves city planners all over Europe to consider Portuguese-inspired patterned pavements as a cheap and effective urban rejuvenation and renewal tool. What such an import could do to the monotony of once special but now defunct boulevards of Paris. Throughout the Western part of the Right Bank, around Madeleine – on Rue Royale, up lower Boulevard Malesherbes and Boulevard de la Madeleine, but especially along Rue Tronchet and Boulevard Haussmann – the City of Light has highways for boulevards, people thoroughly and conclusively replaced by cars. Intimidating, dreadful, faceless – despite the strict uniformity of Second Empire facades lining them up as far as one can see – the once fashionable places to see and be seen have devolved to a mere utilitarian function of connecting the dots to a destination, defaced by all-consuming traffic and all but abandoned by pedestrians. Don’t even bother looking for wanderers enjoying their walk: colorful, real inhabitants of Paris, hurried in their purposeful daily routine, are nowhere to be seen here. This is especially true in late afternoon hours on a gloomy day, in late fall or winter, when romantic, joyful atmosphere that on most other days still permeates this great city seems gone for good, when broad, busy streets of the capital’s wealthy arrondissements sit empty, gritty, devoid of all pedestrian activity, lifeless. Enter calcada pavement, and things could be different for this uninspiring stretch of urban infrastructure underpinning the pinnacle of prime Parisian real estate.
Cities, and certainly their smartest streets, were built for people – celebrating their lives on a daily basis, going about their business – not for a flow of traffic worthy of an interstate freeway, that’s what outer ring roads and underground runnels are for. And nothing brings human scale back, nothing connects with the surrounding enclosure of elegant Second Empire and Third Republic facades, nothing captures the attention of a person out for a stroll better than a continuous, unbroken pavement pattern – made up of tiny blocks, tiles, and stones but readable as one design, one picture, one story across an entire length of a 19th century block – bridging across the disunity of Parisian space. A disunity even the iconic sameness and uniformity of the facades of its 19th century percees could not fix. Calcada planted in Paris would help bring intersections closer, making one look forward to the remainder of the walk rather than dreading it, breaking up the daunting dimension into manageable, human scale links. Especially given all the amazing street furniture so affirmatively present throughout upscale quarters of Central Paris, above all in its Western districts.
Even brushing aside the short-term socioeconomic benefits such purposeful public works would unleash on underemployed masses and their elected masters, a project of beautification and renewal through patterned repaving – along the broad sidewalks, and yes, even portions of the traffic lanes in the middle, perhaps at street intersections – would do wonders for these former boulevards, restoring their former glory, but more importantly, their relevance, making a human being walk along them once again. Reclaimed them from the chokehold of things transient and transitory, like the through traffic rushing across the city and into the suburban obscurity, these formerly grand boulevards of Baron Haussmann would see their impressive stretch reanimated, for unrelenting motorists, cyclists, and wanderers alike. And that’s Paris at its finest, in its smart, posh, upper class epicenter.
My imagination drifts off in a predictable direction, and I picture calcada overlaid on the distressed and nearly disused pavements of Vienna’s Ringstrasse – naturally, with care and proper respect for the jaw-dropping detailing of its civic and residential palatial structures – to a similar positive effect. Certainly no shortage of headroom for improvement, and the great Imperial capital, struggling to integrate and adapt the Ring to rapidly changing functions and patterns of use should take note, I am sure a dynastic linkage could be made to legitimize this act of borrowing from the Portuguese.
Need I go on about what calcada, Portugal’s so far untapped killer export, could do for the streets of Nordic or Central Europe? And if the initial labor cost is the issue you are about to bring up, there are plenty of present day master craftsmen further East, their skills unclaimed at home, who would be glad to have a part in such a project. And while they are at it, let’s recognize that the maintenance cycle of never ending annual repairs, the unsightly patches of the new, and the holes in the old – asphalt pavements are like a needy kid who never grows up – could be avoided almost entirely once calcada is deployed. City planners, commissioners, and chief architects – you have quickly domesticated shared mobility, car-free zones and bike lanes, and sweeping pedestrianization across your city centers – this new frontier may well be your moment to shine, don’t let it slip away. If still not convinced about color stone mosaics and how much they can do to the pavements of a pedestrian area, just look at Budapest’s renovation of its Basilica Square.
