Project Portugal 2030

Summary

The first main objective of FUTURURAL is to understand contemporary rural urbanism in 4 regions partly shaped by Twentieth-Century villagization: northern Portugal, northern Angola, Manica in Mozambique, and central Guinea-Bissau. Past research, including by team members or consultants, provides some knowledge on the history of villagization in these regions. Architectural and geographic research methods will be employed to examine rural urbanism at 3 different scales: settlement design, territorial infrastructure, and city-country mobilities. The second main objective of FUTURURAL is to draw on past collaborations and on the applied research process to enable substantive North-South dialogues on the future of rural urbanism. FUTURURAL aims at challenging the conceptual barriers between Northern modernity and Southern development long denounced by Jennifer Robinson, and to engage in a substantive dialogue on how architects and urbanists can best serve rural citizens and the specificities of their built environments through new kinds of design practices and processes; and on the ways in which the legal framework for rural urbanism can be adapted for the future. This dialogue will take into account the 3 Sustainable Development Goals that orient this research: “reduce inequalities,” in this case by improving access to professional design and planning services, and increasing the fairness of state planning systems, which are arguably biased towards the spatialities of cities; “sustainable cities and communities,” by enhancing participation of rural citizens in the design of their own future built environments at various scales; and “climate action,” by being attentive to the legacy of villagization as “fossil development,” to paraphrase Andreas Malm.