Guias de Design e conservação do caráter da paisagem urbana: redescobrindo um instrumento

Abstract

The assimilation of the urban landscape as a complex field of permanence and transformation brings great challenges to its understanding in the area of cultural heritage. When focusing on commercial areas, the challenges associated with conservation directly confront the fast transformations caused by the tertiary sector. In view of this, the present research aimed to investigate and rediscover an instrument capable of contemplating the complexities present in the intervention process on the urban landscape character of commercial areas: the Design Guide. For this purpose, as a research focus, the investigation focused on a set of Design Guidelines of the Main Street America programs in the United States of America, in order to detect the potentialities and weaknesses of the Guides as an instrument for management, conservation and safeguarding of the urban landscape character, articulating the urban environmental heritage with the urban planning of cities. To this end, the discussion was linked on how to deal with the management of the urban landscape through the integrated conservation of the formal character that composes it. Therefore, the research was supported by three related theoretical pillars: commerce, landscape and heritage. Furthermore, it also relied on a qualitative-quantitative analysis regarding the set of Design Guidelines listed as case studies. For this, five Guides were defined covering different scales (national, state and municipal/local), in order to build a systematic debate about this instrument. From this, it was observed that the Design Guides can play the role of an instrument for promoting the integrated conservation of the urban landscape formal character of commercial areas from a contextual conduct that acts and reaches three dimensions: spatial, temporal and sociocultural.