Sustainable Rehabilitation of Historical Urban Areas: Portuguese Case of the Urban Rehabilitation Societies

Abstract

The role of urban rehabilitation in the vitality of urban centers is commonly perceived as a mandatory strategy for most cities with historical city centers. This unanimous principle has been developed under different models, with different objectives, and distinct tools and mechanisms for intervention. Strategies have been evolving from financing programs to partnership models in order to increase the effectiveness of the process, and engage the stakeholders in the same common objective. This paper is a study of the legal, strategic, and organizational forms that support urban rehabilitation interventions, analyzing the Portuguese case, where urban rehabilitation societies (URS) have been created. The URS tool stands out as the most recent means of rehabilitating degraded historical areas, such as those classified as urban recovering and reconverting areas. The URS provide a potentially successful model for large-scale intervention, and to overcome the lethargic behavior of owners, although it may have undesired social impacts due to an increase in real-estate housing prices. The paper addresses the new competencies of the model, the mechanisms by which it was applied, and the overall assessment of its development, providing policy implications useful to researchers and practitioners dealing with urban rehabilitation issues.