recovering the memory of the public space: leiria’s waterfront

Leiria can be recognized as a flagship case within the scope medium‐sized Portuguese cities, so much so by way of its unruly growth in the last decades of the 20th century, as by the self‐conscious process of loss of quality in urban life. On the brink of the millennium, the “opportunity to make city” turned it (among others), into the target of a national plan for urban and environmental reinstatement of Portuguese waterfronts. This presentation intends, above all, to focus on the middle process of acknowledging the loss of the public space and the importance of rebuilding the memories of physical spaces around which the city has grown and prospered. In these “remaining” places, spawned from the logic of “spontaneity” between the urban core and the natural element ‐ river ‐ there resides the excellence of memory, that has progressively faded with time.