Praça da República is today an uncharacteristic urban space and ravaged by car traffic. The way in which the car crossing is processed in the various directions, but also the way in which the parking and road circulation is processed within the entire area, is poorly disciplined and without an understandable logic, coexisting in the same space the circulation of people and of vehicles, in a disorderly and non-hierarchical way.

On the other hand, there is a dominant, but disqualified, presence of the group formed by the Convento de Nossa Senhora dos Mártires building and the Church of Nossa Senhora da Purificação, whose scale and isolated and elevated location, reminiscent of an acropolis, constitutes the focal point. of the area in question.

The proposal developed has as its main purpose to rethink and redesign an urban space that assumes public space as the matrix of its urbanity and identity, and as the main organizing element of urbanism and urban landscape.

  In terms of general strategy, the solution presented is based on two fundamental premises:

1 - Delimit and contain for pedestrian use, especially the north and west ends of the intervention area, giving a form that stabilizes and makes these sectors of the “Square” significant, thus allowing to qualify and return the public space to pedestrians, at the same time as the convent and church are valued in the context of the square, repositioning them as primordial elements.

2 - Effectively solve car traffic, the location of public transport stops and parking in the intervention area, articulating it with other green spaces and pedestrian use, in order to guarantee an articulated urban structure and image that privilege the human scale, and the integrated functioning of pedestrian, cycling and road flows.

The structure of open spaces proposed is constituted as a continuous and hierarchical system that articulates several subsectors. In a simplified way, it can be said that the east fringe assumes a more road character, while the west dominates a system clearly dedicated to pedestrian use.

This option made it possible to extend the pedestrian area adjacent to the barracks area, configuring an elongated trapezoid in a north-south direction. This new platform – designated as “Bosque Urbano” – runs along the east end of the church and barracks, being intersected by the “Praça Alta”, which constitutes the main reference and matrix space of the projected set.