Romanina Masterplan

Working alongside Nuno Portas, Risco came first in the international call for tenders ‘Farecentro a Romanina’.
The main objectives of the Romanina Urban Project were to create a sustainable city from scratch, use the quality of the public areas to construct a centrality, and create a strong, recognisable image.
Our proposed urban morphology is characterised by a hypodamic web structured around inner neighbourhood (central ‘spine’) roads and a number of neighbourhood (transversal) streets.
Using this hypodamic web makes it possible to create a clear and lasting division between the public and private areas, and can potentially be used to manage the whole development in terms of individual ‘plots’, ‘isolatos’ (city blocks), or even ‘sites’. It also means that during the implementation of the overall plan, there can be morphological variations in the different city blocks without endangering the unity of the public areas as a whole.
The individual facilities represent exceptions to the whole and form a system of central public spaces around its outer edge. They form a line along the longitudinal axis, thereby strengthening the image of a central ‘spine’ and lending reality to Romanina as a symbol of centrality. One of the most important public spaces is the market square, which is articulated on different levels so as to make it possible to incorporate the metro station.
The Romanina ‘web’ also consolidates the memory of the ‘Roman roads’, in the shape of the diagonal footpath, which makes the public areas stand out and breaks up the rigidity of the layout.
The compact nature of the hypodamic web creates a permeable relationship with the park, which is allowed to come directly into the web itself, thereby diversifying the different spaces.