Balancing Knowledge, Design and Sustainability. The rehabilitation aspects of the Porto Historic Centre

Porto’s old city centre, listed as World Heritage since 1996, has been the subject of successive studies, proposals and urban regeneration programmes, culminating in the world heritage management plan that underwent its last revision in 2021. The results of some works in progress in the Historic Centre of Porto, commented on above, while obviously constituting a very modest sample, certainly overwhelmed by virtuous interventions, appear precisely as the outcome of rules dictated by standards implemented in simplistic terms. It is as if the enormous amount of research carried out, at different scales, on the historic centre of Porto in some cases did not have the strength to orient projects, making them more sustainable.