Re-programming infrastructure for public space. Opportunistic planning as urban strategy for Macau
Creators: name: REBELO LEAO, Rui Miguel
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330102
subject: Architectural design
classificationCode: 330411
subject: Urban design

description: Macau is a place of cultural complexity and high density, undergoing rapid growth in population after the the planning of new infrastructure became a policy priority to facilitate increased gambling tourism. Being a mid-size city with little infrastructure at the time of its handover to China in 1999, with an unprepared administration, the city had to deal with a tourist industry that climbed to over 32 million tourists in the span of a year, 12 years after the end of the gambling monopoly in 2002, and an inflation of the real-estate market that saw property prices rise by 1000% in less than 10 years. 
My upbringing between colonial Macau, São Tomé e Principe in Central Africa and Portugal, and my Goan ancestry gave me a cross cultural point of view, from which to hold a critical position on the shifts in policy and practice in the period after the handover, as I didn't feel the burden of being perceived as a descendent of white colonisers.<br><br>
I look back at my design trajectory to explain what allowed me to structure my role as an architect, and my specific relation to Macau, where I grew up. I left the city to study architecture in Porto, where I was offered an overlay of a new identity. The pedagogic narrative of the Porto School of Architecture was about being part of an architectural community with a rich cultural and civic inheritance born out of the important role that architects from the Porto region had in the resistance to the dictatorship of the Estado Novo regime of António de Oliveira Salazar. My apprenticeship at the Porto School brought me to focus on issues such as the reinterpretation of traditional typologies, the genius loci and the re-visitation of modernity. My confrontation with the collective struggle of class and critical regionalism would be revealed to be key knowledge for me to confront the reality of Macau and deal with its post-handover condition, where I set out to contest the status of the praxis when I moved back there to practice.<br><br>
I believe that my socially orientated attitude to making public space, my pursuit of relating the old in the new in the ambit of every project, and my tendency to prioritise the understanding of the project as a system rather than a structure, is tied back to my learnings at Porto. <br><br>
When I returned to Macau in 1996, I found myself in a unique position to speak and express the lack of policy and shifts in paradigm that were essential in a post-handover scenario. The system needed to adapt to the people and the people would need to fill their place in a new order. <br><br>
I grew close to Manuel Vicente, who had developed an extensive body of work with an alternative understanding of the cultural and theoretical connections that the project could operate. Manuel Vicente had a big influence on me. The conceptual openness that I discovered in Manuel and his projects taught me that architecture can be infinitely inclusive, and that our affinities are not necessarily confined to our strict cultural framework, thus helping me overcome my reservations on addressing the Porto School approach to critical regionalism and cultural linearity to Macau's reality. 
I took a step forward when I understood that my advocacy and lobbying roles and my agenda as a designer are part of a same strategy of action that builds resilience and an expanded field to the projects. I started to become conscious of these added layers that were played into the project with the design for the Reading Room for the Portuguese School of Macau.<br><br>
Our intervention in the city through the projects is proof that through a process of collaboration with the government and the decision-making stakeholders, designers have the opportunity to experiment and innovate at an urban scale. Working beyond the strict realm of design and the commissioned briefs, I discovered that I could sometimes become an agent of change, a negotiator or a policy-maker, thus exploring an important role that architects can play in changing both the culture of commissioning projects and the spatial propositions for the future city of Macau.<br><br>
My collaboration with Carlotta Bruni, my life and work partner from my first years out of school, has allowed both of our agendas to have a solid breeding ground in the practice and mature steadily from commArchitectureission to commission. Due to the specific commissions that we received over the years and my propensity in expanding the scope of design, my work reflects the relevance of infrastructure for urban design and exemplifies how infrastructural urbanism complements conventional architectural urbanism. <br><br>
We have been working on sites with challenging briefs, like making a square in a traffic interchange or designing a park in between sections of a highway and below a bridge. We do opportunistic urbanism, by inserting into the projects additional layers that allow us to respond by creatively widening the scope of the original briefs and to offer more to the city than just the formal intent in the brief. <br><br>
I use every project to test my urban visions, aiming to negotiate and curate the projects from a set of points of view which contribute to making significant changes to the briefs, the impact and the scope of the projects, the intervention sites and the wider discussion on the urban approach to infrastructure, leading to an expanded role for the architect. <br><br>
My contribution to knowledge resides in doing resilient infrastructural civic urbanism as an alternative form of practice using the design of infrastructure to generate public spaces for the city, and in exploring an expanded field for the architect, demonstrated through an engagement in negotiation and agency with government bodies to achieve meaningful urban changes through design. These visions for contributing to the city are attained through a systematic opportunistic urbanism where the designers play various roles to enact a scenario of discussion with all stakeholders, creating precedent in the city, resulting in innovative procurement strategies for Macau.