Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

Since the Middle Age “beco” appears in written documents as the word to translate certain streets in Lisbon (Carita, 1999). In its conceptual definition, it is always associated with narrow streets not favourable to be crossed (Topalov, 2010; Rykwert,1991), meaning that this typology of streets is tendentiously the hierarchic extreme in a street network system. On the other hand, the picturesque and intimate scale of the streets of Alfama and Mouraria neighbourhoods of Lisbon, were mentioned throughout times by several authors in more or less academic/literary references. The methodological approach allowed to build three maps of dispersion of “beco” upon cartographies of the city of Lisbon, in the last three centuries. By comparing those maps, it is possible to identify the synchronic concentration of “beco” in a specific area during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, even with the changes operated in the toponymy and in the street network, including the new roads leading to the expansion of the city area.