Eastern Walks

Working walks at Porto's East

Type: Activity
Admission: Free

How are paths established?

The Eastern Walks project was born from the Porto City Council's desire to develop, through the Matadouro—Porto Cultural Center, cultural and research programs dedicated to the Campanhã Valley and the eastern part of the city. It is a project that proposes to traverse this territory through the practice of walking—understood as an instrument for approaching, reading, and sharing urban space.

More than simple displacements or incursions, the proposed routes seek to create moments of observation, listening, and encounter between different forms of knowledge—from the local and everyday to the artistic and reflective—producing a more direct relationship with the landscape, memory, and the communities that inhabit it.

By crossing the Campanhã Valley, the project seeks to give visibility to its multiple historical, social, and geographical layers, recognizing it as a fundamental ecological, cultural, and human structure for understanding the recent evolution of the city of Porto. At the same time, this territory is currently in a moment of transformation. Former productive spaces and infrastructures coexist with new urban projects, making the construction of shared knowledge about its characteristics, potential, and fragilities particularly relevant. Walking thus allows what often remains hidden to become visible, questioning and interpreting the city through direct experience and building a deep relationship between body, memory, and landscape.

Starting in March, Eastern Walks begins its first public phase through an exploratory program of weekly routes, open to the participation of residents, researchers, artists, and visitors. Each route will be guided by guests from different fields, who propose specific ways of relating to the territory. The proposal stems from the idea that a path is built gradually, like a collective settlement over time: a mark produced by many feet that, by treading the same ground, make the landscape legible.

Throughout the year, 31 routes will take place, organized around three work axes—Settlement, Creation, and Identity. Each axis, guided by a guest curator, proposes distinct approaches to the territory and takes on an exploratory and open nature. This inquiry allows the routes to dialogue with each other and the program itself to evolve throughout its development, measuring and (re)tuning, at every step, its availability and its commitment to this territory.

— João Covita, project coordinator

Programmatic Pillars

Settlement - Transformed Territories

The Campanhã Valley is a transition zone between the consolidated city and the sprawling metropolis, a mosaic of realities that come together in the landscape to create a unique territory. The diversity and multipolarity resulting from a process of irregular transformation over time and space present themselves today as an imperfect suburbanity, where buildings multiply and road and rail axes grow, but also in the portrait of memories of the industrial and agricultural past—now just ruins and tracks that continued paths and alleys through the slopes of the Douro River and the valleys of the Tinto and Torto rivers.

The fulfillment of this programmatic axis is based on ten routes that propose new ways of approaching the transformation dynamics of the "sub-territories" that compose it: villages, water, industry, nature, accessibility, communities, work, heritage, rurality, and sociabilities. These are areas in full transformation that are intended to be explored thematically, yet always interconnected—through their spatial and content intersections—contributing to a sustained knowledge and an integral, proactive, and prospective vision of a transformed territory.

The involvement of participants in these routes aims to be inclusive and exploratory, using mechanisms such as stopping/observation/direct listening and the dynamic experience between space and body in the process of walking.

Curated by Mário Mesquita.

Creation - Imagined Territories

The Creation axis proposes walking eastward as a creative gesture and a device for revelation. In the immense Campanhã Valley—a true chimera crisscrossed by fields, railways, and highways—we find social housing neighborhoods, recreational associations, and old factory buildings where industrial memory and transformation coexist. Each path will be an encounter guided by the practice of a guest from the field of artistic creation and expanded thought. The starting point is the process of the path itself: a journey that calls for group participation and engagement, attentive observation, and the integration and questioning of the surroundings. Walking, in this sense, is also about experiencing what it means to "leave one's place"—displacing the body and certainties, making room for discovery. A body in motion places itself in the territory, and positions itself as territory. In a solitary or collective walk, sensitive choreographies are composed where speech, listening, sight, smell, touch, and taste intersect with the drift proposed by the place. This is a territory inhabited by the legacies of Porto artists and thinkers from other centuries, and today by artistic collectives and multiple cultural and social expressions.

By recognizing human potential through culture and creation, the way the territory is lived and projected is transformed. This axis invites us to (re)notice—while moving and together—activating memory, presence, and the future.

Curated by Ana Rocha.

Identity - Lived Territories

This axis proposes a relational approach to the identity of places, understanding them, beyond their physical materiality, as bundles of historically constituted social relations. Economic activities, ways of living, and networks of sociability are inscribed in power configurations that shape the territory, both materially and symbolically. By inscribing themselves in social space, agents produce and appropriate physical space in a way that is homologous to the positions they occupy in social space. Thus, inequalities in capital translate into spatial divisions, making the city a material expression of social and symbolic hierarchies.

The walking route allows one to grasp continuities and ruptures in the urban fabric, records of cycles of investment and abandonment, housing typologies associated with public policies and distinct moments of space production, as well as marks of
precarization and redevelopment.

Applied to Eastern Porto, this perspective reveals, across ten sociological routes, a territory marked by (de)industrialization, large transport infrastructures, working-class neighborhoods, and successive housing and resettlement policies.

Distinct social times overlap here-from the factory to productive retraction and urban redevelopment. Knowing its identity implies understanding the historical modalities of territorial production, the dynamics of social and urban recomposition, and the daily experiences that these enable-and have enabled-as well as the tensions in which they are inscribed.

Curated by Virgílio Borges Pereira.

Additional Information

Program
The first off-site program organized by Matadouro — Porto Cultural Center takes the form of guided walks in Porto’s Eastern District. With a program designed by three invited curators, “Caminhos a Oriente” aims to introduce participants to a historically fragmented and little-known valley within the city. This valley, bounded to the west by the Via de Cintura Interna, to the south by the Douro River, and to the east by the city limits of Porto, possesses a heritage of diverse facets: from historical to industrial, from landscape to social. On each walk, participants will be invited to engage with the activity itself, contributing their experience to a path forged collectively.

The Eastern Zone of Porto
Marked by rail and road infrastructure, former industrial zones, working-class neighborhoods, and green spaces still present today, this part of the city constitutes a territory where different eras and forms of landscape occupation overlap. Caminhos a Oriente proposes looking beyond the condition of the periphery. Throughout urban history, similar places—situated on the inner banks of rivers and endowed with geographical and logistical advantages—have often been sites of productive, agricultural, and industrial settlement. Today, many of these territories are also in a moment of transition: simultaneously repositories of the material and social memories of the productive city and spaces where new urban dynamics may redefine the se

Intervenients

Mário Mesquita

Mário Mesquita (Porto, 1971), architect, researcher, and artist, he holds a Ph.D. in Architecture with a dissertation titled “The Networks of Invisibility in the Contemporary Equation of Territory,” and a master’s degree in Urban Planning and Design with a thesis titled “The Formation and Consolidation of the Urban Fabric in the Antas District—Porto, 1880–1950.” He is a professor at FAUP, also teaching at FBAUP and FPCEUP. He is a full-time researcher at i2ADS, coordinating the project “Critical Territories of Drawing,” a collaborator at CITCEM, a researcher at R3IAP, served as a consultant for Porto’s Water and Energy Heritage, and is vice-chair of the FAUP Academic Council. He is an expert on Porto, with his most recent books, “Porto: Territories of Invisibility” and “Porto: The City of Cities,” standing out.

Ana Rocha

Ana Rocha (Porto, 1982), choreographer, curator, and performer, has been mediating in the field of Culture & the Arts for 23 years, creating a language of research and artistic and socio-political action committed to the potential development of the process and its context. Ana Rocha operates in fields of cultural multiplicity and diversity, correlating points of reflection and transition through mentoring and consultancy for institutions, non-profit organizations, artistic collectives, and national and international creators. With a background in Visual Arts and Art History, she is a PhD student in Human Ecology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

Virgílio Borges Pereira

Virgílio Borges Pereira (Porto, 1970) holds a degree in Sociology, a Master's in Sociology with the dissertation "Local Power, Development and Social Change", a PhD and an Aggregation in Sociology from FLUP. He has specialized in the sociology of social classes and symbolic-ideological practices, paying special attention to the sociological legacy of Pierre Bourdieu's work. Taking the realities of the city of Porto and the Vale do Ave and Vale do Sousa regions as a reference, he has focused on the construction of social spaces, lifestyle spaces, and position-taking, as well as the analysis of their respective relationships with physical space.

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