Almost 42% of Portuguese population
lives in 5% of the territory.
According to UN, in 2015 the population living around Lisbon and Oporto areas will be 70%: These areas represent 5% of the country. What is going on with the remainder 95% of the territory? What future can we expect?
A large number of countries and major cities around the world are facing similar territorial discrepancies.
DNS ECONOMY
In fact we are now living in different times. Some called it the "New Economy" but Economists did not appreciate it.
The word did not express much about the "Digital Revolution Era".
Nowadays economic activity runs in bytes. Services are constantly being dematerialised.
The change of Headquarters - huge buildings - into web addresses is the ultimate proof. The web came to dematerialise companies and organisations.
None of us know where to "geo-find" the
Portuguese Technological Plan, Nespresso or Brother,
but one thing is for certain: we can all remember
their web addresses.
Contacts also begun to be established by mail, which means that we can almost reach anyone from any part of the world. Each and every one of us contributes to this information mass.
This process brings fresh competitiveness resources to territories with better life conditions, providing a new strategic position to attract entrepreneurs and qualified human resources.
The "New Settlers" project (Novos Povoadores, translated) promotes this opportunity.
We met in Trancoso, a lovely town 70km away
from Spain. Ana comes from Barcelos, a little town in
the north, Alexandre comes from Pombal a medium size
town, and Frederico is from Lisbon, an metropolitan
area. Each one with different backgrounds, we started
to discuss territorial development, and looking back
at our own experience we begun to handcraft a solution
around the idea of promoting territorial cohesion and
ways to increase inner Portugal potential.
We started from the basics and collected various kinds of studies. We were in 2005 at the time, and the country was discussing Urban Planning, so we had the chance to assist to several seminars with many experts. The driving course of the discussions rarely met the problem we were addressing: How to revert low density regions into dynamic and attractive ones? We could not find a proper answer, neither a solution to this simple question.
We kept researching. We dug through the Internet and ultimately found an initiative in Spain for revitalising old villages. It was not the right approach for our idea but we finally had found an initiative that was based on metropolitan exodus!
(images: Expresso/Rusticasa)