Inês Norton de Matos
i.norton@gap.pt
Landscape Architect, PhD candidate in Departamento de Arquitetura da Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa, Da/UAL, Portugal.
To cite this article: MATOS, Inês Norton de – The Carnaxide Urban Plan: A Landscape Architecture Perspective. Estudo Prévio 27. Lisboa: CEACT/UAL – Centro de Estudos de Arquitetura, Cidade e Território da Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa, dezembro 2025, p. 20-48. ISSN: 2182-4339 [Available at: www.estudoprevio.net]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26619/2182-4339/27.2
Received on July 30, 2025, and accepted for publication on November 21, 2025.
Creative Commons, licence CC BY-4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The Carnaxide Urban Plan: A Landscape Architecture Perspective
Abstract
In the context of urban expansion in Portugal in the 1960s, new forms of urban planning were being explored to deal with the housing problem. The New Towns model developed in England in the post-war period, which had already been experimented with in Olivais Sul, served as the basis for the development of the Carnaxide Plan by the architects Ruy d’Atouguia, Álvaro Dentinho and António Barreto. The landscape project was of structural importance at a time when newly trained landscape architects were flourishing in Portugal, and it asserted itself as a new typological model, marked by social concerns in a break with neoclassical design typologies. Today we are faced with an urban reality in which a large part of the plan’s initial premises have been altered or have not been implemented, either due to a lack of political will to comply with the plan, or due to the overlapping of private interests, or even due to the changes introduced as a result of the way of life. Based on the consultation of archival primary sources, aerophotogrammetric surveys and a reconnaissance of the Carnaxide site, this article evaluates the changes that have taken place since the plan’s conception process until today, in a time span of almost six decades. It questions how landscape architecture studies have ensured the permanence of the natural systems developed in the Carnaxide plan, and how it can contribute to future planning and urban design scenarios in the current context of the housing problem.
Keywords: New Towns, Landscape Architecture, Public space, Urban drawing, Ecology