- The new Azores Regional Plan as a Tool to regulate the Sprawled Growth in the insular Portuguese Territory    1641 kb by    Brandao Alves, Fernando & Conceicao, Paulo & Granadeiro Cortesao, Joao &, Pinho, Paulo | jcortesao@gmail.com    Short Outline How can a plan contribute to the regulation of urban sprawl in the insular Portuguese territory? The Azores Regional Plan promotes the balance between urban renewal and expansion as a way of containing, reverting and preventing this phenomenon. Abstract Urban sprawl, aside its disadvantages, is nowadays a figurine of cities growth because it tags a specific way of development capable, thus, to legitimate its existence such as once other development logics legitimated compact growth (military purposes for instance). Regeneration, diversification and densification of the cities’ spaces might be one of the best tactics to control the negative effects of urban sprawl, regarding urban planning as its managing tool. In the Portuguese case, urban sprawl has defined in the last decades a serious landscape deconstruction scenario based on the juxtaposition of urban fragments, due to a fast and intense metropolitan development, not always capable of consociate the new urban fabrics to the pre-existent ones. The absence of an efficient legal framework able to lead to a well balanced urban development between the levels of renewal and expansion in new areas can be seen as one of the main causes of this phenomenon. This problem shall be focused in the insular Portuguese territory, through the Azores Regional Plan. The aim is to show how a regional plan can contribute to the regulation of sprawled growth by promoting a balance between urban renewal and urban expansion. The sprawled growth in Azores, which is different from that one in the continent considering its relation with a hard topography, leaded the Regional Plan to have the responsibility of regulating urban growth and of promoting urban renewal in the Azores territory. Therefore, the rehabilitation of the existing buildings is promoted as well as the information of urban development policies, towards the regeneration of void urban spaces and buildings within the city. To manage cities growth regarding sprawl regulating, it is crucial to change the ‘game rules’ of local urban development, namely through containing, reverting and preventing the phenomenon. Keywords Regional planning, urban expansion, regeneration, densification, conservation Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2008: Urban Growth without Sprawl   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper