March 7, 2023

Architecture

Mário Krüger

The integration of the university into the city was a guiding objective in the planning of new Higher Education spaces in Portugal in the 1970s. In the methodology of spatial syntactic analysis integration is a normalized measure of distance from any source space to all others in a system. It calculates how close the origin space is to all other spaces, and its importance stands out by reinforcing orientation, co-presence, safety and encounter, desirable factors in urban environments that, in the university-city relationship, can be determinant in the production of knowledge. In the last three decades, despite this objective, it has been observed that the university poles of the University of Coimbra behave as physically and socially segregated spaces. The aim of this work is to measure the integration of each of the university poles of the city of Coimbra through syntactic spatial analysis, correlate it with quantitative and qualitative data obtained in a survey on the use of space by students in the academic year 2015/2016, and verify whether there is a correlation between the values of integration and altimetry by overlaying the integration map of the spatial configuration of Coimbra with the topographic plan of the city.The results suggest that the University of Coimbra, represented by the university poles, is segregated in relation to the city and that the rugged topography of the city constitutes a factor in conditioning the urban spatial configuration that predicts the segregated development of the university and the city.

Keywords: Coimbra; city; integration; space syntax; university