The European city with its patrimonial, cultural and social identity, its administrative and economic function and its symbolism forms a very stable model of urban organisation only individualised by the "place", its unique architectural and scenic character and urban lifestyle.

Today the city’s references – modelled by the place where it is established and made memorable by its most impressive urbanistic and architectural creations – are associated with the process of its appropriation and use, where its social and cultural cohesion and its urban lifestyle are affirmed. In this way, the events which happen in cities these days and the way they are presented by the media constitute the factors which best identify the cities and to which the events which promote them are associated. Recent cases illustrating this are Bilbao and the Guggenheim, Barcelona and the Olympic Games, Lisbon and the World Expo of 1998, and today the Park of Nations.

The challenges which face the city today, more than those of regulatory planning as a factor of development, are those of its strategic reorganisation in an extended regional context, in order to modernise by means of the opportunities presented to it and thereby resolve the problems which, given its current dynamism and globalisation, surpass the normal regulatory and preceptive capacity within its political and administrative power. In this way the sense of sharing in the construction and management of the city comes about, with hierarchical and administrative urban planning being replaced by the participative urban project.

The objective of its renewal and sustainability has therefore become clearer, as well as the factors which have contributed thereto – the place, social cohesion and cultural affirmation as a heritage for the future. These days, intervention in physical space has a more ephemeral meaning, as it only takes root and lasts when it is recognised as a memory and heritage and as such is safeguarded by the community. It is bringing the capacity of its utmost transformation to the city’s territory, metamorphosis, with the purpose of its perpetuity and sustainability – maintaining its polarisation – thereby counteracting the sense of its constant growth and consequent marginalisation. In turn, that which is stable within the fabric of the city and thus more memorable, gains greater value it becomes unique and irreplaceable – a space of public appropriation and use. It is the process of reclassifying the city and once again discovering it as the privileged territory of the community.

The EXPO 98 was conceived in this way. Its conception and urbanistic management express it thus.

Lisbon’s identity became based on the luminosity of its atmosphere and its colour in relation to the River Tagus, in the straight-lined pattern of its avenues, in the articulation of the contours of its valleys and hills with the homogenous patterns of its urban fabric contrasting with labyrinthine structures where its attendant, simple buildings exist alongside those of a monumental and unique character.

Today, urbanistic and architectural eclecticism have added the peculiarities of cellular, organic and circumstantial structures to this identity, where the fragmented redevelopment of rural terrain into urban terrain constructs individualised textures and accentuates the disruption.

On the eastern waterfront the physiognomy of the city had transformed it into an expanse of levelled ground salvaged from the river, without scenic or urbanistic identity, behind the road and rail belt. There, the relationship with the river had become mono-functional and the riverfront, associated with the situation of being a barrier between the municipalities of Lisbon and Loures, had evolved into a degraded borderline periphery, an industrial

refuse dump of warehouses, insalubrious and dangerous equipment and infrastructures – a petrol refinery, warehousing of products of the petrol industry, containers and wartime materials, waste water and solid waste treatment plants, a waste land-fill, a municipal abattoir, silted up docks and riverbank abandoned to the dumping of rubbish, waste materials and open sewers.

The Urbanisation of the Parque Expo 98, brought a revaluation of the city’s relationship with the river, a recovery for the environment and the landscape, converting its use, ensuring its integration in the fabric of the city and its participation in its identity - reclassification/recovery/integration/participation - founded on the concept of physical space and its buildings to bring about the 1998 World Exposition.

At the heart of its proposition and its formalisation, the Urbanisation Plan of the Intervention Zone constituted a support strategy which made the reality of these objectives possible.