The novel by João Reis A Noiva do Tradutor (2015) narrates in a disorderly flow in the head of an unnamed translator, in a city without explicit reference, somewhere in the interwar period of the 20th century. He presents himself between the precarious and subaltern situation of his writing work and the mocking anger with which he observes the inhabitants and social webs of the city where he lives. It is in this condition that such a character leads us to possible parallels with well-known characters of literary modernity – Bartleby, Wakefield, Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Hunger, by Knut Hamsun, Gregor Samsa – but also to the legacy of several ‘tired functionaries’ of twentieth-century Portuguese literature, such as Pessoa's semi-heteronym in The Book of Disquiet (1982).

É sempre com grande prazer e expectativa que se assiste ao arranque de umanova publicação periódica científica, na área do Planeamento do Território eUrbanismo e, neste caso, em Portugal e em língua portuguesa. A nível nacionaleste tipo de publicações é manifestamente escasso, pelo que esta publicação irácertamente contribuir para colmatar uma clara lacuna do panorama editorialatual. Ao nível internacional as publicações nesta área, como em muitas outras,diga-se, são quase totalmente dominadas pela língua inglesa, desde as mais antigas,ainda com opção em papel, às mais recentes, disponibilizadas exclusivamenteonline. Só por estas razões a presente iniciativa já seria de louvar, masgostaria ainda de destacar outros aspetos que considero muito positivos. (...)

Numa iniciativa inédita, um conjunto de escolas de planeamento territorial ligadas pela suaparticipação na Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) decidiram iniciar umprojeto editorial científico que tem como objetivo promover o debate e divulgação de questõesque alimentem uma agenda de políticas, planos e projetos de ordenamento e desenvolvimentoterritorial, preenchendo um espaço há muito por ocupar. (...)

The title of this new journal - Territory, Planning and Urbanism - theory and practice - contains three words whose meanings oscillate between two extremes: sometimes they seem almost self-explanatory, so familiar to us and o abundant in any common discourse about almost everything; sometimes they easily entangled in such a plurality of unstable, contradictory meanings, manipulations that they seem to be at risk of eminent collapse by too much polysemy and utter lack of clarity. While planning seems inoperative and confusing, adjectives that say nothing, like “sustainable”, “resilient” and other placebos, swarm. Probably the proliferation of vague concepts is due precisely to such inoperability. The state of the art is a huge mess. The reason for this contradiction is partly explained by the fact that no one really wanted to know what happened to the planning and urban planning of the postwar gold years if they had at the same time overwhelmingly changed the logics and socio-technical devices Economic and social organization (and therefore also territorial), the power of the state and the sovereignty that the nation-state had in terms of social regulation (urban planning and urbanism included). Territory, planning or urbanism are very open fields of knowledge, fed by a huge variety of scientific and non-scientific fields, theoretical and applied, from the natural sciences to the social sciences, from politics to common sense. Purely analytical attitudes are mixed here, with prescriptive attitudes where what “must be, may already have completely lost its reason for being so. We have the common evidence that territory is the place where things exist, na-mely in terms of how they are individually and collectively appropriate. The crisis of territory or urbanization (the city is only a literary metaphor) is the crisis of public affairs, of the res publica, and will only be clarified when we can clarify who governs us, with what objectives and, above all, how we want to be governed there Of the closed rhetoric where they place us - markets, competitiveness, globalization, entrepreneurship, nature, the environment... and other words to review or destroy.

Center for some and periphery of many others, Portugal occupies a peculiar place in the production ecologies of contemporary urban knowledge. If, on the one hand, the notion of planning that has been generated here represents the norm from which order is defined in various parts of the world, on the other hand, urban theory reaches us from other places. None of this is surprising. In fact, there are few cases in which the notion of planning is absolutely interior to the empirical reality in which it is applied. However, the trajectories travelled by theory are far from being symmetrical. Concepts are not uniformly distributed and the hierarchical nature of North-South relations plays here a fundamental role. This article tests a postcolonial approach to issues of territory, planning and urbanism in Portugal. Starting from the importance of considering how theory travels, what is at issue here is a "double movement of dislocation and location" similar to that proposed by Manuela Ribeiro Sanches in Deslocalizar a Europa (2005). There is, however, a long way to go and before we can dislocate, we must uproot. This article intends to establish starting points for reinterpreting the forms of urban knowledge that is produced here, probing its epistemological certainties and calling into question its geographical and disciplinary horizons. The objective is, in other words, to lay foundations for many theoretical journeys "through the interstices of cultures, nations and disciplines" (Ribeiro Sanches 2005: 8). In doing so, three short itineraries are pursued: the first course will follow postcolonial studies, the second route will trace some of the Portuguese inflections to postcolonial thought, and the third trajectory will track the impact of postcolonialism in the urban and planning disciplines at the international level. These three itineraries will then lead to an analysis of knowledge about territory, planning and urbanism in the Portuguese context. By examining the theoretical proposals of João Ferrão and Álvaro Domingues, two authors who recurrently question the dominant core of planning in Portugal, this article intends to illustrate how rooted the colonial imagination is in our territory, planning and urbanism. Here too there is much to decolonize. Here too we must encourage new ways of interpreting, understanding, and teaching the past and the present.

Through the importance given to the problems of method and praxis by three XXth century philosophers (Sartre, Lefebvre and Popper) we try to find, in influential actors in the urbanization field (Hipodamus, Manuel da Maia, Nash, Haussmann, L’Enfant, Cerdá) as well as in their works, the importance of methological issues and how these questions are handled by these urbanizers/authors. The development of this theme in other instances in this same sector, covering the contemporary works as well, is left untouched, as is the treatment of this question in the context of project work (urban and architectural) and their teaching (this latter being the ultimate goal!) We will come back to this matter in some other opportunity.

For more than a century, the street has been the scene of successive trials, directed not only to its own physical structure but also to the relationships it establishes with the surrounding buildings and spaces. The great turning for a new model of street occurs in the XX century with the modern postulates - CIAM -, which, in one way or another, deprived the street of its traditional and civic function, charging it with overloads driven by the motorization that led to its social disruption. But it was in the street (and in the square) that citizens’ movement and life were institutionalized. In this article we retake the narrative of the traditional street importance, as a privileged place of interaction and citizenship, in the light of its intrinsic urban qualities, such as scale containment, meeting-place notion, social and civic interaction, image and symbology, security and comfort, among others. At the same time, one emphasizes its capacity to perpetuate, even today, in the contemporary city, the urban qualities indispensable not only to match the inclusive civic life, but also the cultural capital imbued in the tradition of the harmonious principles of composition of spaces, probably an equilibrium factor between the confrontation of morphological diversity and the complexity of recent urban structures.

The article discusses the process of financialization of the city, associated with the liberalization of the circulation of capital and the deregulation of the financial system since the 1980s. The contrary in the real estate sector causes changes in the structure of the city, through: urban regeneration mega-projects, occasional urban regeneration operations, intensive urbanization and its extension, privatization or the contractualization of social reproduction functions. Interventions, focused on the rapid accumulation of capital gains, accentuate socio-spatial segregation. Portugal is particularly influenced by the logics of neoliberal urban development. Underpinned by territorial planning and other sectoral public policies (in particular the massive infrastructure of the territory and the policy of home ownership), urban growth is supported by extensive expansion and urban regeneration operations, along with the degradation and abandonment of housing in consolidated urban areas (with underutilization of infrastructures and an increase in empty housing). Capital reproduction takes place in three ways: the classification and qualification of the soil on which the zoning is based, the policy to support home ownership and massive public infrastructure financed by structural funds. The persistence of this model, increasingly disconnected from local socio-economic dynamics, generates a supply of urban land, infrastructure networks and housing far greater than effective demand. The crisis that began in 2008, indissociable from "real estate bubbles", emphasizes the over-sizing of the urban and the problems associated with housing credit (banks have lost liquidity, many debtors are forced to give up their property through foreclosures). The excess of urban areas, the scarcity of public resources and the expected demographic decline for the coming decades require a rethinking of urban planning. Traditionally geared to working in contexts of demographic and economic growth, it now has to act in a restrictive framework and manage "urban waste". The paradigm changes are necessary, and some priority lines of action are pointed out.

Spatial planning is a methodological and procedural approach to implement public policies, not only through land use control but also through the preservation of land environmental values, having in mind public interest and inter-generation solidarity. Among the environmental values of land, water plays a critical role to sustain human activities and structural environmental functions. The planning instruments, spatial andsector wise, and their cross-sectoral articulation play a decisive role in the configuration of priorities, principles and decision-making processes for the territory-water nexus. This article develops a critical discussion on how the articulation between the spatial planning and the water resources planning systemshas been encouraged in Portugal. For this purpose, the most relevant concepts are reviewed, the Portuguese fundamental legislative framework is analysed and five problems and related challenges on the articulation of the water-territory planning systems are discussed, based on the results of recent research projects.The paper concludes with a prospective reflection questioning whether the recent regulatory instruments have brought a new impetus to the role of territorial planning for the protection of water resources or whether new efforts should be considered to enrich the dominant praxis.