Planning with infrastructures in the face of austerity: new opportunities in the portuguese planning system

Abstract About fifteen years after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), land-use planning practices remain largely unchanged worldwide, even in regions affected by austerity and reduced public spending. Moreover, critical research on crisis, austerity, and urban dynamics often overlooks land-use planning, creating a disconnect from planners’ everyday realities. This is particularly relevant in areas undergoing extended urbanisation, such as Portugal. The austerity measures triggered by the GFC in Portugal exposed significant shortcomings in its spatial planning system, including its rigidity and inability to adapt to socio-spatial contexts marked by dispersed urbanisation alongside demographic and economic decline. Using action-research methodologies, this study explored opportunities arising from the crisis and developed a procedural tool, Infrastructures vs Building (IvB), which leverages infrastructure as a reference point for land-use planning. IvB strengthens Portugal’s planning system by challenging expansionist urban paradigms and providing quantified infrastructure data for land-use classification. Beyond diagnosis, IvB offers a practical framework for integrating infrastructure networks into land-use planning, with relevance for Portugal and other contexts.