Mercado Abastecedor do Porto

The MAP is currently one of the working engines of the city. Twenty pavilions spread across roughly eleven hectares handle around 110,000 tonnes of fresh produce a year and see more than 45,000 vehicles pass through every month, supplying food retailers across the whole of northern Portugal. Porto’s Municipal Master Plan already anticipates the market moving elsewhere, freeing the land for a district built around services, retail and public space rather than logistics. That relocation is the starting condition to remake this part of the city, aligning it with the broader regeneration already underway across eastern Porto.

The MAP project starts from what’s worth keeping. Fields and grassland that survived Campanhã’s slow, patchy urbanisation are unusual for a site this close to the city centre, and the plan treats them as ecological infrastructure to design around, with potential to work as a model for how other parts of Porto handle green space. Local streets and crossings around the site are reworked for pedestrians and cycling as much as for vehicles, addressing the disconnect between Campanhã’s strong regional links and its weak internal ones. Programme is spread across the day and the week rather than concentrated in one use, mixing retail, public space and the kind of everyday services the current working-class population needs and currently has to travel elsewhere for. None of this treats the site’s history as something to build over; the aim is a district that keeps faith with what Campanhã already is, a productive, lived-in part of the city, while giving it the park, the public space and the local connections it has never really had.

Campanhã has been reshaped by outside forces before. It began as farmland supplying the city, then industrialised fast once the railway and Campanhã Station arrived in the nineteenth century, bringing factories, workshops and workers’ housing with them. The 1950s and 60s added large-scale social housing, and the VCI motorway pushed the area further to the margins of the city rather than pulling it in. The wholesale market itself was built in the late 1980s, after Portugal joined the EEC, as a way of modernising food distribution. Each layer left something behind: agricultural fields and low grassland that never got built over, a working population that has lived here across several of these transformations, and a place still well-connected outward by rail and bus but poorly stitched into its own neighbourhood.