City Memory – Luca Sabbadini

City Memory
with COOP-Architecture

Family run businesses are closing, permanent residents must flee and go to live to the suburbs, this is a fact that we cannot change in the modern times of AirBnb, Ryanair and fast-growing economical niches. How can architecture preserve history and collective memory?
In the world we live in, we see a huge development in local accommodation for attracting the fast visiting foreigners, that is in fact a great opportunity for a small quantity of citizens. For the rest of the citizens of European cities, this means an eternal search of a liveable accommodation for the residents and their families and for the local shops their end.

Using “Virtual-Reality” we show the visitor the spaces of a recent case of gentrification in Porto, where the owner of a building will refunction all the apartments to hotel-rooms and needs the space of the traditional restaurant named Cunha to offer breakfast, to the fast visiting guests. This restaurant was projected by Victor Palla and Bento d´Almeida in the early 70´s and has cultural, architectural and historical value for the citizens of Porto. Besides this place is an example of the modernization and of the new forms of inhabiting and consuming in the cities.