Uploaded on 2016-09-17 by Francisco Melo Vergueiro

The most important stocks and flows that, nowadays, operate with more expression in my city are: emerging tourist demand (flows); centralisation, and consequently, densification of restoration and cultural services at historic downtown(stocks); interaction of the users with urban spaces, using social networks, creating and promoting a dense and complex database of information city that flows rapidly in realtime(flows). The historic downtown of Oporto is one of the emerging destinations that is gaining a lot of credebility to the contemporary tourists...that became more demanding with the phenomenon of globalization. The consequence is a continuous, not seasonal, and intense flow of tourists that expresses dynamic quantities that shift in time and place. The second example, is a finding of what was said in one video: "a single stock and flow cannot be isolated from others". The result of the constant flow, of the tourists, was a demand on services and urban functions that support this context. So the strategy was the gradual, and present, requalification to transform an abandoned downtown into a centralised,static, but permeable urban infrastructure (restoration and cultural services) that has the capacity to receive and accommodate this heterogeneous and demanding flows. The third example it was already explained, when it was mentioned. I think the social networks are very usefull tools, to combine and study social and spacial patterns. With the conscience of the growing importance on promoting our city, specially in this dark days of our economy, I think the planners, city councils,etc, have to adopt strategies that are supported on a network/matrix by the premise of combining and analyse the previous stocks and flows. Maybe with this methodology, it´s possible to create standard but resilient typologies of urban functions/patterns that can be applied in others areas, promoting the sustainability of the whole urban system. * The photo selected was downloaded from the Internet, it was not taken by me. The city is Porto, Portugal, and the area is Praça de Lisboa. Thank you. Francisco Melo Vergueiro