The Marvila Masterplan by MVRDV and OODA reworks a 28-hectare post-industrial territory on Lisbon’s eastern riverfront into a mixed-use urban district organized around landscape, mobility, and phased public spaces. The proposal introduces approximately 1,400 homes, public facilities, commerce, and ecological infrastructure while using existing rail lines, heritage fragments, and topographic discontinuities as the basis for a renewed urban framework.
Marvila Masterplan Technical Information
- ArchitectsMVRDV, OODA
- LocationMarvila and Beato, Lisbon, Portugal
- Gross Area278,896 m2 | 3,002,010 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2022 – Ongoing
- Visuals© OODA
Marvila has long been defined by the infrastructure that divides it into pieces. This plan turns those barriers into connections, using landscape and public space to reconnect the neighbourhoods with each other, with the city, and with the river.
– Jacob van Rijs, MVRDV
Urban Repair on the Eastern Lisbon Riverfront
The Marvila Masterplan addresses a large residual area between Marvila and Beato, an area whose current condition results from successive urban and infrastructural transformations. Once agricultural land associated with Lisbon estates, the site later absorbed industrial uses, railway corridors, warehouses, silos, and service infrastructure. These layers produced a fragmented urban field with limited access to the River Tagus, despite its strategic position between the historic center and the eastern expansion around Parque das Nacoes.
MVRDV and OODA approach the site less as a blank redevelopment parcel than as a damaged section of the city requiring connective repair. Rail lines, future bridge structures, changes in level, and obsolete industrial elements are not erased from the project narrative. They become conditions around which new routes, landscape corridors, and public spaces are organized. This strategy is relevant in Lisbon, where infrastructure has often reinforced separations between hillside neighborhoods and the waterfront.
Existing structures and landscape elements are used as anchors within the new urban fabric. The Convento do Beato, industrial chimneys, historic walls, and a mature rubber tree are positioned as spatial and cultural reference points rather than isolated relics. Their role is not limited to preservation. They help establish orientation, scale, and memory within a development that will otherwise introduce substantial new density.
Four Clusters and a Distributed Urban Identity
The plan is structured around four clusters: Acucar, POLU, Beato, and Madre Deus. Each is conceived in relation to adjacent neighborhoods, allowing the masterplan to avoid a single repetitive urban diagram across the entire 28-hectare site. This distributed identity gives the project a more adaptable structure, with each area responding to distinct topographic, access, heritage, and surrounding building-scale conditions.
The massing strategy relies on variation rather than uniformity. Courtyard blocks, open-perimeter blocks, towers, and lower infill buildings are combined to mediate between the existing residential fabric and areas of higher density. In the visual material, the Madre Deus cluster includes sharply folded white residential volumes, while other areas use stepped low-rise blocks, mid-rise housing, and taller structures near transport nodes. This range of types suggests an attempt to absorb density without imposing a single metropolitan scale across the entire site.
The program combines approximately 1,400 homes, including affordable and social housing, with retail, services, a day center, a care home, and civic uses. This mix is significant because the future district cannot function only as a housing enclave. Its success will depend on the distribution of daily amenities, ground-floor activity, and public facilities across the clusters, particularly during the long construction period implied by a project of this scale.
Landscape as Connective Infrastructure
Landscape serves as the principal organizing system of the master plan. A central park links the four clusters through a sequence of squares, courtyards, planted corridors, cycle routes, and pedestrian paths. Rather than treating open space as residual land between parcels, the proposal gives it an infrastructural role, using it to connect different levels, absorb movement, and create a legible public framework before the full build-out is complete.
The environmental strategy includes water retention areas, infiltration zones, drought-resistant planting, and habitats for local species. These measures respond to the climatic pressures facing Mediterranean cities, where heat, water scarcity, and intense rainfall events require public landscapes to perform beyond recreation. The project frames green space as a system for cooling, drainage, biodiversity, and social use, although its long-term performance will depend on maintenance, soil depth, and the degree to which ecological zones are protected from over-programming.
Phasing is also embedded in the landscape concept. Each development stage is intended to include public space and green infrastructure, allowing parts of the site to remain accessible while construction progresses elsewhere. This is a critical planning decision for a regeneration area of this size. Without early public realm investment, large masterplans often remain fenced development islands for years, delaying the urban benefits they claim to deliver.
Mobility, Public Realm, and Infrastructural Mediation
One of the central infrastructural interventions is the proposed deck over the Northern Line railway. By covering part of the tracks, the plan seeks to repair a long-standing barrier between Chelas station, the neighborhoods inland, and the waterfront. The deck is conceived not only as a technical crossing but as a public promenade, with planted edges, viewpoints toward the Tagus, and direct connections into the broader park system.
The mobility strategy prioritizes walking, cycling, and public transport through a reorganized road network and dedicated routes across the site. A new Marvila station building is intended to strengthen the relationship between the district and Lisbon’s transport infrastructure, while red cycle paths and shaded pedestrian corridors appear consistently in the visualizations. Streets such as Estrada de Marvila are presented less as traffic channels than as civic spaces, with tree planting, active ground floors, and generous pedestrian surfaces.
The proposal also anticipates the future Third Tagus Crossing, a major piece of infrastructure that will pass through the area. Rather than ignoring its impact, the master plan introduces green buffers and partial coverings to reduce the spatial disruption caused by bridge structures. This mediation between metropolitan infrastructure and local public realm will be one of the project’s most demanding tests, since the success of the plan depends on making large-scale connectivity compatible with everyday urban life.
About MVRDV
MVRDV is a Rotterdam-based architecture and urbanism practice founded in 1993 by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries. The studio is known for research-driven urban regeneration projects and bold formal experimentation across housing, public space, and city planning.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Thornton Tomasetti. Team: Daniel Bosia, Liz Dubay, Duncan Cox, Jeroen Janssen, Julie Pietzrak, Jacqueline Lu, Barbara Gao, Nico Azel.
- Landscape designers: LOLA Landscape Architects. Partner in charge: Peter Veenstra. Design team: Simon Verbeeck, Victor Hugo Faustino, Silke Volkert, Lucio Fiorentino, Nastya Vashchenko, Boya Zhou, Martin Garcia Perez.
- Client: 1875 FINANCE.
- Other contributors: Project Coordination: PFXCO. Developed in coordination with Lisbon City Council and Infraestruturas de Portugal.
