Obsolete Airports as Regenerative Urban Fields: Agroproductive Land, Circular Construction, and Intergenerational Housing in Lisbon

Airports occupy extensive, specialized territories within metropolitan regions. Where relocation is planned, their future becomes a consequential urban question: how can land organized around aviation support new relationships between dwelling, production and ecological recovery? This paper explores the regenerative urban field as a spatial response, examining Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado Airport as a case of prospective infrastructural obsolescence. Existing post-airfield research has advanced landscape and redevelopment approaches, while the integration of productive land, intergenerational housing and circular construction across scales remains less explored. Two complementary design projects are reanalysed through six analytical layers inferred retrospectively from the completed work. Together, they articulate compact urban blocks and inhabited agricultural clusters within a shared territorial scenario, connecting housing and community spaces with cultivation, material choices and proposed water networks. At building scale, an A1–A3 comparison of selected documented materials under a common inventory boundary indicates approximately 31% lower embodied carbon for the proposed strategy than for the conventional reference. The study contributes an exploratory analytical framework for investigating these relationships across scales. It positions prospective airport transformation as an architectural opportunity to organize habitation, productive landscapes and resource systems together, before redevelopment choices become fixed.