Sociologia

This article reflects on the rise of Lisbon as a metropolis. First, it examines how a
public housing programme, Habitações de Renda Económica, was put into practice by a muncipal office, Gabinete Técnico de Habitação. Second it gives an account on how research carried out by that office supported alternative claims on Estado Novo
housing policy in the 1960s. Third, the public housing programe and its urban counterpart, the universe of illegal housing, are put in relation. Perceived in an articulated manner, it is suggested, they contribute to Lisbon’s social and metropolitan history as well as to a sociological analysis of the suburban condition
and experience.

This article analyses the daily gathering of a group of men who meet to play cards on a sidewalk on their neighbourhood. This practice is understood as a pattern of street behaviour, a notion that enables the interpretation of its effects on the public space of the neighbourhood. By reconstituting the emergence and the consolidation of this small social world, an examination of the production of a local social order is carried out. At the end, the public nature of this street pattern is discussed in terms of the ways in which such uses of space and sociable practices change both the social and urban condition of the players.

This article analyzes the effects of urban growth on the suburban experience of Amadora’s residents – Lisbon’s most important suburb in the 1960s and 1970s. It begins by placing Amadora within Lisbon’s suburbanization process, giving then an account of its transformation from an industrial and residential suburb to a suburban city. A close study of newspaper articles published on the national and local press between 1960 and 1974 on Amadora´’s urban life enables the reconstitution of an urban growth crisis, and its interplay with suburbanization, deficient public services provision and local government structures. At the end, a discussion on the relationship between the suburban experience and the urban political economy is made, and a contribution to understand and explain different suburban meanings is offered.

Resumo: Em cinquenta anos, os arredores de Lisboa urbanizaram-se. Pequenos núcleos suburbanos, associados à indústria, à residência e à vilegiatura deram lugar a vastos corredores de expansão e consolidação metropolitana onde uma pluralidade de formas de ocupação, de circulação e de uso hoje se observa. Através da análise à transformação dos padrões de con­centração populacional na aglomeração de Lisboa, este artigo dá conta de como na segunda metade do século XX emergiu e se consolidou uma estrutura de povoamento que em muito contribuiu para a morfogénese da metrópole de Lisboa.

This article analyzes the emergence and institutionalization of Lisbon’s homeownership housing market. At first, it reconstitutes the city’s housing tenure distribution for the second half of the twentieth century, highlighting a structural urban change: in the 1950s and 1960s Lisbon’s city and suburbs were predominantly a renter’s territory that rapidly gave place to a metropolis of homeowners involved in credit operations, in the 1990s and early 2000s.  In the second part of the article a close examination of how legal and financial instruments relating to access to the property have been incorporated in the housing market explains in detail the role of public policy in this process – namely, tax benefits, interest rates, subsidized down payments. The formal financial path to homeownership is contrasted with the alternative and informal ways of homeownership building, based on savings, mutual help and illegal sub-division. In the end, it is suggested that the design of mechanisms to support formal homeownership exerted significant effects on the production and distribution of housing and on Lisbon’s metropolis tenure balance, a significant feature on the social and urban condition of urbanites and suburbanites.

A década de 60 constituiu um período de forte urbanização de Lisboa e dos seus concelhos limítrofes. As zonas de transição entre a frente urbana consolidada, os campos e os antigos núcleos suburbanos foram rápida e intensamente ocupadas por edificado residencial e por populações que quotidianamente se deslocavam a Lisboa para trabalhar, estudar e recrear-se. Neste artigo apreendem-se e interpretam-se duas gamas de descrições dos territórios tidos como dormitórios de Lisboa num arco temporal preciso. A primeira, originária da esfera do Ministério das Obras Públicas, integra o trabalho preparatório à elaboração de um instrumento de planeamento regional – o Plano Director da Região de Lisboa. A segunda é constituída por imagens produzidas e difundidas na imprensa da época. Tais descrições oferecem elementos qualitativos das mudanças sociais e territoriais que a passagem da cidade industrial à metrópole engendra.

This essay takes as a starting point the research conducted by Pierre Bourdieu and collaborators , published under the title “L'Economie de la maison” in the Journal Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales and it focus on the production of single-family homes on the outskirts of Paris. It argues that Bourdieu's perspective contributes to a clearer understanding of  the centrality of the home and the domestic economy in contemporary societies and metropolitan regions; it elucidates in an original manner the power relations and domination effects that impend on the housing transactions situations; it establishes how different categories and classes relate to ownership and investigates the distinct meanings that redress different housing tenures; and finally, by analyzing the administrative field of housing production, Bourdieu’s team charts the positions of public and private agents and institutions on the making and remaking of French housing policy. In the end, it is suggested that Bourdieu’s team contribution is key to discuss the suburban sprawl agents, their economic positions, their strategies and their material and symbolic productions.

In the last three decades, European cities have been showing a new pattern of everyday spatial mobility in which the automobile prevails. This change has been understood as "urban transition" (Wiel, 1999) - a process that like the demographic transition describes and explains long process of change from walking cities to an automobile metropolises. This paper examines this international trend in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Portuguese Census 2001 data show that the majority of home-work commuting had the private automobile as the main daily travel mode. In order to understand and explain how this pattern emerged and consolidated in Lisbon, this paper presents and discusses sociological, historiographic and planning theoretical approaches to urban form and urban mobility and analyses the census statistical data series on commuting (1981-2001). Besides a clearer characterization of Lisbon as a walking city, as a collective transportation agglomeration, and as an automobile metropolis, the paper suggests a closer examination of both land-development processes to apprehend  new urban form proprieties, namely edge-city formation, spatial mismatches, on both jobs and commercial facilities.