3 - Death and Life of large housing complexes. Appropriations, uses and identities

Isabel Guerra | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL

Sandra Marques Pereira | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL

Débora Félix  |  Investigadora LLM

 

From the mid-twentieth century onwards, the suburban neighbourhoods had as first recipient a middle-class whose aspiration was related to a modern dwelling and to a new, forward-looking lifestyle outside the traditional city and marked by technological progress. Often described in a pejorative way due to its residential monofunctionality, anonymity and isolation of the private space – the house – in relation to the public space, these neighbourhoods originate a series of questions following these premises:

 

3.1. What is the correspondence between the proposals of these modern housing models and the effective lifestyles of its residents?

3.2. In what way the architectonic modernity and the cosmopolitanism interacted with formal and/or informal aspects of local identity and with broader aspects concerning new public policies and new urban identities?

3.3. What was the impact of the physical space in the structuring of the ways of life and how the diversity of the successive occupations was reflected in the maintenance or alteration of that spaces, given their later exposure to very diverse uses and social / cultural contexts?

3.4. In what way the construction of neighbourhoods in non-European geographical contexts, with very diverse occupations in what concerns to the ethnic, religious, social and cultural origin of its dwellers, is related to its "success" or "failure", both in social and economic terms.

3.5. How was the coexistence between the initial cosmopolitanism of these neighbourhoods and elements of local belonging, and how phenomena of identity, indifference or anonymity emerged?