Affordable 20th century housing in Porto. The transformation processes under scope (original) (raw)
Related papers
Challenges
Stable access to affordable quality housing is a core feature of public health principles and practices. In this report, we provide an update on the research project “Mapping Public Housing: A Critical Review of the State-subsidised Residential Architecture in Portugal (1910–1974)” (MdH), developed between 2016 and 2019 at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP) in Portugal. This funded research project (PTDC/CPC-HAT/1688/2014) brought together an international and multidisciplinary team composed of architects, sociologists, historians, an economist, an anthropologist, information scientists and archivists, from different academic levels (senior researchers, postdoctoral, PhD and Master’s degree students), adopting a variety of approaches and operating in a range of different contexts. The aim of the research undertaken was to investigate the reality of social and state-subsidised housing in terms of its architecture, while, at the same time, seeking to broaden...
The construction of social housing complexes in Portugal during the Estado Novo (1933-1974)
IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 2019
This paper focuses on the urban growth experienced in the third quarter of the 20th century due to the generalized deficit of housing in Portugal —by the transfer of population from rural to urban areas— and which characterized European cities mainly during the last century. This period was marked by great growth of cities and, therefore, one of the most considerable architectural and urban production in recent urban history. Following modern city's precepts of the Charter of Athens (1933), Housing in Portugal shares many of the morphological and typological characteristics with the rest of Europe. However, housing policies developed in Portugal during the dictatorship of Salazar (1933-1968) and Caetano (1968-1974) —within a socio-political context marked by a strong control of the State— caused Portuguese cities to introduce certain peculiarities in their development. In this sense, the research has sought to address the general context —social, economic and political— that conditioned the construction of these urban complexes during the so-called Estado Novo (1933-1974) in Portugal. This contextualization framework on construction of social housing has been mainly built through an analysis of housing legislation approved in those years. The research has also required an important bibliography search for references to articulate the knowledge generated by other researchers. Likewise, statistical data of construction and housing elaborated by the National Institute of Statistics of Portugal have been consulted. Based on this information, the research has detected two political facts of clear influence in terms of social housing. On one hand, the end of the Second World War brought along industrial growth for some regions of the country, which became important centres of population attraction at the beginning of the 50s. The pace of industrialization accelerated in the big cities and with it the migratory dynamics from the countryside to the city. In this context, Estado Novo had to rethink the policy on housing, planning large-scale housing construction through development plans. On the other hand, Marcello Caetano's Government, who was appointed the new head of government in 1968, tried to solve the problems of overcrowding that resulted from previous housing policy. This translates into an attempt to institutionalize and rationalize housing policy through the creation, in 1969, of the Fundo de Fomento da Habitação. It was sought to centralize the different public initiatives related to housing in a unique structure. It can be said that this period corresponds, in the sphere of housing and urban planning, to a transition for the policies that would develop after the Carnation Revolution in 1974.
Public Housing Renovation in Porto: Typology versus Occupancy Density
2012
In the 1950s a ten-year municipal plan (and its subsequent five-year extension) set off the construction of many public housing complexes in Porto to solve the need for housing, as industrialization phenomena had caused relevant migration to cities. These housing settlements (near half of the current total public housing in Porto), despite their careful urban design, do not present nowadays satisfactory quality level (constructive, but also architectural and residential), failing to comply with some of the present regulations and living standard expectations (e.g. dwellings reduced area). In the last few years, some of these residential units have been renovated. One reference case is presented, a 1953 municipal housing in Porto presently under renovation, illustrating the urban regeneration that may result if deeper housing refurbishment is contemplated on a municipal strategy, without necessarily a much higher investment. Original dwelling typologies (with very limited area) are m...
Large-scale housing projects in Lisbon: Olivais and Telheiras
TOSTÕES, Ana, FERREIRA, Zara, "Large-scale housing projects in Lisbon: Olivais and Telheiras", Docomomo Journal, 65 - Housing for All, Docomomo International, Lisbon, 2021
The neighborhoods of Olivais Norte (1960), Olivais Sul (1963) and Telheiras Sul (1974) are paradigmatic examples of the Portuguese State's response to the housing shortage that was acknowledged in Lisbon, in the period of the post-wwii. Featuring a varied catalogue of architectural trends, this series of projects demonstrated extensive structural, formal, and spatial experimentation that revealed the concerns and quest by their designers to respond to the need for "housing for the greatest number". What all three projects shared was that they were large scale, publicly financed, started out with similar programs, and that various architectural teams were involved in each of them. The fact that they succeeded one another chronologically enables a critical reading to be made of the evolving interpretation of the Modern Movement in Lisbon, and the pursuit of modernity as an attitude that valued universality, rationality, and a fair response to new social orders. See full contents at: https://www.docomomo.com/articles/essays/large-scale-housing-projects-in-lisbon-olivais-and-telheiras
2013
During the year of 1976 there was an unprecedented interest of the international architectural media in Portuguese architecture, which up until that year, had been seldom published abroad. The reason for this sudden interest of the architectural milieu in Portugal was the works produced under the aegis of the so-called SAAL process, an ephemeral housing programme created in the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution of 25 April 1974. Among the projects featured, the architectural media showed a special interest in the SAAL operations developed in the city of Porto, where the work of Alvaro Siza, among others, arguably epitomized a novel approach to urban renewal. What was, then, so appealing in these works? What was the aspect or the reasons that triggered this unforeseen interest in Portuguese architecture? The answer, I would argue, is relatively straightforward and entails the concatenation of three factors: revolution, grassroots movements, and participatory processes in archite...
13th International Space Syntax Symposium, 2022
This paper explores the role of women’s struggle within residents’ movements in the production and transformation of space in Porto during the PREC (the Portuguese Revolutionary Process of 1974-1976), analysing the spaces where these movements started, the issues they focused on, and how it related and acted within explicit and implicit views of family and gender relations in institutional approaches to housing development. It also considers how these were mirrored in housing policy options and design paradigms. In this way, by shifting the focus to women’s struggle at the grassroots, looking at those who were both the recipients of houses and actors of an ongoing struggle, this research explores the intersection between class and gender in the processes of housing and urban development.
2012
By understanding social housing as State promotion, this article proposes to present a comparative study between federal housing policies in Brazil, particularly during 1964-1986 (through BNH/COHAB) and since 1999 (through CEF/PAR – Programa de Arrendamento Residencial)1. The study has as object the components of urban and architectural design and the public management in housing policies. The research universe is the state of São Paulo, at municipalities in which COHAB was created in the 1960’s. Today three of them are centers of metropolitan areas (São Paulo, 1973; Santos, 1996; Campinas, 2002), and two of them (Ribeirão Preto and Bauru) are centers of administrative areas. The study is based on mapping housing ventures promoted in two phases: (1) from 1964, when the national planning system was rearranged, inside the housing finance system (SFH) with centralized State management, resources managed by Banco Nacional de Habitação (BNH) through Companhias de Habitação (COHAB)2, unti...
Public housing as urban heritage: experience and research approach in Spain
Conservar Património, 2022
International conservation policies have incorporated the urban dimension of heritage, which considers the city as a historical continuum connected with the territory. However, the social housing complexes built in Europe throughout the second half of the 20th century lack legal entities and tools for their protection. Urban rehabilitation policies have substituted the initial demolition-replacement processes, by way of combining and coordinating protective measures. The rehabilitation of the Caño Roto Housing Estate (Madrid 1994-2004), as a precursor of a type of intervention widespread in Spain, is analysed with the aim of finding the actors, tools and decisions, so that the model can be optimised in future operations. The heritage dimension involves the development of the necessary means to make possible the conservation and functional updating of the buildings, as well as the development of new cultural, socioeconomic and environmental values, in order to add sustainability to the urban environment.