The pathways of Lisbon metropolization: focusing on residential trajectories

Abstract

Metropolization has been studied essentially through census analysis. Despite its incontestable interest, it presents an ‘interrupted’ portrait of reality that omits the continuous aspect of metropolitan development. Moreover, the focus is placed predominantly on territories and their demographic evolution rather than on households. To overcome these shortcomings, the project ‘Residential Trajectories and Metropolization: Continuities and Changes in Lisbon Metropolitan Area’ focuses on households as the main protagonists of spatial structuring processes. It aims to reconstitute the trajectories of Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA) inhabitants (born between 1945 and 1975) by means of a life course approach. Housing stability is an important finding, but should not be understood as a Portuguese peculiarity. Moreover, it is important to underline the great heterogeneity of each trajectory, both in terms of their protagonists and their meanings. Either within ‘centrifugal’ and ‘province’ trajectories we found four ‘similar’ sub-groups: pioneers, modern families, the established and the socially vulnerable. Their similarities are, however, essentially formal and their distribution is quite different concerning the two trajectories.