Views of domesticity from fascism to democracy: The shifting architectural paradigms of Portuguese public housing, 1969-1982

Abstract

The mass construction of public housing throughout the 20 th -century across Europe had a great impact on the way cities grew. The urban and therefore social impact of housing estates has been thoroughly studied both within and outside the field of Space Syntax. However, decades after the first efforts within the field at deconstructing simplistic claims of deterministic relationships between architectural form and social problems, these continue to be used to justify dismantling public housing programmes and demolishing existing estates. This research searches to counter deterministic arguments by arguing that the architecture of 20 th -century public housing is not a homogeneous paradigm, but rapidly transforming design ideas that translated similarly shifting social views of city, class, and domesticity. The paper focuses on 33 housing projects built in Porto between 1969 and 1982, accompanying deep transformations in Portuguese society, most importantly the shift from dictatorship to democracy in 1974. The results show clear differences at all scales of housing between the different housing programmes implemented during this period that are significant to developing a more complete understanding of the role of 20th century public housing in city-shaping, but also for re-examining the classic syntactic definitions of estates and of the soft and hard solutions.