What about housing? (today). Un viaggio tipologico nella recente produzione di edilizia residenziale sociale in Portogallo

Throughout the whole 20th Century, the urban issue is inextricably interwoven with the architectural research about new residential models. From the early formulations of the Utopist Socialists to the siedlungen of social-democratic Germany, from Le Corbusier and Russian Constructivists' projects to the new paradigms of the urban Dutch regeneration, the studies which were carried out around the typological and distributive aspects of housing propose and interpret new living ways, reflecting at the same time specific ideas for the city. In the latest years, it seems that the residential question has been once again playing a central role in the articulation of the political discourse about city building. The discipline deals again with collective housing, bringing back to the heart of the debate an issue which was abandoned at the end of the 20th Century. The main approach oscillates in most cases between extolling the idea of environmental sustainability – identifying social housing as a privileged field for technological experimentation – and a political and programmatic approach concerning the opportunities that building development itself offers in terms of reactivation of economic cycles of production. From a strictly architectural perspective, typological-distributive aspects are rarely addressed, being the research about the ways of living the domestic and public spaces more often subordinated to romantic and evocative considerations about a communitarian and pre-urban life. This approximation is not surprising, given that the production of the last thirty years is consistent with a neoliberal model of privatization typical of the 80s and 90s which, coupled with the crisis of modern project, mechanically reproduces trivialized and stereotyped models of housing and urban living. If what we just said gives a general idea about the drift of the inevitable supremacy of speculation on disciplinary practice, this assumption represents only a superficial step and prompts us to further investigate the current state of architectural research on housing. The present study, proposes a systematic analysis of recent Portuguese housing production. It could be defined as an attempt to identify recurring and innovative models for defining space, retrieving a scientific knowledge which can offer operational tools for the project