There are professions such as architecture where, despite all what women have achieved, a male hegemony persists and is not very permeable to gender revolutions. This exploratory project aims to identify and describe the struggle of women architects in Portuguese-speaking Africa for career recognition and representation as a consequence of the inequalities inherited from the colonial past. Unanswered research questions have been raised: Who were the women architects working in the former Portuguese colonial territories in Africa? What was their ethnic origin? What was their professional and educational background? What were their struggles for professional recognition? With the independence of these new countries, what roles did these women arch assume? The project seeks to fill a gap in the history of the African countries colonized by the Portuguese – Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, S. Tomé and Príncipe, Angola, and Mozambique – by approaching the condition of the precursor women architects understood as the first professionals to work in these territories. The offer of work during colonial rule was limited to the Colonial Public Works (CPW) and family offices. The transition to independence would bring novelties, such as cooperation programs and the reform of public services. The research will consider these changes in the profession and architectural culture, questioning how women survived and emerged in conditions of extreme labour vulnerability, however sometimes imposing themselves by the lack of technicians. The project will note 2 historical periods: 1953-1974, defined by late colonialism (from the arrival of the first woman architect in Africa, until the African independence); 1975-1985, characterized as the post-independence period (starting from the government transition, until the first woman graduated from the first architecture course at the Agostinho Neto University, Angola). Different types of careers will be addressed in this chronological plot: self-em...

UrbanoScenes sets out to explore, through a post-colonial epistemological lens, the construction, reproduction and contestation of imaginaries of urbanisation—focusing on Portugal, Angola and their transnational relations. It does so by focusing on how the society/nature dichotomy—and its derivatives, eg colony/metropolis, urban/rural, human/technology, modern/pre-modern, development/underdevelopment, North/South—informs dominant imaginaries and (re)produce socio-spatial relations of power. The working hypothesis being that the forms of (structural, cultural, state) violence/injustice that are inherent to global urbanisation are legitimised, reproduced and justified by the normative framing provided by such imaginaries, UrbanoScenes investigates alternative imaginaries co-existing with dominant ones.

What was the role of Architecture supporting Portuguese colonialism during the colonial war (1961-74)? Starting from the scarce bibliography that questions Architecture, Colonialism and War (He17;He18), but also pondering the interplay between Violence and Colonialism (LuMo14), the research focuses on the production of Housing during the liberation wars in the former Portuguese C ontinental Africa, and its repercussions in the immediate post-independence of Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique. It entails 2 phases: 1)assessment of the housing production carried out in the last 14 years of colonialism (and late Salazarism), considering the colonial society and the 3 agents of Colonial Public Works (C PW) involved, through archival and documentary treatment, cartography and historical description; 2)its identification and critical analysis in the immediate period of 1974/75 (abandonment, reconfiguration, appropriation) and its contribution to inequality in access and housing quality (plastic, technical, functional) by post-independence societies. The research explores the role of war in the emergence of control mechanisms based on Architecture and Urbanism, taking housing as epicentral. It observes 3 scenarios: a) Middle-class and affordable urban expansion neighborhoods, built over slums, to lodge and control populations; b) Settlements located in strategic economic areas; c) Rural resettlements resulting from the massive displacement of African peasants. A continuous reading between colonization and post-independence will be traced, relating the current right to housing with the different residential infrastructures inherited from the colonial period. In the 1st phase, the study considers 3 groups of inhabitants involved in colonial narratives: a) European settlers; b) Assimilados; c) African populations. It analyzes urban and rural landscapes and identifies the 3 main colonial agents: a)Self-employed Architects, in urban environments, using the architectural cultur...

The main challenge of this Cost Action is to create a transnational network that gathers European researchers carrying studies on Middle-Class Mass Housing (MCMH) built in Europe since the 1950s. This network will allow the development new scientific approaches by discussing, testing and assessing case studies and their different methodologies and perspectives. MCMH has been generally underestimated in urban and architectural studies and there is still a lack of comparative analysis and global perspectives. The number of transnational publications and scientific meetings has also been scarce. By crossing different approaches focus on Architecture, Urbanism, Planning, Public Policies, History, Sociology new concepts and methodologies will arise. Therefore, the Action aims to produce a wider understanding of MCMH sprawl, deepening on-going researches and focusing on the existing case studies. The current methodologies, surveys, catalogue and contextualization allow an initial mapping of relevant case studies, their diverse degrees of resilience and how they have been adapted to current (urban and social) conditions. It is intended to develop the knowledge of the interaction between spatial forms, behaviours and satisfaction and to combine methodologies of architectural and social analyses. The Action will be developed by three Working Groups, coordinated by a Core Group: Documenting the MCMH; Development of a specific set of (new) concepts for MCMH analyses; Leverage contemporary architecture interventions and Public Policies. In the Action will be involved researchers related to Mass Housing, MCMH Architecture and Urbanism, Planning and Public Policies, Sociological studies, Architecture History and Modern Heritage.

The goal of the project is to carry out a compared analysis of Middle Class Mass Housing (MCMH) in Europe, Africa and Asia, introducing new case studies to deepen the existing research, made with successfully tested methodologies: survey, catalogue and contextualization of housing complexes built between the 1950s and the 1980s in Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Angola and China. It is intended to identify the existing housing and urban models and to map the changes after 50 years of use in order to understand how they have adapted to current (urban and social) conditions, and to support future actions. The case studies are located in the peripheries of Milan, Antwerp, Lisbon, Luanda and Macao, in areas that they helped to consolidate, and were selected by: 1) scale; 2) number of inhabitants; 3) accessibility; 4) urban and architectural quality. Based on on-going national studies, a cross-reading that reflects the expansion of cities in the context of demographic growth after WWII is proposed. The impact of residential models developed by architects in European contexts will be analysed, and also their transposition to territories formerly under colonial rule. The studies that analyse the transcontinental housing panorama under an architectural and sociological perspective are confined to some regional cases, not assuring a more global vision that includes: 1) the historical description of the physical evolution of the dwelling, the building and the neighbourhood; 2) the survey and analysis of their inhabitants' profile. We want to assess the resilience of these complexes, including testing and proposing ways to prolong its life by updating the functional organization of the apartments, by renewing the infrastructures and building systems and by outlining the profile of its residents. Special attention will be given to the way of promotion (public or private) and its effect on the profile of the current inhabitants (pioneer, recent, immigrant). The neighbourhoods are char...

Objectives 1) the analysis of the infrastructural process from the mapping of 3 specific typologies of colonial Public Works (PW), which will be addressed in the perspective of its archival, documental and cartographic processing, and of its historiographical description?  2) the identification and critical analysis of the state of these infrastructures (reuse, strengthening or decay), after the 1975 independences. The research is based on the hypothesis that the colonial territorial infrastructure leave resilient marks in the postcolonial built environment, and that this impact should be analyzed in such a way as to support future actions. The Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino owns an essential part of the document collection concerning the colonial PW of the 19th and 20th centuries. The archival processing, cataloguing and description will be a responsibility of the project, making them available to the scientific community. After the mapping, recurring to specialized cartography, all the documentation will be gathered, and casestudies will be selected, based on specific criteria (strategic relevance, scale, impact in the built environment). Its detailed and historical description follows, in order to create inventory records in the web platform HPIP of FCG and referencing in the GIS, together with the verification of the conservation state and with the surveying of the postindependence interventions.

The research aims to survey, catalogue and contextualize housing projects in Lisbon, Luanda and Macao, built between the 1960s and the 1980s, which stood out for large scale occupation and high number of people housed. It is intended to identify the existing housing and urban models and to map the changes after 40 years of use in order to understand how to adapt to current conditions (urban and social) and to support its future.Methodology: Initially it begins with a detailed description and historical process, creating records of inventory, referenced to the Geographic Information System, and the redrawing of projects (for comparative analyses of the urban design and of the housing cell unit). It follows a visit to the complexes to verify its conservation state, experiencing the urban situation and describing the profile evolution of current populations. Questionnaires will be released for occupation and social satisfaction reporting (district/dwelling). Qualitative interviews to deep-rooted groups (social and cultural groups of belonging) will allow evaluating the integration in the city. The visits will be recorded on video for "future memory" and a documentary (three 30 minutes short-films) will be produced. In the last year, workshops will be implemented with the communities, involving architects, students, residents and local institutions, proposing architectural interventions based on historical and social analysis and in the Portuguese tradition of participatory architecture.

This study aimed to inventory, catalog and analyze the work of sucessive Offices that belonged to the structures of the Ministries of the Colonies and later of the Overseas (henceforth designated overseas ministries) and that were responsible for the architectural project is part of a more comprehensive study about the city and architecture produced in the former colonial territories, the aim of which is to further the knowledge of the intellectual and constructed heritage generated by the Portuguese and to make it available to the public at large by means of an on line consultation system.