The discipline of architecture, when dealing with Public Works associated with colonialism and territorial occupation, still focuses on the analysis of the constitution of the design teams, of the colonial Public Works offices, of the architects and engineers themselves. This focus on the “designing elite” misses a critical input to these Public Works, namely the Labour force responsible for realising these structures. As such, critical questions about the labour force engaged in the spatialization of architectural plans are still missing: who were those workers? What ethnic groups did they come from? How did they emerge in contingents that could aggregate a few thousand individuals? What was their recruitment like? What expectations did they have? How were they paid? What training did they receive? What repercussions did these (mostly compulsive) work experiences have? What conflicts did they provoke in colonial societies? How did they resist recruitment? How did they collaborate? How to deal with this legacy? In answer, ArchLabour will develop a new theoretical framework for assessing mass labour in order to shine a spotlight on these invisible workers, thus establishing a connection between historical subalternity and the inequality that still haunts communities inheriting this past. Through the study of the diverse colonial experiences of the African countries that have Portuguese as one of their official languages (Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Principe, Angola and Mozambique), and covering a wide period from the modern colonization that begins after the Berlin Conference through the industrial capitalism’s exploitation praxis up to the years immediately following African independence, the project will cross the history of colonial architecture and the subject of Labour, with the history of Science applied to construction and post-colonial studies in architecture.

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...

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.