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Pacheco, Monica & Nascimento, I. (2021). The donkey and the Ferrari: mass housing halfway between the city and suburbia. The case of Quinta das Lavadeiras. Optimistic Suburbia 2.

M. R. Navarro and I. C. Nascimento,  "The donkey and the Ferrari: mass housing halfway between the city and suburbia. The case of Quinta das Lavadeiras", in Optimistic Suburbia 2, lisboa, 2021

@misc{navarro2021_1766650615040,
	author = "Pacheco, Monica and Nascimento, I.",
	title = "The donkey and the Ferrari: mass housing halfway between the city and suburbia. The case of Quinta das Lavadeiras",
	year = "2021",
	howpublished = "Impresso",
	url = "https://www.optimisticsuburbia2.com"
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - The donkey and the Ferrari: mass housing halfway between the city and suburbia. The case of Quinta das Lavadeiras
T2  - Optimistic Suburbia 2
AU  - Pacheco, Monica
AU  - Nascimento, I.
PY  - 2021
CY  - lisboa
UR  - https://www.optimisticsuburbia2.com
AB  - In the mid 1950’s millions of people abandoned rural areas in the interior of the country and came to the Lisbon looking for new and better life conditions. The population growth in peripheral territories around the capital, started to increase exponentially, changing completely its landscape. This resulted in a speculation market around the city fringe for an emergent middle class, ignored by the state, and explored by a developing economic-driven market. The urban pressure was particularly high in the north outskirts, with an enormous impact in the management of pendular traffic flows, despite the Municipality efforts to implement strategies to regulate the city expansion and communications, at the same time that also looked for ways to alleviate the centrality of the city core.
Calçada de Carriche, a lane on a valley connecting the northern part of the city with Loures and Odivelas, was object of a road infrastructure to maximize its urban flow to the maximum that its urban condition between two steeped slopes permitted. By the mid 1960’s a private enterprise that owned the land on the east side of the valley - Quinta das Lavadeiras - developed an urban plan that would be responsible for a major territorial transformation. Together, they would become the popular image of what a city gate should not be: the traffic was never solved, and the urban ensemble embodied one of the greatest evils of postmodernity, the anonymous character of urban life promulgated by mass housing and the “highway”.
In the 1990’s, during the council elections, the socialist party promoted a race between a donkey and a Ferrari in Calçada de Carriche. Despite the populism, the political maneuver highlighted the in-between condition of the place, of its architecture and inhabitants: half-way between suburbia and the city, half-way between social classes, between the rural and the faith in progress, and yet it seems extremely distant of any avant-garde discourses at the time. This paper aims to address the divorce between the theoretical debate and the construction of a counter-architecture promoted by construction companies during the 1960’s, responsible for an important landscape of the city.

ER  -