This presentation focus in the analysis of specific urban facilities, object of our study, the collectivities and churches of the neighborhoods Encarnação and Caselas, in Lisbon, built under the affordable housing Program Casas Económicas promoted by Estado Novo, in the 1950s. The main sources of research are the unpublished documents located at the archives of Forte de Sacavém and IHRU, in Lisbon. The adopted methodology involved the orga- nization and a chronological analysis of data, local visits, interviews and morphological analysis. We thus intend to unveil the aspects that intersect official initiatives, strongly informed by the political strategies of social control and the associative movements that have preceded those initiatives. Our research has allowed to witness the convergence of two specific “needs”, the collective and the political, in the situation that will give rise to the material formalization, including buildings, outdoor spaces, fixed and mobile equipment. The collectivities, which can be found everywhere throughout the country, emerged in urban areas with a strong incidence of uprooted populations, to surpass collective needs, embodied through associations promoting activities of common interest, capable of bringing people together and creating a community. For the collectivities in focus, stands out the role played by FNAT (the ‘National Founda- tion for the happiness at work’, nowadays renamed as INATEL Foundation, an institution created by the regime to regulate popular recreational, cultural and sporting initiatives, which will also be responsible for those neighborhoods of affordable housing. Churches bring together religious communities, function at the level of spiritual needs, guarantee social support and do also present themselves as elements of reference, rep- resentative and symbolic — they transmit security, they give meaning to the urban space where they stand. The history of these structures, from the manifestation of their need to their effective occupation and use, including the circumstances and processes of their construction, and the observation of their present situation, allow us to evaluate the way they have responded to social and cultural changes over time, in the use of buildings and spaces, which today show signs of degradation and obsolescence, but also reveal a great capacity for adaptation and resilience

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Housing,Collectivities,Urban Form,Lisbon

• Other Social Sciences - Social Sciences
• History and Archeology - Humanities
• Arts (arts, history of arts, performing arts, music) - Humanities
• Other Humanities - Humanities