Featuring 1200 houses that cover an area of twenty-seven hectares located to the west of Évora’s historic centre, Bairro da Malagueira is Álvaro Siza’s largest social housing project. Malagueira was developed during a unique historical, political and social period in Portugal. It deployed collective and participatory construction principles in the scope of the SAAL (Serviço Ambulatório de Apoio Local [Local Support Ambulatory Service], 1974–1976) programme. Siza coordinated SAAL’s so-called Northern Brigade, designing its first social housing projects, the Bouça (1973–1978) and São Victor (1974–1979) neighbourhoods in Porto, which predate the Malagueira Plan (1977– 2001). His ability to design and build with the local community led to his recognition in Europe, where he designed Bonjour Tristesse in Berlin (1980–1984), Punt and Komme in The Hague (1983–1988) and Campo di Marte in Venice (1985; 1995) (Genin et al. 2023). In Malagueira, architectural and constructive innovations resulted from the extended building period (1977–2001), the participatory process, and the scarcity of materials and workers. Typologies A and B houses, with a patio to the front and a patio to the back, diversified into other ten subtypes (Duarte 2021). Given the lack of ceramic bricks, a factory in Évora was reopened to supply cement blocks. Taking advantage of the material, Siza imagined an aerial conduit for the distribution of infrastructures and to facilitate construction, which was then managed by various co-operatives. Inspired by the aqueduct that supplies and crosses the Historic Centre of Évora, the conduit creates shade and a route between the houses and commercial spaces, promoting social connections with the public space and communal living. The recognition of Malagueira’s heritage value, one of Álvaro Siza’s most notorious architectural works, has led to ongoing national and international classification processes. The nomination for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List is, however, considered complex, due to management by multiple owners, its apparent advanced state of degradation, and the issues related to its integrity. Nevertheless, various and detailed studies carried out with ten students as part of the Final Project for the Integrated Master’s Degree in Architecture at ISCTE found Malagueira buildings in a reasonable state of conservation. Degradation was caused mainly by the urban voids left by unbuilt facilities. A comparative analysis was conducted between Malagueira and Le Corbusier’s Quartiers modernes (Frugès social housing neighbourhood), inscribed in the World Heritage List in 2016. The Malagueira research is based on fieldwork and archival research, while Frugès was analysed exclusively by looking at bibliographical sources.

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World Heritage List,Cité Frugès,Le Corbusier,Malagueira Neighbourhood,Álvaro Siza