QUEIRÓS, João (2015). In the Center, on the Margins. Sociology of State Urban and Housing Interventions in the Historic Center of Porto. Porto: Edições Afrontamento. ISBN 978-972-36-1450-3.

SYNOPSIS

In the Center, on the Margins reproduces some of the main results of a sociological research on the genesis, structuring, and social consequences of urban and housing interventions promoted by the State in the historic center of Porto over the last sixty years. Developed between 2010 and 2014 within the framework of a doctoral research funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology, the research aimed to realize, through thorough empirical specification, some fundamental analytical ambitions: to reconstruct the framework of socioeconomic transformations that, at the national and regional-local levels, precede, enable, and accompany State interventions in housing for the working classes; to analyze the network of functional and power relations that sustains, albeit provisionally and contradictorily, the actions of the state bureaucracy in this domain; to identify the main lines of the cultural movement in which the technical, ethical and aesthetic (always, ultimately, political) perspectives on urban planning, urban renewal and housing for the working classes are embedded, perspectives that have been imposed over the period of more than half a century privileged in the work; to deepen the study of the relations of sociability, mutual knowledge and mutual assistance in the social spaces involved, not without noting the manifestations and effects of social heterogeneity and the anomic tensions that also mark them; to analyze the relationship of the recipients of housing policies with the State, distinguishing what in this relationship approaches either sustained political mobilization, at one extreme, or more or less atomized dissent, at the other extreme, and also considering the intermediate gradations of involvement/distancing of the populations in relation to the political decisions that concern them; To denounce the accumulation of perverse social effects (only partly unintentional) associated with isolated political measures, continued forms of institutional inconsistency in which Portuguese society thrives, and gaps in action and more or less deliberate omissions by central or local public administration.

Available at the FLUP Library under reference 946.9P-Q44n