Social Housing Design. Urban Proposals. A possible interpretation throughout the last thirty years of Habitação Social in Portugal

The paper compares some recent Portuguese productions (framed in the activity of the Instituto Nacional de Habitação) with three residential projects by Alvaro Siza (Bouça, São Vítor and Malagueira), trying to show how the mechanisms of spatial organization of housing translate ideas, attitudes and specific proposals for the city, interpreting and defining strategies for construction of the urban space, combining particularities of the territory, history and memory. Simultaneously, inserting the projects analyzed in the general trend of research on social housing Portugal, the study draws interpretive hypotheses to describe the specificities of the Portuguese case.