In the weeks following 25 April 1974, thousands of houses were occupied by underprivileged residents of big cities. The housing problem left behind by the Estado Novo was visible in the extensive shantytowns that surrounded the main cities undergoing an accelerated process of metropolisation.

And so, along the demands for the right to housing and political participation, emerged a broad urban social movement that disputed the model of democracy to be built in Portugal during the PREC, which faded with its depoliticisation in the following years.

This book analyses the revolutionary period, taking the urban question as a lens through which to read the affirmation of Portuguese democracy. What did it mean to build a democratic regime in the city? To answer this question, the author observed the actors, policies and institutions - in the debates of the Constituent Assembly, in the housing programmes launched after 25 April, in the proposals of political parties on participation and housing, in the readings of architects and urban planners on urban planning and metropolisation.

And also, in the responses of the new democratic local authorities to the housing crisis in the peripheries of the 1970s and 1980s, caught up in the contradictions between the right to housing, the explosion of “clandestine” construction and property rights.

About the Author

Ana Drago has a degree in Sociology from the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra and a PhD in Urban Studies from ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa and FCSH/Universidade Nova de Lisboa, with a dissertation on the urban question in the first decade of Portuguese democracy. She is currently a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. She has published on urban and housing policies, participation and democracy in the city.