Arquitectura da Participação. O Debate sobre o habitat participado entre o Primeiro e o Terceiros Mundo, 1960-2010

Abstract

The following dissertation analyzes the subject matter of participation in architecture and its importance in defining the habitat, both in the First and Third World, as a way of responding to the housing issues and to the new social and cultural inhabitants' necessities. The origin of participation ideas is contextualized in the decade of 1960, having in account the deep changes in the ways of life and the ideological discussion on the social posture of the architect; and four distinct environments of the First World are synthesized: Central Europe and the urban task of Social Sciences; The suburban and "gentrificated" USA; The United Kingdom and the utopian and reformer North; and Italy and the Mediterranean "Tendenza"; which contributed to the reformation of the architectonic thinking and allowed a new point of view on vernacular architecture and the Third World's reality. The Portuguese discussion is analyzed, considering the immobilized social politics of the Estado Novo' administration, explaining the accompaniment and the absorption of the new exterior guide lines and demonstrating, already in the post-revolution period, the universal diffusion of a new architectonic posture, which SAAL became a paradigm. The three Latin-American realities under study, Peru, Brazil and Chile, confirm the different forms of acting to face the extreme housing needs, which proportionate theories, models and techniques of participation and self-building, feeding the discussion in the First World. The work pretends to demonstrate the universal lecture of the issue: participation in architecture, and to prove the importance of the architectonic postures developed during the decades of 1960 and 1970, which, apparently, are now emerging in new characters, thanks to the comprehension of antiques practices and emphasized by the present financial and economical crisis.