Housing, Nationalism And Social Control: The First Years Of The Portuguese Estado Novo's Affordable Houses Programme

Abstract

In 1933, the dictatorial regime imposed in Portugal after the coup of May 1926 lost its military status. The government, since 1932 headed by Oliveira Salazar, wrote a new constitution, which was published in April 1933, and in the following months prepared a set of legislative orders that became the fundamental decrees of the new corporative state, the Estado Novo (New State). The drafts of those decrees were published in the newspaper Diário de Notícias, to allow the several social forces to react and propose changes to the legislation before it became official. One of those decrees established the principles of the construction of affordable houses by corporative or public institutions, with the support of the State. The Affordable Houses Programme was, from the start of the Estado Novo (New State), seen by the government as a central initiative in the framing of a new social order, and built over sixteen thousand houses across the country until the end of the regime in 1974. [...]