The Social Logics of Realignment Processes

From Residential Re-qualification to Classification Struggles in New Social Housing Neighborhoods

Abstract

The large plans of social housing that almost completely obliterated the last vestiges of of shanty towns in Portuguese urban landscapes were designed so that certain social dimensions associated to the process of spatial transformation were pondered. This text retrieves a study of one of these resettlement operations, starting from the reconfiguration of local relations, taken as an effect of the housing requalification, to test some interpretations about the meaning of the new residential attitudes and practices, as well as the mechanisms that the actors use to protect their expectations and hopes of social promotion and separation of the stigmatized and devalued identity - accusations exchanged in the relational daily life, from the frontal insult, the rumor, the insinuation and the jocular commentary.