Closed Housing Condos and Quality of Life

A discussion (also) about the City

Abstract

1) With the absence of a precise legal framework in Portugal, the concept of closed housing condominiums reminds us of an architectonic, social and symbolic heterogeneous universe. 2) The phenomenon of its emergence and expansion invites us to interchange, in an indivisible way, Space, City and Democracy, covering such an interpellation of a particular strategic potential in the discussion around the city that we have and its transformation in the city that we want. 3) The material and symbolic markers that distinguish closed condominiums from the generality of condominiums, the imagination about who lives in them, and the reasons and impacts underlying their origin and expansion, have become the thematic guiding principles of provocation and discovery the discourses of a group of socially and culturally diverse interlocutors, distinctly associated with the production and social appropriation of some of these enterprises, located in the city of Lisbon. 4) An analytically established dialogue between residents, agents associated with the provision of residential space, researchers and policy makers, from which - in between lines of rupture - emerges interesting and worrying spaces of mutual consensus and understanding, clarifying concerns and demands produced on the existing city, which seem to be shared between confessed adherents and opponents of these enterprises. Addressed the challenge, how can the City respond?