More than Homes
How will we live on April 25, 2074?
More than Homes How will we live on April 25, 2074?
2023.2024
→ online streaming: https://www.youtube.com/@fauplive
The Direction of FAUP has defined as its strategic objectives the reflection, debate and development of programs focused on teaching that identify and respond to the challenges of contemporaneity.
For this, along with the international platformNEB Goes South(selected by the European Commission as a NEB Lab under the New European Bauhaus), created and now presents the program 'More than Houses'.
More than Houses' is associated with the 50th anniversary of the 25th of April 1974, an event that deserves to be celebrated with a reflection on themes that then and today remain as a challenge and an unfulfilled need. With this purpose, this initiative intends to bring together Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Fine Arts to contribute to a critical and propositional reflection on the contemporary challenges of housing and public space in building an intercultural society and promoting global citizenship.
The program, developed with the curators Teresa Novais and Luís Tavares Pereira, integrates seminars, exhibition, publications, and workshop, to instigate, inform, and communicate the research produced by the students in the university institutions in the 2023-2024 academic year.
Taking as a reference the memory of the experience of the housing programs that took place immediately after the 25th of April 1974, namely the Local Ambulatory Support Service (SAAL), it is proposed to envisage a possible contribution to the future that we want for 2074, 100 years after the 25th of April.
The Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto dedicates this initiative to the Architect Professor Nuno Portas and, in his person, to all participants in the SAAL process.
The first initiative - 'More Than Houses' Seminar #01 - will take place on April 28 at the Fernando Távora Auditorium, starting at 10am.
Free entry, with prior registration, until the room is full.
Manifesto
More Than Homes
1. Peace
Portugal, like Europe, is moving rapidly towards a society of cultural and social atomization, not only in the larger urban centers, but throughout the territory.
Social and identity transformations are occurring at an ever-increasing pace, impacting on diverse ways of living, of understanding work, education, and leisure.
Diversity is the norm, which is reflected in the need for continuous adaptation of the individual for survival, given the relevance of these transformations.
The city must urgently transform itself into an intercultural space in order to allow citizens of different origins and identities to mix, interact, and communicate. The intercultural city refuses atomization, ghettoization, and racialization, and shapes its planning policies, from housing to public spaces, to guarantee the rights of all and the city for all.
But is that the city we are building today?
2. The Homes
The right to housing is enshrined in the Portuguese constitution of 1976 (art. 65), as well as in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (art. 25). The state's effort in housing, which dates back to 1918, has always been insufficient. It is enough to remember that only 2% of the total current housing stock is under public initiative. Today Portugal is experiencing the great housing crisis of this century.
A crisis that has different facets, extends to vast and distinct layers of the population and to different territorial problems. On the one hand, it stems from the inability of the population to bear inflated costs in city centers, pressured by tourism, investment funds, the difference in the cost of living between countries and the nomadization of labor. On the other hand, it stems from the inability of low density territories to fix population, being unattractive to private investment. And, finally, it directly reflects the lack of successful public housing policies that incorporate both social balance and integration, as well as good quality architecture and construction in an affordable way.
The largest state housing program is underway, following the passage in 2019 of the Housing Framework Law and the RRP. There are multiple programs for specific situations - support for young people, people with incomes below the poverty level, immigrants, refugees, the elderly, etc. - but they are sectored or respond to emergency situations, without articulation or communication among themselves, not promoting the city for all. Rarely are their programs made with reference to the populations of the communities in which they are inserted, and to the characterization of their specific needs.
Do these actions carry a reflection around the dwelling and the types of dwelling? Do they consider the configurations and reconfigurations of the family or family groups, the intergenerational dwelling, the aging at home, the habits of cultures from different geographies and religions, the presence of domestic animals, among other specificities?
If the family is in transformation, is dynamic, is fluid, is elastic, is pendular, is unipersonal, and the house is the space of sharing of several people, how to respond to the right to live?
Do small-scale interventions within urban fabrics that promote urban upgrading and social cohesion have a place in the funding and management models of public programs in a comprehensive and effective way?
Shouldn't redevelopment options, in effective/primary compliance with sustainability objectives by reducing waste and CO2 emissions, and providing for the requalification of cities and the huge vacant housing stock, be the predominant model?
To what extent is public space also being considered? Are the voids being the object of reflection about their program of use, management, and appropriation? Is their potential for encounter, collective participation and continuity with the city being considered beyond the vegetal and mineral filling?
50 years ago the SAAL program brought to the surface, with the participation of the future inhabitants, a movement for the right to the city and to housing, who thus claimed their place in the city that was forbidden to them by the extreme poverty to which they were condemned. The resulting typological and urban research, as well as its process and financial models, are still a disciplinary and international reference. Tragically, and according to the housing programs on the ground today, it seems never to have existed.
Currently, the goal of the Portuguese State is to build 25,000 dwellings in the next two years. The results of project tenders for housing construction are evidence of current policies, dominated by the quantification of costs, areas, deadlines, regulations, obsolete norms, and incongruous notions of accessibility and energy efficiency, far removed from the discussion of urban design, populations, and their different characteristics.
Most of them, as a city model proposal, are absolutely similar, with no place for diversity, becoming even difficult to distinguish from the architectural point of view. The basic program seems to prevent the advance beyond a generic, aseptic and universal city, from the ordering point of view, instead of a specific local response and interconnection with the context where it is integrated, indifferent to the social and intercultural needs. What elements are designers being given to promote inclusive city models?
In the last decades, the State has chosen to withdraw, leaving public institutions with no means of reflection for a continuous work on housing. What remains is the sense of urgency, in the face of the crisis now emerging on the surface, to guide public actions today.
3. More than Homes | April 2074
The current social complexity suggests the strengthening of a global citizenship marked by citizens' capacity for self-organization in a multiplicity of forms of participation in the defense of their rights and in the decisions that concern them directly.
The 50 years since the 25th of April should be celebrated with a reflection on those issues that then and today remain as a challenge, an unmet need. An unfortunate coincidence, 50 years later, access to housing is once again one of the most urgent problems to be solved.
Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Fine Arts have the capacity and the duty to contribute to this debate, with research projects and practical intervention, adequate to the current Portuguese context, and to the present moment, with the enthusiasm and the critical, creative and free involvement of students and teachers.
The challenge proposed here is the contribution of schools with proposals for an open and intercultural society today.
Teresa Novais and Luís Tavares Pereira
February 2023
Programa
#01 Seminário “Mais do que Casas” > FAUP, 28 de abril de 2023
#01.1 - O Seminário contará com diversos contributos multidisciplinares que procurarão construir perspetivas alargadas e complexas da sociedade portuguesa contemporânea, contextualizando o lançamento do desafio escolas “Mais do que Casas | Abril 2074”.
#01.2 - Launching of the Schools Challenge "More than Houses | April 2074"
The challenge posed to schools begins with 7 visions* that intend to stimulate the debate around the themes that urgently need to be reflected today in housing and cities for all. The aim of this challenge is to gather all schools around the reflection, debate and proposition about the mentioned themes, through the development, in the school year 2023-2024, of research and project in several Curricular Units of the several years of the courses.
*Authors of the texts
'7 visões''Recuperar terreno', Aitor Varea Oro [architect; CEAU. FAUP]
''We need to reactivate the renewable energy of the Imagination'', Inês Lobo [architect; ISCTE / UAL]
'Ecúmena: our battlefield', Maria Manuel Oliveira [architect; EAAD-UM]
'More than Houses, Simply Houses, Simple Houses', Nuno Brandão Costa [architect; FAUP]
'Respigating the Housing of the Past as an Act of Resistance', Rui J. G. Ramos [architect; FAUP] Gisela Lameira [architect; CEAU.FAUP] Tiago Lopes Dias [architect; CEAU.FAUP]
'Teaching as activism (notes for a territorial integration)', Sílvia Benedito [architect; UAlg/GSD-HU]
'More than houses - the voice of schools. Access to housing, migrations and spatial configurations', Sílvia Leiria Viegas [architect; CIAC.UAlg]
#02 International Conference "More than Houses/More than Housing" > FAUP, 21 and 22 September 2023
This event will convene different project practices that act today on the theme of public housing and on the territory, crossing reflections and multidisciplinary testimonies. It is intended that students come into contact with themes as diverse as typological research, new construction techniques, reuse and rehabilitation, use of local materials, collaborative processes with communities, and different ways of living.
#03 Exhibition "More than Houses | April 2074" > July to December 2024
The exhibition will result from the work developed by the various schools and will be accompanied by debates with active participation of the students.
Team, Coordination
#04 Oficina Internacional de projeto ‘Cidades de mil portas’ > FAUP, julho de 2024
A oficina, de 10 dias, com foco em obras de habitação pública realizadas na primeira década após o 25 de Abril (FFH e SAAL), reunirá estudantes de várias escolas e arquitetos internacionais com reconhecida experiência promovendo uma reflexão crítica e propositiva em torno de três conjuntos existentes, reconhecendo a sua mais-valia e o seu potencial de adaptação à condição urbana e aos desafios do século XXI:
Famalicão > Edifício das Lameiras, Noé Diniz
Setúbal > Casal das Figueiras, Gonçalo Byrne
Évora > Quinta da Malagueira, Álvaro Siza
Organization (FAUP's Executive Council)
João Pedro Xavier
Teresa Calix
Clara Pimenta do Vale
Filipa de Castro Guerreiro
José Pedro Sousa
Curators
Teresa Novais e Luís Tavares Pereira
Support