Porto, Paranhos and the Affordable Houses Programme – A heritage and a historical memory at risk?

Abstract

The Affordable Houses Programme of the Portuguese Estado Novo, inspired by the European garden-cities of the early twentieth century, left a deep mark in several cities, including Porto. It is in this city, and in its economic residences, that this article is centred, focusing on the Bairro Económico de Paranhos. Making its study from a historical point of view, we seek to understand how the growth of the spaces where these neighbourhoods were built, between the 1930s and 1960s, induced a change in the sense of identity of these places, how it modified this cultural landscape and, reflecting critically, how it put at risk not only the memory, historical and collective, associated to them, but also the physical elements of space, which we understand as Cultural Heritage.