DINÂMIA’CET-IUL  is pleased to announce that the call for papers for the “Optimistic Suburbia II – Middle-Class Large Housing Complexes” International Conference (Lisbon, Portugal, 16-19 June 2021) has been extended until 20th December 2020.

This conference follows the “Optimistic Suburbia-Large Housing Complexes for the Middle Class Beyond Europe” congress that took place at ISCTE in January 2015.

As the congress, the international conference “is part of the research project “MCMH – Middle Class Housing Developments in Europe, Africa and Asia – Middle Class Mass Housing in Europe, Africa and Asia” [PTDC/ART-DAQ/30594/2017], started in October 2018, also funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology, and is being developed at ISCTE by DINÂMIA’CET-IUL research center. ISCTE partners in the project are Universidade Agostinho Neto in Luanda (Angola), Universiteit Antwerpen (Belgium) and the Politecnico di Milano (Italy), as well as Docomomo Macau and Docomomo Angola. The goal of this research project is to carry out a compared analysis of Middle Class Mass Housing (MCMH) in Europe, Africa and Asia, introducing new case studies to deepen the existing research, made with successfully tested methodologies: survey, catalogue and contextualization of housing complexes built between the 1950s and the 1980s in Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Angola and China.

The “Optimistic Suburbia II – Middle-Class Large Housing Complexes” has its starting point in a research on large housing complexes in the outskirts of Lisbon, Luanda and Macau, then enlarged to Antwerp and Milan. In the last decades of the 20th century, these housing complexes were instrumental for the urban growth, showing similarities as well as differences in Europe and beyond. Drawing from this context the conference intends to open the reflection on these complexes on broad realities, showing the multiple features of urbanizations in several geographical, chronological and social contexts.

The objective is to put into perspective the shaping and the pattern of autonomous neighbourhoods, both of private and public promotion, on the outskirts of big cities, for the middle-class and designed in the second half of the twentieth century.

Therefore, are welcomed researches on architecture, urbanism, architecture and urbanism history, impact on the periphery urban areas, social sciencies, economics, cultural issues related with the theme, as art, image and media (publications, film, photography…) and other important subjects. Aspects as terminology, concepts and representation will be addressed as well”.