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Portugal Housing
Much Portuguese housing was substandard, both in rural
and in
urban areas. Many rural villages were not electrified even
by the
early 1990s, and villagers often had to carry water from a
common
source. The influx of rural migrants to urban centers in
recent
decades intensified demand on an already inadequate
housing
supply. Although 60 percent of Portuguese rented their
houses (80
percent in Lisbon and Porto), rigid rent control laws in
effect
between 1948 and 1985 had discouraged the construction of
apartments, as did a sluggish bureaucracy. As a result, in
the
late 1980s an estimated 700,000 illegally constructed
dwellings
existed in Portugal, 200,000 of which were located in the
Lisbon
area. Some were built on public or unused private lands.
The
resulting urban shantytowns (bairros da lata) often
lacked
electricity, running water, or sewage systems.
In Lisbon's suburbs, gigantic apartment houses were
built for
the more affluent new city-dwellers, but the supply of
decent,
affordable housing lagged far behind the demand, estimated
at
800,000 dwellings for the entire country. A succession of
Portuguese governments recognized this severe housing
problem and
sought to do something about it. For example, the National
Housing Institute planned to build 70,000 dwellings a year
during
the 1990s, and various programs to help people become
homeowners
had been put into practice.
* * *
Portugal was long the most understudied country in
Western
Europe. The authoritarian nature of the Salazar regime
made
social science research on contemporary issues all but
impossible
to carry out; Portuguese social sciences also lagged
behind.
Despite these obstacles, some very good studies were done.
Among
them were works by Joyce Firstenberg Riegelhaupt in
anthropology,
João Baptista Nunes Pereira Neto and Aderito Sedas Nunes
in
sociology, and José Cutileiro's pioneering A Portuguese
Rural
Society. Harry M. Makler broke new ground in his
investigations of Portugal's business elite, as did
Massimo Livi
Bacci in his demographic study, A Century of Portuguese
Fertility.
Social science scholarship has flourished in Portugal
since
the Revolution of 1974, as specialists there have looked
into
many unexplored aspects of their society. Readers needing
sociological analyses in English will profit from the
survey
edited by Lawrence S. Graham and Douglas L. Wheeler, In
Search
of Modern Portugal, and the one edited by Lawrence S.
Graham
and Harry M. Makler, Contemporary Portugal.
Economic and
social data are also found in the historical surveys
Contemporary Portugal by Richard Alan Hodgson
Robinson and
Portugal: A Twentieth Century Interpretation
by Tom
Gallagher.
Among the best political-sociological studies are Nancy
Bermeo's The Revolution Within the Revolution,
which deals
with revolution in the countryside, and Caroline Brettel's
Men
Who Migrate, Women Who Wait, an excellent study of
Portuguese
emigration. Thomas C. Bruneau, Victor M.P. Da Rosa, and
Alex
Macleod provide much useful information in their
Portugal in
Development. Rainer Eisfeld's "Portugal and Western
Europe,"
in Portugal in the 1980s, edited by Kenneth
Maxwell, is
also helpful. Finally, Marion Kaplan's 1991 book, The
Portuguese: The Land and its People, although not
aimed at a
scholarly audience, is often highly informative about
contemporary Portuguese society. (For further information
and
complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of January 1993
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