Portuguese Journal of Social Science - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2015

Praça do Rossio has been the most emblematic space in central Lisbon both before and after the 1755 earthquake that destroyed much of the city. Up until the thirteenth century Rossio was a barren area outside the walls of the medieval city and was used as a common space where people held ceremonies for 500 years. The Rossio also connected inland rural area with the city within the walls, acting as a bridge between those two worlds. For this reason Rossio has always been a space for all kind of vendors, outsiders, beggars and social rejects, while also a route into the city for agrarian culture, rituals and people. Despite the attempts by the city’s masters and the Crown to seize the space for the construction of their institutions, it was not until the 1755 earthquake that this finally happened. The reconstruction of Lisbon under the gaze of the enlightened rationalist Marquis of Pombal represented the beginning of a new era for the city: giving birth to the modern bourgeois city, in which the historical organization of space was reshaped, the Rossio’s traditional functions displaced and the meaning and contents of the hegemonic city representations and imaginaries such as fado music and the annual People’s Saints (Santos Populares) celebrations renewed. In this article, the centrality of Rossio is reviewed, with a stress on the displacement of some of its attributes to the districts after the earthquake by the romantic heritage processes of meaning. However, the Rossio maintained some of its traditional functions, with the daily presence there of African migrants as an example.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the peripheral area of Alcântara became one of Lisbon’s most important industrial centres. Its economic development was accompanied by a massive growth in population. As this area became urbanized and industrialized, the representations of the neighbourhood also changed. Within a few decades, Alcântara ceased to be associated with the image of a remote suburb, a place that had no clearly defined boundaries or a space defined solely in terms of its industrial function. This article presents the Alcântara neighbourhood as a case study that helps us understand how collective practices shape new representations of city and urban life. The objective of this article is to analyse the role of a republican voluntary association – the Society for the Promotion of Popular Education (Promotora – Sociedade Promotora de Educação Popular) – in transforming the representations associated with the Alcântara neighbourhood in the early twentieth century. During this period, Promotora helped shape different levels of ‘collective representations’ of Alcântara; it also contributed to the formation of an authentic urban lifestyle at the neighbourhood level, drawing attention to people who represented the local community and speaking on their behalf.

During the last decade of the twentieth century, 3.4 km2 of Lisbon’s eastern waterfront was converted from an industrial, commercial and working-class residence area into a high-end residential, office, leisure and consumption complex now called Parque das Nações. Expo ’98 constituted the occasion for implementing this publicly-funded project that is part of the global, competitive and uneven logic that characterizes contemporary urban development. Parque das Nações was envisioned to become a place where residents, workers and visitors could experience everyday life in a stressless and informal manner: its public spaces were planned to be used as relaxing, breathing spaces in the heart of a modern and busy metropolis. Building on the seminal works of Lefebvre (1974) and De Certeau (2005), this article pursues two main objectives: to describe the process of new-build gentrification, triggered by Expo ’98, that resulted in today’s Parque das Nações and to show how its public spaces, although they are excessively planned and controlled, produce and become products of multiple forms of spatial practices, experiences and social interactions.

Parkour is a relatively new practice in Portugal. It became popular in Lisbon because it has some public places, including Telheiras and the Parque das Nações, that are appreciated by parkour protagonists. Telheiras has a very special architecture that is ideal for parkour jumping, while the Parque das Nações is a renewed part of the city with good areas and is well served by public transport promoting the meetings between traceurs from across the city and the country. Focusing on the results of an ethnography that has these two points as its main research fields, we will discuss how an examination of these practices requires the construction of an ethnography of urban flows within a multi-scale analysis. This article is based on the results of doctoral research. Intensive fieldwork was carried out with participant observation and the use of ethnographic methodology in an attempt to understand the traceurs’ map of Lisbon.

This article is the second of a two-part literature review on the evolution of the relationship between science and the public after the second half of the twentieth century. The first part presented a general review on public understanding of science (PUS), PUS measurements and what has motivated a shift from a deficit model to a contextual one. In this second part, we look more closely at the discussion around the role of the public in science and the transformation from the idea that lay people are isolated from science to the idea that the public should participate in policy-making on science and technology issues. In particular, we focus on the debate around who should and should not contribute to decision-making by presenting both the arguments in favour of and against public participation in science policy.

Contrary to all expectations and policy goals, poverty is on the rise in the European Union (EU). In fact, one of the headline targets of the current Europe 2020 strategy is precisely to lift at least 20 million people out of the risk of poverty or social exclusion. This setback can be largely explained by the crisis. Eventually, cohesion and political legitimacy may be put in jeopardy. Therefore, the growth in poverty calls for the adoption of adequate policies at the European and domestic levels, taking into account past experience and the diversity of national contexts. However, the inability to tackle poverty was already evident between 2000 and 2010. During this period, European social policy underwent a paradigm shift that emphasized activation measures rather than just income redistribution. This article explains this change by arguing that the deepening of the internal market, European diversity and the goal of sustaining the core European acquis were the underlying reasons behind this transition. The impact of this change on poverty and inequality during the last decade is also assessed. Econometric estimations show that the drivers of poverty and the drivers of inequality are different, suggesting that distinct approaches are required for each of these problems. We claim that the traditional redistributive policies remain the most effective way of fighting poverty and that although activation policies have had a positive impact on reducing inequality, they have not been able to combat poverty effectively.

WAR OF ATTRITION: FIGHTING THE FIRST WORLD WAR, W. PHILPOTT (2014) New York: The Overlook Press, 400 pp., ISBN: 9781468302684, Hardback, $29.95