Coordinators: Carlos Fortuna [ FE-UC ] Luís Baptista [ FCSH-UNL ] Manuel Carlos Silva [ UMinho ]
Although, up to the 1970s Portugal was a deeply rural country with a quite weak level of industrialization, in the last half century the country revealed a complex and powerful urbanization. As the inland des-urbanized, the rural areas lost the dynamics that the Portuguese sociology was analyzing and celebrating for the past thirty years or so.
In Portugal then the old urban-rural dichotomy diluted: on the one hand, the rural lost agricultural vitality and the countryside turned into a tourist and leisure landscape; on the other hand, the urban and the cities became "territories" displaying a relevant socio-economic and cultural dynamics.
The rural-urban space-time relationships intersect the various social sciences, namely Sociology. The present and the future of both cities and the countryside continue to demand an urgent and critical sociological inquiry. It is within the rural and urban mix of contemporary Portugal that futures are to be designed, so it is important to analyze (i) the vitality and deficiencies of its economic and social structures; (ii) the social re-composition of classes and social categories; (iii) the domains of labor and the organizations; (iv) sociabilities and family models; (v) habits and lifestyles; (vi) social representations and cultural and symbolic worldviews.
Aware of these challenges, the X Portuguese Congress of Sociology invites you to reflect on the Portuguese cities, countryside and territorialities of today. Open to the internal debate, this Thematic Area opens also to a huge variety of objects and problems, such as those that cross the current urban and rural complex and the more or less sudden changes that it reveals. Therefore, dear colleagues, we accept communication proposals and posters that, focusing on these objects, analyze issues related to
- rural and urban territories, as both constraints and opportunities for social action and locations of diverse modalities of material and symbolic appropriation; cities and countryside as territories of work and mobility, culture and leisure, (in)action around local power;
- social actors: classes, social groups and individuals in rural and urban contexts, involved in conservation practices and/or social change and renewal of mentalities in reference with the integration of several "others" that arrive here;
- Economy, politics and governance: the city formation, economic groups and the role of the State and municipalities; public space and citizenship; urban rehabilitation processes; lobies and clientelism; in situ social movements and social participation; multi-inter-culturality;
- cultural policy and social action: contexts of production and circulation of culture: cultural associations and groups; new urban events;
- local improvement and inter-city competition; urban and rural tourism; the city of festivals; discourses and new narratives;
- urban and rural heritage and rituals: daily life, lifestyle and shared experiences; sociabilities, interactions and group identities;
- planning and management of territories: conflicts and social cohesion; urban infrastructure (housing, transport and social amenities), (sub)urbanization, urban and interurban mobilities; prevention of risks / calamities and planning or lack of planning for territories in particular rural areas;
- rural-urban: processes of resistance and/or adaptation to the remaking and reinvention
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