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Metropolization has been studied essentially through census analysis. Despite its incontestable interest, it presents an "interrupted" portrait of reality that omits the continuous aspect of metropolitan development. Moreover, the focus is placed predominantly on territories and their demographic evolution rather than on households. To overcome these shortcomings, the project Residential Trajectories and Metropolization: continuities and Changes in Lisbon Metropolitan Area 1 centres on households as the main protagonists of spatial structuring processes. It aims to reconstitute the trajectories of Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA) inhabitants (born between 1945 and 1975) by means of a life course approach. The present paper presents some of the results. Housing stability is an important finding but should not be understood as a Portuguese specificity. Moreover, it is important to underline the great heterogeneity of each trajectory, both in terms of their protagonists and their meanings.

Alto da Barra and Portela are two modern estates designed by the same architect and located on two sides of the periphery of Lisbon: the west side, Costa do Sol, where the river meets the Atlantic and the east, with no label, which is upstream. The estates were planned and built in the same period (1960s to 1970s), the height of Lisbon’s urban development. This article presents a comparative analysis of these estates: their plans, implementation, social appropriation and resilience, by exploring the sociological profile and place-attachment perceptions of their inhabitants. The analysis also contextualises the development of the estates within the consolidation of these two quite different Lisbon peripheries: the west side traditionally highly valued in relation to the east. An intensive methodology was developed—case studies of the two estates—combining quantitative (survey, inter-census analysis) and qualitative (interviews and documentary analysis) methods. In addition to the differences between the two estates, which were largely due to their specificities in terms of geographic location and status, both reveal significant feelings of place-attachment and a rejection of the suburbia label.

This paper analyses the residential trajectories of Lisbon Metropolitan Area inhabitants who were born between . The analysis was carried out using a longitudinal approach that, in contrast to the traditional transversal ones, emphasizes the diachronic aspects by reconstituting the residential biography of each respondent in the survey (N=1500), which was implemented during the second half of 2011. The research underlies three essential dimensions of residential trajectories: 1) location and geographical direction; 2) the housing model that is directly related to the morphology of the territories; 3) the housing tenure, which is of profound interest in the current Portuguese context because of the economic crisis that is diminishing the propensity for homeownership. Due to the plethora of data, this paper will focus on the first dimension with two purposes: 1) to identify the dominant trajectories (e.g.: countryside-periphery, Lisbon centre-periphery, periphery-periphery, etc.); 2) to discuss the various sociological profiles of the protagonists in each of those dominant trajectories, in order to understand the multiple combinations and intersections of variables (social class, generation, household type), which characterize and differentiate each other.