This site brings to public a digitised and systematised database of the Survey on Urban Housing (Pereira & Gago, 1984). The survey, conducted during the 1970s in Portugal, gathered an important body of data on how families living in social housing developments related to and used the spaces of their homes. In Portugal, it remains a unique example of an exhaustive sociological field survey on the topic of the relationship between families and domestic environments. As such, it continues to be a relevant source of information in the fields of architecture and housing studies.

This database is the outcome of work carried out for the doctoral dissertation Design Paradigms in Porto’s Public and Cooperative Housing in and around the Portuguese Revolutionary Period: a systemic approach grounded on spatial analysis” (Ruivo, 2021). The preliminary analysis conducted in that scope was able to demonstrate that, to some extent, spatial and configurational (Hillier and Hanson, 1984) attributes have an impact in the way houses and rooms are used by families and individual household members.

As such, the dataset appears to have the potential for further examination, and its broad availability should be useful for future research.

The complete set of information has been digitised as closely as possible as it appears in the survey and an additional layer was added regarding the apartments’ spatial characteristics. All the data was organised in a structured database. With the gentle collaboration of the LNEC (Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia Civil), it can be consulted on the site or downloaded for academic use.