Public defense of the Doctoral Thesis by Patrícia Amorim

DINÂMIA’CET-ISCTE is proud to announce the successful public defence of Patrícia Amorim's doctoral thesis, entitled "Os Espaços Públicos e as Manifestações de Protesto: O Eixo: Praça Marquês de Pombal - Avenida da Liberdade - Praça do Rossio, em Lisboa (1974 – 2014)”, held this past 5 May 2026, at Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa.

The thesis, supervised by Professor Paula André and co-supervised by Professor Paulo Tormenta Pinto, analyses public space as an essential dimension of the city, understood not only as a physical support for circulation and permanence, but also as a place of memory, collective representation and political visibility. From this perspective, it investigates the relationship between Lisbon’s public spaces and protest demonstrations held between 1974 and 2014, taking as its object of study the urban axis formed by Praça Marquês de Pombal, Avenida da Liberdade and Praça do Rossio.

The research is based on the hypothesis that certain public spaces become recurrent in practices of contestation not only because of their central location, but also due to the combination of symbolic value, legibility, capacity for concentration, public exposure and urban configuration. In this sense, the Marquês de Pombal–Avenida da Liberdade–Rossio axis is analysed as a spatial sequence that articulates squares, avenue, routes and urban framings, establishing itself as a privileged territory for collective action in the Portuguese democratic period.

The work develops a historical, documentary and spatialized reading of protest demonstrations reported by the newspaper Expresso, converting journalistic records into urban data through procedures of selection, coding, georeferencing and spatial interpretation. This approach made it possible to build a historical-documentary database on protests in Lisbon, expressed through maps, graphs, patterns of recurrence and functions of occupation of public space over the four decades studied. The newspaper archive also allowed the construction of a narrative of the city, revealing how protest demonstrations were reported, represented and spatially inscribed in Lisbon over time.

The analysis demonstrates that, throughout the period under consideration, social actors, repertoires of action, scales of mobilization and forms of mediation changed, while the centrality of the axis under study remained. The repetition of gatherings, marches, symbols, crowds and urban framings contributed to the consolidation of a visual culture of protest in Lisbon, in which Avenida da Liberdade, Praça Marquês de Pombal and Rossio assume complementary roles as places of assembly, route, arrival, representation and symbolic dispute.

At a final stage, the thesis incorporates configurational analysis, through Space Syntax, as an experimental procedure for verifying the hypotheses developed throughout the research. This stage aims to understand the permanence of certain urban centralities and the spatial availability of the axis for collective action, without reducing the phenomenon of protest to an exclusively configurational explanation.

In this way, the thesis contributes to a multidimensional reading of public space, articulating material form, urban memory, political representation and collective practices. By showing that certain spaces function as infrastructures of visibility, memory and civic participation, the study broadens the debate on the role of urban planning in preserving the identity of cities. The research therefore argues that thinking about the city implies knowing how to read its history, recognize the singularity of its public spaces and guide its future transformation by including the relationship between memory, citizenship and the production of urban meaning.