This Project was initiated in 2003-4 at the same time of the drafting of the ISSP new questionnaire on «Citizenship» and the subsequent drafting of a supplementary module designed to capture the urban dimensions of the exercise of political citizenship, namely the possible effects of urban and metropolitan condition upon that exercise. The principal investigator has been involved in the past decade and a half in the systematic study of the main dimensions into which the exercise of citizens' rights in Portugal unfolds itself, from social fairness to party representation, with a recent emphasis on historical and comparative perspectives (Cabral, 1997; 1998; 2000; 2001a; 2001b; 2003; 2006a; 2006b). The project aims at exploring dimensions absent from the ISSP questionnaire and more generally at the comparative study of citizenship exercise in Portugal and Brazil, namely in the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Rio, in view to analyze, on the basis of the extended questionnaire applied by ICS and the Brazilian Observatory of Metropolitan areas, the ways urban life influences the exercise of citizen's rights and is in turn influenced by the social movements associated with the defence of such rights. In fact, the urban dimension of citizenship, though fundamental in the first formulations of the concept (Weber, 1956), has lost weight in the recent literature, especially when it is based on survey studies in the civic culture tradition (Almond & Verba, 1963; 1980), which aims mainly at cross-national comparisons.

The present project tries, instead, to revisit with new empirical basis the theses according to which the exercise of citizen's rights is not just favoured by the urban condition, but is in fact a manifestation of «urbanism as way of life» (Wirth, 1938);

conversely, we will have the opportunity to test counter-trends according to which the recent evolution of large urban areas is actually generating effects opposed to the production of «social capital» and the maintenance of solidarity networks favourable to the exercise of citizen's rights (Putnam, 2000). In other words, we want to study the relationships between city life and urban social strata, on the one side, and citizenship exercise on the other, specifically in societies with political traditions different from the liberal model which supports mainstream citizenship studies, such as the Portuguese and the Brazilian societies, but also the Spanish and Italian ones (Alabart, Garcia & Giner, 1994). More recently, the initial luso-brazilian project has entered into collaboration with the Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation program headed by the University of Chicago and with the New Political Culture network dedicated to the study of current changes in political values, attitudes and patterns of behaviour (Clark & Navarro, 2007).