Talk:Unincorporated area

Misleading information about Portugal, but my point is different

Hi! Hailing from Portugal here, and I found it curious to see a small paragraph relating to Portugal's administrative land division. There is a minor issue there to be corrected, and some clarifications.

First, the word "parish" is a bit ambiguous in this context, and the more correct translation of the Portuguese freguesia would be civil parish. This is simply because Portugal, as a predominantly Roman Catholic country, always associates the name parish to the literal translation paróquia — which is always a religious administrative region — and so, similar to the UK, the designation civil parish is to be preferred in all cases.

As stated, there is no "unincorporated land" in Portugal. Lakes, rivers, etc. are all made part of the municipalities they border. This even applies to remote, uninhabited islands on the archipelagos of Madeira and Azores: even those are considered to be part of the closest municipality. The ocean itself, however, is under a Maritime Authority, and that's a different story. But the landmass and its waterways all belong to a freguesia or a município. It's irrelevant how many people live (or even if they can live!) there: there are no 'empty areas' on the map, the coverage is of 100% of the territory.

All municipalities are legal personæ, formally registered and function as such

It's true that the Constitution of the Republic of Portugal defines the possibility of existence of three levels of administrative division, leaving legislators to pass laws on the subject. It is also implicit that each level elects their representatives to an executive and a representative assembly, by universal suffrage of those residing in the covered administrative area, and that such regional and local political bodies have independence from the national Government, and potentially the right to legislate and raise taxes or levies or fees for their specific region. This is what happens for all municipalities, small or large, even though it took several years to devolve more and more power to these, as Portugal distanced itself further from the centralised fascist state, and embraced a model more consistent with its history, where each community would have a degree of self-rule based on democratic principles and through elected officials to serve on behalf of all others.

Therefore, on mainland Portugal, the region level was rejected in a referendum, mostly because it was impossible to figure out exactly how to split the regions in terms of borders, and where the local parliament and seat of power of each region ought to be.

Instead, municipalities voluntarily created associations, also legal corporations, to coordinate efforts together — metropolitan areas and intermunicipal areas, depending on their size. These, being voluntary, do not cover the whole land, and they're managed through an internal charter. Their management bodies (including an executive and a board) are not democratically elected from the represented citizens; rather, they are composed of the members of the municipalities which chose to participate. These entities have no political or administrative power and do not manage public moneys directly: their budget comes from membership fees. Nevertheless, as an organised body, they are able to manage municipal cross-border issues more effectively (e.g., local road planning, where the next urban railway shall be built, how to design sewage pipes towards a common water treatment plant, etc.). They also work as a lobby to petition the national Government for enacting legislation or budget-spending to benefit the whole area.

In other words, this "third level" of administrative division is a bottom-up, voluntary organisation of many, but not necessarily all, municipalities, to work closer together — but hey are not the "regions" mentioned in the Constitution, which would have a certain degree of devolved rights, a budget from raised taxes and fees, and an elected body of regional government, possibly fashioned along the lines of the current two archipelago-based autonomous regions of Madeira and Azores.

The rather confusing sentence that follows explaining that "towns" and "cities" may span several parishes and have no boundaries fixed in law is correct in essence, but perhaps some further clarification is needed.

In Portugal, the status of "city" (cidade), "town" (vila), and "village" (aldeia) have no independent political or administrative relevance, but rather just a historical reference: if a certain urban area (irrelevant of how many civil parishes it covers) meets certain criteria, such as urban density and existing local amenities (hospitals, schools, etc.), then it can petition to be "elevated" to the status of "town" or even "city". It's merely a mark of distinction, and, before 1974, it was reserved to just a very small number of places (which historically had their own local self-rule). With the administrative revision imposed by the new Constitution in 1976, these "titles" are merely cerimonial and have no separate legal, administrative, or political significance. While historically most seats of municipalities have been towns or cities, there is no requirement for this to be true, and, indeed, there have been several amusing anomalies as populations have shifted. A good example was Amadora, pop. ca. 200,000, an extense, dense urban area just bordering the city of Lisbon, which, for a while, enjoyed the status of the largest village of Portugal (it has been since become a city and have its own municipality). Similarly, once the new bridge across the Tagus River was completed, there was a population shift towards the southern margin of the Tagus, and Almada, once little more than a hamlet of fishermen with some restaurants for visitors — who would arrive by ferry — quickly became densely populated as well, also reaching 200,000 or so, and therefore applied for city status and was given its own municipality. In the case of the city of Porto, its across-the-river neighbour Vila Nova de Gaia, as its name implied, was just a small, unsignificant town, mostly associated to the place where the Oporto Wine was produced, as it is located on the southern shore of the Douro river. Over the decades, thanks to the several bridges spanning the Douro and giving easy and fast access to Porto, the town of Gaia grew in population, became one of the largest municipalities of the country, surpassing even Porto (Portugal's historic #2 city) in population, and is today a city with its own municipality as well. These are the more obvious cases.

There are also several other anomalies, such as Loures, also very close Lisbon, which was a small town in the middle of a rural area which historically was one of the farming places producing groceries for the population in Lisbon. It is still quite rural in many regards. With the shuffling of administrative borders, it happened to enclose two very dense urban areas — Odivelas and Sacavém — both of which surpassed Loures in population, amenities, and importance, due to their excellent connections to Lisbon. Both were industrial towns as well as having planned urban areas in the 1950s, with much more historic significance than Loures itself — Odivelas with its 7-century-old monastery, Sacavém with its Portuguese tile manufacture which produced most tiles for the rebuilding of Lisbon after the earthquake from 1755. Eventually, Odivelas and its nearest civil parishes was spun out of Loures, became a city, and was granted its own municipality, bordering neighbouring Amadora. On the other hand, Sacavém, in spite of having acquired city status as well, is still part of the Loures municipality — but far more important, geographically, politically, and economically speaking. Since the rearrangement of the borders with Lisbon due to the 1998 Universal Exhibition, Sacavém's importance grew even more, and has for a long time petitioned the national Government to split from Loures as well. There is, however, a big question of taxes being raised — due to its rural nature, the municipality of Loures mostly gets its taxes from the dense urban areas around Sacavém; it already "lost" its main source of tax revenue, which, at the time, was Odivelas; a further shedding of civil parishes to create a new municipality would mean a loss of revenue which might not afford the now-dubbed "city of Loures" (a title which it eventually also acquired) the ability to sustain the whole of the remaining infrastructure in the municipality.

Much further south, in Sines — a fishermen's town — due to its privileged location, even during the dictatorship area, it was considered interesting to explore this area further, by creating a large port for ocean-grade carriers, where oil tankers could deliver crude, to be pumped through pipelines all the way to Lisbon. Gradually, it acquired its own major power plant and oil refinery, as well as a plethora of other industries required to supply such major endeavours, since Sines is really far away from the next most important urban area, Setúbal. Therefore, the Government, in the 1970s, decided to convert an abandoned pine forest nearby into a urban area, to accomodate up to 100,000 people, who would be employed at the Sines facilities. This place didn't even have a name. Administratively, it belongs to the municipality of Santiago do Cacém, a small town further inland, but it's nevertheless still very close to Sines, and, indeed, much of the workforce for the Sines industry was housed on that urban area as intended. It also included the required amenities for such a potentially large city, including shopping areas, hospitals and clinics, parks, and so forth (it even has an open-space zoological garden where visitors can interact with the wild animals from other continents, which live in a state of semi-freedom instead of permanently caged). Gradually, the local inhabitants started calling their place "Santo André", picking up the name of the closest hamlet, the tiny village of Santo André, with an insignificant population of just a few families; but names have to come from somewhere. When the population reached a certain threshold, it was raised to the status of town, and known as "Vila Nova de Santo André" — to contrast with the "old" hamlet of Santo André, which is called by locals "Aldeia de Santo André" (although that designation is not official) not to mix up the two places. And, finally, even though the plan to reach 100,000 inhabitants was never reached, Santo André nevertheless grew enough in size and importance to become a city of its own.

Now this raised some complex administrative shifts and divisions. Technically speaking, the original hamlet of Santo André was so small that it was not even its own civil parish (although it still has a church there and possibly, at some point in the remote past, it might have been a religious parish). In terms of territory, even though most of the inhabitants have close ties with Sines in one way or the other, it lies within the administrative region supervised by Santiago do Cacém — at the time, freshly raised to the status of "town". Sines proper — the "old" Sines, so to speak — which gives the industrial complex its name has also grown, but it has a limit for expansion: it is also a walled city, and the grounds outside Sines are taken by the several industries. This was, after all, the reason for creating a "new city", so to speak, to house all workers — as Sines was limited in its growth expansion, and Santiago do Cacém was a bit too far away (and lacked the infrastructure and amenities for such an increase in population). This is one of the funniest anomalies where you have two bordering municipalities, historically with little significance, but a huge industrial complex between them, employing tens of thousands of people, most of which, for practical reasons, live on a "new", modern, planned city (now formally raised to that official status), which eclipses the two bordering municipality seats in population (and overall importance), but, by itself, has little more than the oversight of a local civil parish — and even the seat for that is located on the tiny, insignificant hamlet of Santo André, which gives the parish its name, but which is technically not even part of the "City of Santo André" (but lies in its suburbs, so to speak).

Near Lisbon, Cascais and Sintra are possibly the largest population centres, Cascais being the place where traditionally house prices were the highest in the whole of Portugal, due to its bordering the ocean; the old town of Sintra, due to its ecletic architecture from the romantic period of the 19th century, has also always appealed to the wealthy classes and even to the royalty — one of the popular attractions in Sintra, for instance, is a royal castle built after the fashion of "Mad King Ludwig", to whom the King of Portugal was closely related, and which is built on top of a 400m+ mountain with impressive views over a vast area, all the way to Lisbon, over 25km away. Palaces abound on the town proper, which has a completely different cityscape from "typical" Mediterranean villages, and it was sought out by the wealthy classes for ages. Cascais, which is not very far away (measured on a map, at least!), is, by contrast, a beach resort — and has been a beach resort for the royalty as well for over a century, too. It also has its own unique ecletic architectural style — different from the one in Sintra! — copying much of the style favoured on the French and Italian Rivieras, and, indeed, it used to be called "the Portuguese Riviera".

You can obviously read up all the details on both if you really wish, but the point here is that both localities have been associated with wealth, luxury, and the upper classes, for well over 150 years now. The very first private railways offering regular service started to operate between Lisbon and Cascais, and between Lisbon and Sintra. It's no surprise, therefore, that the trend of expanding the city of Lisbon to the west (historically accurate up to the 20th century, where the expansion focused towards the north, while rehabilitating the sparsely populated area of eastern Lisbon, also bordered by the Tagus river), to these two areas with well-developed public transportation, became one focus of population exodus from the city of Lisbon proper; indeed, once Lisbon "absorbed" previously-existing historic municipalities in its immediate neighbourhood, Sintra was left as "all that is not Lisbon". The first municipality that split from Sintra was Cascais. Both were proud of their status as towns, and still use the names "Vila de Cascais" and "Vila de Sintra" frequently, even in official documents.

Both, however, grew to extraordinary sizes, especially Sintra. Even after so many municipalities split from Sintra since then (after Cascais, came Oeiras, then Loures, Amadora, and Odivelas), Sintra is still big, and it rivals the before-mentioned city of Gaia in population size. Like Gaia outgrew Porto in population, Sintra did also eventually outgrow Lisbon itself (Cascais, while not as big, is nevertheless a muncipality with over 200,000 inhabitants, which is not to be shrugged off). But still the two respective municipality seats insisted to the status of being "merely" a "historic town" and refused to be raised to the city status — a situation that persisted well over several decades after far smaller and less significative localities had (proudly) become cities on their own. Very grudgingly, both Sintra and Cascais applied for city status as well, but locals still think of themselves as "living in a quaint little town, just outside Lisbon".

Such anomalies are not that frequent — and I have just mentioned the few I have in mind, there are very possibly many more — which means that there is no alignment between "historic" cities, modern cities, townships... and the real administrative division of the territory into municipalities. As a rule of thumb, every municipality has at least one town (or sometimes one city) which is traditionally its seat of power. But many municipalities, especially closeto the large urban areas of Lisbon and Porto, might contain several towns, or even cities, which sometimes are far more important than the seat of the municipality itself (such as Sacavém in Loures, or Santo André in Santiago do Cacém). Over the decades, therefore, the raising to "town" or "city" level is usually a sign for the National Representative Assembly to re-think the municipal borders once again, and pass laws to shift the boundaries again, mostly to allow for a more fair degree of political representation.

"Aldeias" (lit., villages) are (currently) different kind of place designation, and it essentially follows historical reasons. Usually, they represent any sizable agglomeration of population in a farming or fishing area, and which, in historically distant ties, were close to being self-sufficient. Some might have been towns in the distant past, which lost their status for some reason. Some are just colloquial names for a certain grouping of houses; some acquired that status through a programme to incentive local tourism (cf. Aldeias de Portugal). But most common usage is just the way people refer to their own set of houses.

With that in mind, it can be said that everything in Portugal belongs to a civil parish and to a municipality. Both are administrative and political divisions, with locally elected representatives from among the residents (not only citizens; registered residents can vote, too), via universal suffrage, and with devolved powers from central Government which confers them a degree of self-rule. This is how it stands as of today.

Besides those two levels, which are defined by the National Representative Assembly, civil parishes and municipalities can, voluntarily, organised themselves as a group of interest, thus implicitly partaking from the "third" kind of administrative level mentioned in the Constitution, but such self-organisation does not confer any kind of "special" status whatsoever.

What's my point, really?

TL;DR:

On the paragraph about Portugal:

1. Replace parish with civil parish (with the wikilink!)
2. Add a note explaining that the Constitution does indeed allow for three administrative levels with political power and a degree of self-rule, but the third level ("administrative area") was never implemented on the Portuguese mainland.
3. Remove the confusing sentence regarding towns, parishes, etc. and replace it with something like "In Portugal, the designation of city or town (as well as village) is purely decorative, and has absolutely no impact whatsoever in the territorial division. Some of these designations were inherited from historically existing cities and towns, others refer merely to the presence of a number of amenities and services and relative urban population density.

So why did I write so much?!

Because. That's how I am.

Really, the whole point is preparing in advance a series of argumentations about what and why I propose these suggestions. I'll wait for an appropriate period, and if nobody has a strong argument against my changes, I'll go ahead and change things myself, optionally referring to this talk for clarifications.

For those of you who are programmers: this is the same reason why, on GitHub, we post the issue first, and then send a PR to correct the issue, referring to it. This is the proper way to do things on GitHub.

On the Wikipedia, it's a bit mixed, but unless I find something terribly wrong or hopelessly incomplete, I usually add a topic on the Talk page first and change things later.

Note 1: Writing extremely long texts is not only a pleasure for me, but it is also a way to guarantee that nobody reads it, I can make all the changes I wish, and if anyone reverts the change, I complain and point to my long and extensive topic on the Talk page, where I can prove that I did try to address and engage the community first before making any changes, and since nobody replied, I assumed nobody had anything to complain about my impeccable reasoning.

Note 2: Aye, I'm fully aware that this is a despicable, shameful, perverse way of argumenting. Thanks for noticing!

Note 3: I'm Portuguese. Irony and sarcasm are our second nature. Or perhaps even the first. We learned that from the Brits, but, IMNSHO, we went even further. Shocking, but true. So, take everything I write with a pinch of salt. Or, better, make it a lot of salt. Caveat lector and so forth.

——— Gwyneth Llewelyn (talk) 10:41, 25 October 2024 (UTC)