This research is an approach to the collective identities of class (working class), gender and generation based on the discourses on work, masculinities and feminities and on youth from the mid-twentieth century to the past eighties. The urban peripheries of some of the large cities of southern Europe, between 1950 and 1990, constitute an adequate space for this type of analysis on the construction of collective identities and their social representations. Ordering the research having as main analytical categories the city, class, gender and generation places this work in the multidisciplinary field and inscribes it within the framework of urban history, sociology and geography (HARVEY, 2003; WACQUANT, 2008 ; OYÓN, 2003), of the sociocultural history of the working class (ELEY, 2008; BABIANO, 2012), of gender studies (SCOTT, 1986; ROSE, 2012; NASH, 2014) and, finally, puts it in contact with the perspectives of the studies on youth and generation carried out from the field of anthropology, sociology and cultural studies (MARTÍN CRIADO, 1998; FEIXA, 1991; HALL & JEFFERSON, 2006). This is also a comparative history investigation (BURKE, 1996), for which a diachronic approach has been adopted. One of its objectives is to propose a model for the study of the construction processes of the “peripheral cities” in the Iberian Peninsula and during a temporary period of almost half a century. The metropolitan areas chosen to carry out the research were Barcelona and Madrid, incorporating the city of Porto a posteriori for comparison. With the turn of the century the dissolution of the popular and interclass city took place to give way to the proletarian city in the European countries. However, in both the Spanish and Portuguese cases, this process of bankruptcy of the popular city will take place under the two longest-lived contemporary dictatorships in Western Europe. During this stage the image of a peculiar “proletarian city” will appear associated with the “peripheral city” made up of new suburban neighborhoods, built in the first urban areas of the big cities. This study, in the first place, identifies and analyzes from its cultural dimension the masculinized values of the industrial working class to ask itself about how the archetypes of class, gender and generation evolved and were related within these urban communities. Second, it examines the social tensions and fractures that arise from social practices in the neighborhoods. Thirdly, it analyzes how the periphery of the city was represented as “red”, mobilized, anti-Franco and revolutionary in front of the big city, center of power, conservative, bourgeois and mesocratic, and how, from the end of the seventies , this model of city identified with the “red belts” will enter into crisis. The repertoire of documentary sources used includes primary archival sources (municipal urban planning reports and files; urban guides; anti-Franco social and political movements), hemerographic sources (official press and clandestine press) and oral sources (collections of different archives and creation of own oral sources), to which are added literary sources (popular novels and radio soap operas), film and music. This plural nature of the sources is the most appropriate to address a sociocultural study on the chosen object of study.
