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- Ghosts of colonialism in the post-imperial city: a history of informal settlements in Lisbon, 1970-2010Publication . Ascensão, EduardoIn the late 1980s, fifteen years after the Portuguese democratic revolution, it was estimated that around 200,000 people lived in informal settlements in the country (AML 1997; Númena 2003: 143; Ascensão 2015a: 52). This was the peak of a long process of internal migration to the Porto and Lisbon metropolitan areas since the 1960s and immigration to Lisbon since the mid-1970s from the newly independent Portuguese-speaking African countries Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The most vulnerable of these populations had been prized out of the housing market and immigrants were left out of the eligible pool for the diminutive public housing system; in effect, they had been “led” to the interstices of the urban fabric to look for or build the accommodation they could not find or afford in the regular city. Informal settlements were then tacitly accepted by the state because of its inability to provide housing for everyone. The state turned a blind eye while the white Portuguese internal migrants and the Black African postcolonial immigrants who constituted the urban poor settled in shanties or similar structures in areas that had become unprofitable for agriculture but were not yet subject to the instruments of urban planning such as surveying or zoning (Salgueiro 1977; Rodrigues 1989; Nunes and Serra 2004; Pinto 2015).
- Postcolonial GeographiesPublication . Ascensão, EduardoPost-colonial is a qualifier that identifies both a context – that is, a country, a city or a polit ical regime after independence from colonial rule – and a theoretical and epistemological perspective on that same or related contexts. Such a perspective not only looks for and makes explicit the conditions of oppression and domination pertaining to colonialism but, crucially, aims at deconstructing the knowl edge forms associated with the latter and, in the process, integrates the viewpoint of the oppressed or the colonized. The first is essentially a political and historical marker for describing a period or a place, while the second is an ontological shift to see from the eyes of the hitherto invisible, racialized or exoticized, and integrate their worldviews into a more complete, non-Eurocentric anal ysis. In the latter sense, ‘post-colonial’ is not merely an adjective but a mode of knowing, and it is the epistemological basis for the field of knowledge known as post-colonial studies, with its ‘impulse to invert, expose, transcend or deconstruct knowledges and practices associated with colonialism’ (Sidaway, 2000, p. 592).
- Urban gardening and post-austerity in Lisbon: between subaltern urbanism and green gentrifcationPublication . Ascensão, Eduardo; Ginn, FranklinOn 12th January 2020, a municipal initiative to plant 100,000 trees across Lisbon began. Several hundred people joined the efort at four locations near large public housing estates. The feel-good event drew families with young children and around 20,000 trees were planted. The following day work began on a new urban park at Praça de Espanha, a major trafc intersection where thousands of cars pass each day to and from the city centre. The latter €16 million project will connect the celebrated Gulbenkian Gardens to the Monsanto Green Corridor and is part of a broader regeneration plan for the Avenida de Berna and Praça de Espanha area, which in the next decade is expected to be consolidated into a new fnancial centre. Both initiatives are part of the Lisbon 2020 Green Capital of Europe programme, an award which has been used by the City Council as the centrepiece of Lisbon’s push to re-fashion itself as a green city. They capture the way environmental celebrations tend to oscillate between an afective, altruist dimension and a competitive one. The frst plays with people’s desire to ‘contribute as best they can’ to a better urban environment, provide simple ecological experiences for their children, and produce shaded space that reduces overall urban temperatures; the second illustrates the type of city plans associated with green growth and green gentrifcation, whereby investment on quality, sophisticated green space is part of broader plans to attract capital and reconfgure particular spaces to attract more afuent populations (Anguelovski et al., 2019) [...]
- Viver numa casa do Siza: a experiência da arquitetura de autor na Malagueira, ÉvoraPublication . Pereira, Juliana; Costa, Ana Catarina; Carmo, André; Ascensão, EduardoEste artigo retoma os estudos sobre a casa e o habitar desenvolvidos pela Antropologia e pela Arquitetura portuguesas, acrescentando-lhes um olhar vindo das geografias da arquitetura, para de seguida explorar a forma como os habitantes de edifícios de arquitetura de autor experienciam as suas casas e os seus bairros no quotidiano. Focando-se no caso do bairro da Malagueira em Évora, projetado por Álvaro Siza Vieira no final dos anos 70 para albergar populações de baixos rendimentos, mas entretanto tendo integrado uma constelação de populações mais variada, o artigo procura responder a perguntas sobre o que significa viver numa casa e num bairro projetados por um arquiteto consagrado, como se relacionam os modos de viver dentro da casa com o desenho e a estética relativamente austeras da arquitetura de Siza, e finalmente como é experienciada a relação com determinados elementos arquitetónicos que fazem a casa funcionar. Baseado em trabalho de campo etnográfico onde se usou a etnometodologia Show Us Your Home (Mostre-nos a Sua Casa), o artigo preenche a lacuna da relativa ausência de estudos sobre a experiência da arquitetura de Siza pelos seus moradores.
- Inhabiting auteur architecture: tracing the residents’ experience of Álvaro Siza’s Bouça housing estatePublication . Costa, Ana Catarina; Machado, Marta; Catrica, Paulo; Ascensão, EduardoThis paper explores what it is like to live in a celebrated buildingcreated by a renowned architect. Drawing on conceptualizations ofhome and dwelling as cultural as well as sociotechnical events, itintersects such theoretical lineages with the literature on living infamous residential buildings and asks how individual inhabitation isconstrued by residents. Based on ethnographic research at ÁlvaroSiza’s Bouça housing estate in Porto, Portugal, it shows the influ-ence on everyday life of elements such as the material value ofcelebrated housing, gentrification and architectural tourism in suchplaces, as well as of inside elements such as the experience ofresidential space conceived by a famous architect or the interactionwith ‘micro-technologies’ in the building. We argue that inhabitingauteur architecture is a multi-faceted cultural, sociotechnical andpolitical event, yet one that is reworked distinctly according to classand individual takes on the building’s social history. In doing so, thepaper’s contribution is to re-insert class back into a networked,decentred analysis of architecture in geographical studies.