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- Slum gentrificationPublication . Ascensão, EduardoThis chapter makes a strong and very convincing case for slum gentrification. It is defined as a process of capital or material investment in poor and informal built environments, which can be associated with a new (or renewed) interest in the cultures of such places by mainstream urban cultures (in a city or globally), followed by changes in the built environment related to upgrading or renewal projects in those areas and resulting in the partial or total displacement of incumbent populations from the sites of investment. Slum gentrification can occur in the Global South, but also the Global North, it is an example of planetary gentrification. Evidence for slum gentrification across the world is varied and undeniable. It is, however, a contested topic that requires further research, especially longitudinal studies and bold and innovative research that will get policy makers to listen.
- Interfaces of informality: when experts meet informal settlersPublication . Ascensão, EduardoWhat happens at the interface of states and urban poor populations that live in informal settlements? How are academic disciplines, such as law, architecture or economics, and technical instruments, such as computer software, summoned to the interactions between experts from state or city governments and the laypeople whose housing and lives the former’s work is meant to improve? This paper reflects on these questions as it examines two different experiments, one historical and another from the recent past, in housing provision or amelioration for the residents of informal settlements. In post-revolutionary Portugal, the SAAL (Servic¸o de Apoio Ambulato´ rio Local) housing program (1974–76) included ‘technical’ brigades of legal, architectural and economic experts tasked to help shanty town dwellers improve their housing conditions, either by assisted self-building or classic new-build. It was a clear example of the progressive urban politics of the time, or dialogical technical democracy avant la lettre. Some 30 years later, in Lisbon during the late 2000s, as a part of an urban regeneration program devised within the framework of multicultural urban politics and delegative forms of democracy, a detailed survey of non- and sub-standard houses was carried out with a bespoke computer software, which aimed at representing the technical feasibility of rehabilitation, rather than replacement, of those dwellings. Both experiments constituted platforms with the stated objective of working for the community and through which new state–citizen relationships were to be forged with the urban poor, but how were the latter’s knowledges and wishes integrated?
- O património público dever ser usado para responder às solicitações de cada tempo: Interview with Paula Marques, City Councilor of LisbonPublication . Estevens, Ana; Ascensão, Eduardo; Cachado, RitaPaula Marques é vereadora da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, com os pelouros da Habitação e do Desenvolvimento Local. Licenciada em Teatro com pós-graduação em Ciência Política (ISCTE-IUL, 2013), ajudou a fundar o Movimento Cidadãos por Lisboa em 2007. Entre 2009 e 2013 foi assessora e deputada municipal, tendo em 2013 sido eleita vereadora como independente do Movimento Cidadãos Por Lisboa nas listas do Partido Socialista, mandato que mantém actualmente. Nesta entrevista aborda questões relacionadas com o balanço do PER em Lisboa, o Programa de Renda Acessível de Lisboa, o papel dos seus pelouros no mitigar dos problemas resultantes da atual atratividade imobiliária de Lisboa e dos correspondentes processos de gentrificação, bem como quais as cidades com cujas políticas habitacionais se revê.
- ‘A Habitação é para as pessoas!’: Interview with Ana Pinho, Secretary of State for HousingPublication . Ascensão, Eduardo; Cachado, Rita; Estevens, AnaAna Pinho é Secretária de Estado da Habitação e foi responsável pelo lançamento da Nova Geração de Políticas de Habitação (NGPH), entre as quais se incluem programas como o 1º Direito – Programa de Apoio ao Acesso à Habitação, para famílias em situação habitacional grave, ou o Programa de Arrendamento Acessível. Arquitecta, doutorada em Planeamento Urbano (FA-UTL, 2009), trabalhou como investigadora na área da reabilitação urbana entre 2001 e 2012 no LNEC, tendo mais tarde uma passagem pela FundiEstamo, empresa de gestão de activos imobiliários públicos. Nesta entrevista aborda questões sobre a capacidade de implementação do 1º Direito, os princípios subjacentes aos programas de realojamento e de rendas acessíveis, o acesso à habitação face à atractividade imobiliária de Lisboa e Porto para investidores internacionais bem como os seus modelos de habitação internacionais de referência.
- 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) [...]
- Slum gentrification in Lisbon, Portugal: displacement and the imagined futures of an informal settlementPublication . Ascensão, EduardoWhen Lisbon is presented in touristic and official discourses, it is often the city’s post-imperial culture that comes to the forefront. The city and its monuments are associated with the history of its Navigators and with the Portuguese Empire, and many elements are presented as ‘remnants of empire’. The city centre contains different historical layers (such as a 13th-century Moor neighbourhood, elements of the 16th-century maritime world or late-18th-century rationalist urban design; see França, 2008) but the one thing linking five centuries of history together is the reference to empire. Heroic navigation, scientific expeditions, settlement colonialism and miscegenation, all are...
- ‘Estamos numa febre de especulação pela procura de mais-valias’: interview with Rita Silva, President of Associação HabitaPublication . Cachado, Rita; Estevens, Ana; Ascensão, EduardoRita Silva é presidente da Habita, uma associação independente que luta pelo Direito à Habitação e à Cidade. Técnica de Desenvolvimento Comunitário, trabalhou como investigadora e é actualmente doutoranda na área da financeirização da habitação (CES-UC, 2017-presente). Tem sido uma das principais figuras na luta pelo direito à habitação em Portugal nos últimos 15 anos. Nesta entrevista aborda questões como a capacidade dos movimentos associativos e ativistas influenciarem o processo político, o risco de perda de habitação por que muitos agregados passam atualmente ou a ligação com outros coletivos internacionais de luta pela habitação.
- Autonomy, erasure, and persistence in the urban gardening commonsPublication . Ginn, Franklin; Ascensão, EduardoCollective gardening spaces have existed across Lisbon, Portugal for decades. This article attends to the makeshift natures made by black migrants from Portugal’s former colonies, and the racial urban geography thrown into relief by the differing fortunes of white Portuguese community gardening spaces. Conceptualising urban gardens as commons-in-the-making, we explore subaltern urbanism and the emergence of autonomous gardening commons on the one hand, and the state erasure, overwriting or construction of top-down commons on the other. While showing that urban gardening forges commons of varying persistence, we also demonstrate the ways through which the commons are always closely entwined with processes of enclosure. We further argue that urban gardening commons are divergent and cannot be judged against any abstract ideal of the commons. In conclusion, we suggest that urban gardening commons do not have a “common” in common.