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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).
- 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...
- 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.
- Temporalities of onward migration: long-term temporariness, cyclical labour arrangements and lived time in the cityPublication . McGarrigle, Jennifer; Ascensão, EduardoThis chapter thus seeks to explore the temporal and spatial dimensions of Lisbon as an interlude in ongoing migration projects. It is based on fieldwork conducted in the ambit of a project on the socio-spatial integra tion of migrants living in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (McGarrigle, 2016). While the study was wider in its scope – including further neigh bourhood case studies and Portuguese-speaking post-colonial migrantion populations with historical links to the country´s history – in this chapter we focus on a sub-sample of more recent migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. It draws on narratives from 45 interviews on migration trajectories, the process of settling in the city, experiences of living in Lisbon and future migration aspirations. Interviews were conducted, following snowball sampling, between 2012 and 2014 in two areas important for South Asian migrants living and entering the city: the diverse inner-city neighbourhood of Mouraria and the suburban area of Odivelas, where contacts were made at a Sikh place of worship (Gurd wara) for Punjabi-born people (a relatively recently settled community in Lisbon).1 The sample is largely male (42) due to difficulties in interview ing females (three), who are fewer in number and less present in the public sphere. Time of arrival in Portugal ranges between 1996 and 2014; however the vast majority arrived from around 2006 onwards
- Emplaced mobilities: Lisbon as a translocality in the migration journeys of Punjabi Sikhs to EuropePublication . McGarrigle, Jennifer; Ascensão, EduardoThe arrival in Portugal of recent migrants from the Indian subcontinent is normally a secondary movement from within Europe tied to the search for a regular pathway into legal integration in the EU. However, as favourable migration policy is not paired with easy economic integration onward migration is common. We argue that such complex migration strategies cannot be amply explored through an origin–destination model; instead we suggest that a translocal perspective provides a framework to examine connections and experiences of emplacement in places of passage/reception like Lisbon. Through a qualitative study of the migration journeys and emplaced practices of Punjabi migrants in Lisbon, our findings highlight relationality between multiple scales, elucidating how agency and structure interact at micro and macro levels in shaping migration experiences and outcomes. We show how the materiality of local community structures ensures the navigation of daily life in the city and provides pathways toward legality contributing to wider mobility regimes. Moreover, we illustrate how onward migration represents an individual strategy to realise different aspects of integration in other EU destinations challenging nation-statebound understandings of citizenship/settlement and integration.
- The slum multiple: a cyborg micro-history of an informal settlement in LisbonPublication . Ascensão, EduardoThis article proposes a cyborg reading of the process of informal settlement by internal and postcolonial immigrants in Lisbon’s periphery from the 1970s to the present. Cyborg does not stand for a neo-organicist or cybernetic understanding of the informal city but rather for the conjunction of the multiple enactments of city life under conditions of urban informality––in this case the fourfold combination of history/migration; architecture/low-fi technologies; inhabitation/body/memory; and governmentality/ urban capital. The 40-year event of settlement and inhabitation is presented through an ethnographic micro-history of one neighbourhood in particular, with a strong focus on slum dwellers’ life stories, on the details of the artefact-machines they have built, their informal dwellings, and on their social and mental experience of place. Responding to recent calls for multidisciplinary ethnographies of informality, the article brings the specificity of Lisbon’s informal settlements––their growth based in postcolonial rather than rural migrations––into current debates on informal urbanisms and geographies of sociotechnical urban assemblages.