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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
In 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).
Description
Keywords
Colonialism Postimperial city Informal settlements Lisbon 1970-2010
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Ascensão, E. (2023). ‘Ghosts of colonialism in the post-imperial city: a history of informal settlements in Lisbon, 1970-2010’. In N. Domingos & E. Peralta. (eds.). Colonial legacies of the Portuguese empire: memory, citizenship and popular culture (pp. 83-105). Bloomsbury