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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
This 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.
Description
Keywords
Cyborg Micro-history Informal Settlement internal immigrants postcolonial immigrants Lisbon
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Ascensão, Eduardo. (2015). The slum multiple: a cyborg micro-history of an informal settlement in Lisbon. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(5), 948-964
Publisher
John Wiley and Sons