Ghosts of colonialism in the post-imperial city: a history of informal settlements in Lisbon, 1970-2010

Abstract

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).