Lisboa, cidade lazer-investimento: reconfigurações do habitar

Abstract

We are in 2018. They ask me to think about the Futures of Lisbon. I am left with the theme of housing, which implies a broader reflection on the very transformation of the city and, of course, of society. I accept the challenge, starting from the following principle: any approach regarding the future is an exercise of reflection on the possible developments of the dynamics which mark the present. A critical exercise, but also relatively uncommitted in terms of scientific rigour. An exercise which is more or less creative and necessarily framed by uncertainty. Thus, I begin the essay with a brief approach on two fundamental changes, already underway, which I consider shall shape Lisbon in the future: the intensification of urban globalisation and the entry of the city into this dynamic. I then identify two key questions that, starting from these fundamental changes, I consider (re)founders of the possible futures of the city. I then turn to the reflection more directly focused on the futures of Lisbon and, assuming a logic of intensification of the dynamics in progress, I imagine the strengthening of its leisure-investment-city condition in the global panorama. I end with a broader reflection on the reconfigurations of housing of the Lisbon of the future, resulting from this new condition, and which will generally be framed by the accentuation of an emerging problem: housing unaffordability. This reflection is structured in three themes: i) the primacy of housing in the political, media, civic and social agenda; ii) the change in the practice of housing and the return of the ‘exiztenzminimum to the greatest number’; iii) the reconfiguration of the geographies of the city and the directions of its future sprawl.