From green capital of Europe to sustainable city: steps through an urban transformative journey in Lisbon
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From green capital of Europe to sustainable city:

steps through an urban transformative journey in Lisbon

Sandrine Simon

CeiED, Universidade Lusófona, Lisboa, Portugal sandrine.simon.dina@gmail.com

Resumo: 

Whilst Portugal was, for centuries, mainly rural, 1/3 of its population now lives in Lisbon. The increase in its number of inhabitants (1,3 million in 1940; 2.5 millions in 1981) makes Lisbon a place of particular interest when exploring the evolution of urbanism.  Having to face the influx of refugees fleeing World War II, rural populations escaping extreme poverty in the 1950s, and the return of a million Portuguese from ex-colonies after 1974, urban planners had to build in flexibility as soon as ‘urbanismo’ was recognised (Decree 33921 in 1944). From learning to organise a fast-growing multi-cultural city, they had to grasp the implications of Portugal joining the EU in 1986. Later, environmental objectives led Lisbon to win the title of green capital of Europe in 2020. A new context unfolded with the Covid pandemic. This article explores how urbanism in Lisbon evolved in the last 30 years and how moving from a green to a sustainable city could now challenge urbanism even further.

INTRODUCTION

‘Urban issues’, both as a management process, an academic approach and a real increase in cityinhabitants, has been a much more recent phenomenon in Portugal than in other Western European countries - where it emerged in the 19th c. as a response to industrialisation. The ‘urbanism’ approach developed as a response to the pace at which urban population in cities like Lisbon changed, and to the issues that these movements raised. In Portugal, the rate of urbanisation increased from 26,4% in 1970 to 59% in 2005 (Alberto, Fernandes & Seixas, 2018). 

These changes were strongly affected by history: the movements of incoming and outgoing population throughout time reveal some real ‘Portuguese’ specificities. From 1950 until 1981 (when it reached its population peak), the number of inhabitants in Lisbon increased from 1,3 to 2,5 millions. This was a result of a flux of (more than 100 000 in a few months in 1941) refugees fleeing the Second World War and seeking a new home in a then politically neutral Portugal (Léonard, 2018); strong movements of population coming from rural areas and fleeing extreme poverty (1950-1960) and also of the return of nearly a million Portuguese from ex-colonies (Angola, Cap Verde and Mozambique, in particular), after the revolution (1974). Such fast demographic changes led to the birth of ‘clandestine neighbourhoods’ in the periphery (Caetano et al., 2005) on pieces of land originally targeted at agriculture, tolerated by local authorities who were badly prepared for such changes. Although legal instruments such as Decree 174/76 of 1976 were developed to equip public administration with the necessary means to fight real estate speculation and to solve the accommodation crisis, the public administration hardly used them – partly because they didn’t know them well and partly because of lack of financial resources to implement new measures.  

Developing an understanding of such changes and managing them was very influenced by the political context. The term ‘urbanism’ has been attributed to Cerda (responsible for the extension Plan of Barcelona) who used it for the first time in 1856. From then on, urbanism has been considered an “intentional process, obeying specific techniques to construct territories and to give a holistic vision of the city and of the scientific production of space” (Camarinhas, 2011, p.10). In Portugal, ‘urbanismo’ got its legal recognition with Decree 33921 in 1944. The system of urban regulation intended as “a social science interpretation of the organisation of a city, emerged from a democratic process only initiated in 1974” (Padeiro & Marques da Costa, 2013, p.8) and was influenced by the critiques of urban theories that emerged  elsewhere in the 1960s and that highlighted the hybrid, eclectic and somehow confusing character of urbanism. As Camarinhas (2011) explains, the broaden participation of a variety of stakeholders and social groups in urbanism, as well as techniques to enhance such participation were developed to such an extent that, in the 1980s, it was thought that “urbanism became an impossibility since it emerged from the notion of ‘the city’ that does not exist anymore. (…) A new approach [was] needed to envisage the ‘production of the city’, based on trans-disciplinarity, the articulation of various scales, and of a plurality of actors. The introduction of new methods to produce what is ‘urban’ in the age of globalisation – what some called ‘postmodern urbanism, democratic urbanism or ‘trans-urbanism’ – therefore [called] for a new major step in urbanism” (p. 17). In places, this  led to a progressive move towards a more territorial type of land management or, in French, ‘Aménagement du Territoire’, defined by Desjardin (2021, p.11) as “a collective and pro-active set of initiatives that aim at meeting political objectives through the transformation of the spatial and temporal organisation of the society”. Authors such as Nunes da Silva (1993) stressed that the legislative and regulatory traditions relative to land management existing at the time was very new if not immature in Portugal. Despite this, in the 1980s, a strong consensus developed around the idea that Lisbon needed to be rehabilitated, giving itself the possibility to turn towards an international environment likely to “open profitable paths of expansion linked to progress and globalisation” (Breviglieri, 2019, p.12). It is in that period that our story begins, when Portugal joined the EU. In the 30 years that have passed, one could say that urbanism moved from one extreme to another, initially centred on the market, then enabling the city to be awarded the title of green capital of Europe, and now widening horizons towards understanding better how Lisbon could become a sustainable city. Whilst the first part of this chapter takes us through these historical steps, the second explores how urbanism can be articulated beyond green indicators in view of tacking all dimensions of sustainability and, in the process, of facilitating a new phase in urbanism approaches and objectives.     

PART 1. THREE HISTORICAL STEPS IN URBANISM

1.1.Joining Europe; the neo-liberalism approach of urbanism as a ‘key to success’

From an urbanistic perspective, the rehabilitation of Lisbon in the 1980s was an ambitious and difficult task. It was tackled from two very different angles. On the one hand, the concelhos (municipalities) saw their margin of manoeuvre enlarged as a result of a general tendency towards de-centralisation, and became equipped with the ‘Planos Directos Municipais’ (PDM). The PDMs were created to encourage the harmonious development of the area covered by the concelhos, and used to guide land management, the transformation of the territory, and to envisage inter-communal perspectives through the grouping of municipalities to operationalise certain strategies – which happened very infrequently. However, at the time, the town administrations were not only very ill-experienced (Catita, 2009) but often confronted to private consultants in charge of the elaboration of the plans (Alves et al., 1993). As a consequence, the Portuguese approach to urbanism and aménagement du territoire therefore jumped wholeheartedly into a vision of both approaches that was very much centred on (second angle) the market – so much so that it made Luis Mendes assert that “the market and freedom to compete ferociously asserted themselves as the unique organisational principle around which the urban life and the territory were to be organised” (2017, p. 488).

It was therefore around this approach that the State, municipalities, property owners and real estate developers created a subtle and partially implicit coalition, leading to the neoliberal urban policies that prevailed for twenty years. Such alliance led to the management of very heavy investments aimed at acquiring, building, rehabilitating and ensuring that real estate would become profitable and possible to purchase privately. It also led to the transformation of Lisbon into one of the most creative metropolis at a European or even world scale, encompassing entrepreneurial poles, FabLabs, innovation centres, and numerous commercial centres. This phase of urban restructuration was very sudden and it has been difficult to measure their genuine social consequences as well as other impacts generated by a real fragmentation of the urban fabric, with urban empty spaces, wasteland, cultivated pieces of land right close to sets of flats, residential areas or commercial centres and the devitalisation of historic centres (dos Santos, 2011). Although, at the beginning of the 1980s, the State created the priority areas for urban development (ADUP) and the priority areas for construction (ACP) in view of controlling the very strong property speculation, the city centre of Lisbon lost 110 000 inhabitants between 1991 and 2001, and then 16 000 inhabitants between 2001 and 2011, whilst the rest of the Lisbon Metropolitan area gained 224 000 inhabitants and 160 000 in the latest decade.  46% of accommodation became vacant in the Baixa historical centre (EPUL, 2007).         

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