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Contribution short abstract:

Lisbon’s housing crisis disproportionately affects racialized residents in informally build neighborhoods. This paper explores how Black Commoning—mutual aid, care, and solidarity—shapes resistance to displacement, challenging racialized exclusions and envisioning alternative urban futures.

Contribution long abstract:

Lisbon is facing a severe housing crisis that disproportionately affects racialized residents in informally built neighborhoods. Many of these areas emerged in the 1970s through postcolonial migration from Portugal’s former African colonies. While often marginalized, these neighborhood struggles are also examples of black commoning, where residents reclaim space, build solidarities, and negotiate agency in the face of displacement.

This paper explores how commoning emerges as both last resort and a political practice. Mutual aid networks, shared infrastructures of care, and collective organizing sustain long-term mobilization and contest exclusionary urban governance. Affective dynamics play a key role in bridging social differences within the housing movement. Anger and indignation are mobilized against state actors enforcing evictions and financial capital restructuring the city. At the same time, practices of care—such as attentive listening, communal meals, and organizing transportation between peripheral neighborhoods and the city center—forge solidarities and bind people to the movement. These acts of commoning not only resist capitalist extraction and state neglect but also create alternative urban life rooted in care.

This paper asks how the material and affective dimensions of black commoning shape resistance to urban displacement. It does so by showing how residents struggling against demolitions of their neighborhood negotiate through commoning practices the tensions between individual needs and collective commitments. By situating these housing struggles within the framework of Black Commoning, I argue that they are not just local phenomena but part of a broader history of negotiations of urban belonging, challenging racialized exclusions while envisioning alternative infrastructures of care and solidarity.