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Paper Short Abstract:

The presentation investigates shifting frameworks of collective agency endorsed or challenged by state and third-sector institutions in the context of urban development policies in Lisbon, focusing on people’s struggle for decent housing in three pivotal moments in Portuguese democratic history.

Paper Abstract:

This presentation is an inquiry into the multi-layered relationship between temporalities, city-making, and agency. The aim is to investigate shifting frameworks of collective agency that have been either endorsed, contested, or mystified by state and third-sector institutions in the context of urban development policies for people living in precarious housing conditions in Portugal. To do so, I undertake a comparative examination of two pivotal 20th-century housing policies — the first enacted during the democratic transition of 1974-75 and the second in the aftermath of Portugal’s entry into the EU single market, in the 1990s — plus a participatory development strategy for "priority intervention neighbourhoods" launched concurrently with the implementation of austerity measures in 2011. Relying on ongoing historiographic and ethnographic research in a cluster of social neighbourhoods and former slum territory in Lisbon, the emphasis lies on policies’ participatory mechanisms and people’s daily struggles and negotiations with state institutions. The study illustrates how collective agency was initially encouraged, then suppressed, and later “bureaucratised” by the state, aligning with local and global trends in urban planning and capitalist accumulation regimes. At a theoretical level, this contribution prompts an understanding of how agency is distributed over time and capitalised upon through generations — both as a consequence, and in spite of, state intervention — placing the concept in strict dialogue with Bourdieu’s notion of social capital. Simultaneously, this contribution sheds light on the porous and unsettled nature of hegemonic structures governing people’s action and underlines the agency-disguising mechanisms of participatory instruments.