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Paper short abstract

Post-demolition Lisbon: former residents of Bairro do Relógio use Facebook to mobilise reunions and walks at the former site, resisting stigma and municipal silence while negotiating naming disputes and uneven participation in the neighbourhood’s urban afterlife.

Paper long abstract

Urban governance projects that remove marginalised neighbourhoods often continue after demolition through silence, gaps in official record, and stigmatising public narratives that frame these places as problems rather than histories. This paper examines the post-demolition afterlives of Lisbon’s Bairro do Relógio by asking what displaced residents do with governance once the neighbourhood is gone: how they reclaim presence, reoccupy urban space, and make alternative histories from the street up. The study follows recurring gatherings, picnics, excursions, in which participants revisit former routes, re-identify erased landmarks, and narrate what is no longer materially there, turning absence into a publicly shareable experience. These practices are coordinated through Facebook, used less as a repository of memory than as an infrastructure for mobilising bodies, fixing times and meeting points, circulating practical information, and informally regulating participation.

Methodologically, the paper combines participant observation during reunions and walking interviews, semi-structured interviews, digital ethnography of two online Facebook groups, and archival research attentive to silences and stigma. Findings show that spatial contestation is both outward and inward: residents collectively challenge municipal neglect and stigmatisation by staging modest returns and shared itineraries that re-map the city, while also negotiating internal differences in past status, life trajectory, and later social mobility through disputes over naming, rules of posting, and uneven participation. The paper argues that these practices constitute everyday resistance , curating narratives, and sustaining rhythms of belonging—alongside capitalist urban transformation (Lefebvre 1974).