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Paper short abstract

Lagares do Alvará is an interactive piece that reimagines Mouraria, in Lisbon, as a self-sufficient community, using Fortnite in conjunction with 3D scans. In doing so, it provides a speculative sandbox for imagining alternatives to neoliberal urbanism through tangible site-specific fabulations.

Paper long abstract

How might fabulatory practices inspired by critical speculative design expand collective capacities to imagine alternatives to neoliberal urbanism?

This paper presents Lagares do Alvará, a site-specific virtual environment built within Fortnite using re-appropriated game assets and 3D scans captured in Mouraria, Lisbon. This historically marginalized neighborhood is undergoing accelerating transformation driven by tourism and municipal renewal. Grounded in conversations with local actors engaged in documenting gentrification's effects, the project seeks to propose a counter-imaginary, one in which Mouraria is self-sufficient and flourishing, or at the very least in which its residents are finding ways to affirm their right to the city and resist what Harvey calls the governance of visibility imposed by the city. The project seeks to explore how the staging of care, and cooperation in virtual site-specific environments, might participate in bringing such a reality closer.

We argue that this fabulation functions as a sandbox in which active tinkering with relations, values, and the contestation of urban spaces can be encouraged. Drawing on Le Guin's carrier bag theory of fiction, we propose that site-specific virtual environments can serve to hold residents' spatial knowledge, relational histories, and alternative visions of the future against the "urban smoothing". In doing so, they open speculative possibilities that resist short-term profiteering and imagine new social infrastructures for collective interdependence.

While the project's participatory dimensions remain in development, we reflect critically on its potential as a method for caring world-making at the intersection of speculative design, urban governance, and community-based futures thinking.