Under Construction - searching for future ruins in Lisbon's eastern riverfront

Keywords: urban imaginary, urban ruins, spectral ethnography, Lisbon
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Walter Benjamin conceived urban fossils as ‘the survival of past history within the present’, the hollowed-out artefacts in which history is petrified, naturalised, and thus exposed; and urban ruins as the ‘failed material’ of a historical era, an allegorical reality of a latent, yet effective code. This program can be reoriented towards the future: future fossils as the hollowed out material of unactualised futures; future ruins, embodying the submerged contradictions of future trajectories, already existent although invisible in the emptied landscapes of the present. In this presentation, I will apply this methodology to Lisbon's eastern riverfront, an area with a complex relation with the imaginary the city is busy branding. Here, a railway cuts a long, narrow stretch of land facing the Tagus, physically and socio-economically severed from the rest of Marvila and Beato districts. This strip, dubbed the ‘trendiest’ of Lisbon by specialised magazines and estate developers’ brochures, soon to be home to start up incubators and luxury apartment complexes, is a fragmented landscape where the hypothetical trajectories of possible futures intersect the holes, scaffoldings, metal skeletons and cranes of its present under construction. Such ‘future ruins’, as Robert Smithson would have it, expose the submerged contradictions of future trajectories that are already existent, although invisible, in the emptied landscapes of the present. How to engage with these spectral realities and their spatial and temporal fragmentation of the city? The paper addresses this question conceptually, methodologically, and aesthetically, drawing the lineament of a spectral ethnography of the urban.