In the first two weekends of September, Il Salto, the Italian magazine and friends of Political Critique, followed the first six stops of this journey. What we saw provides a deep picture of the housing problems in a country at a crossroads between the austerity of previous years and new proposals of a left wing government, in a moment in which tourism is rapidly changing the face of both Lisbon and Porto. Meanwhile at the walls of the city there are people who still live in shacks, who run the risk of seeing themselves kicked out without any guaranteed alternative. [...]
It was a move from a small ghetto to a bigger ghetto. Now the inhabitants of Casal da Boba pay rent for apartments that in just a few years have began to present many problems, and lack basic maintenance. Not only this: the inhabitants feel discriminated against, simply for the fact of living in a neighbourhood stigmatised as “problematic”, a centre of crime and drug dealing. Police violence, as a result, has focused on people of African descent, as some recent episodes have unfortunately confirmed. [...]
The idea that tourism is the only economic resource that can save Portugal from the crisis is put to the test. For while tourism brings great wealth to big investors, it also offers salaries that are lower than in other industries. Precarity and underemployment are very concentrated in the city precisely where tourism has become dominant. What needs to be respected, the event concludes, is the ‘right to the city’: giving space to more sustainable and socially important sectors.
