Lisbon’s phantom limb syndrome: Lineaments of spectral ethnography

Abstract

The contemporary urban condition is, increasingly, one of fragmentation, as cities enter less and less fathomable circuits of financial speculation. As a result, urban spaces are stretched and bent, folded and hollowed out in many ways. While these dynamics compose and recompose planetary urbanisation at an unintelligible rhythm, the normative image of urban imaginaries adds cosmetic layers on the urban, making physically distant neighbourhoods overlap and physically adjacent neighbourhoods drift apart. How to account for this condition? How to make sense of the experience of fragmentation that ensues? And, how to do so by meeting urban fragments on their own terms rather than explaining them (away) via structural determinism and dialectical elucidation? This is the challenge this chapter takes up, looking at the riverfront of Marvila and Beato, two boroughs on the east side of Lisbon, Portugal. In the last decade, the Marvila and Beato Riverfront (MBR), a tiny stretch of land, sitting between the river Tagus and the railway line, has been drifting away, socio-economically, financially and aesthetically, from the wider part of their boroughs, sitting west of the railway, around which unactualised futures, abandoned pasts and alternative presents have been tangled up. The chapter seeks to attend to these stratifications by exploring their historical development and attuning to their spectral materiality.