From the periphery to the center, maps that tell Lisbon beyond geography
There is no longer Curraleira on the maps, but there is – in the minds of those who also live in the tall buildings that were built there in 2001. And the Casal da Boba neighborhood, in Amadora, is not what the residents call it: it is known as 503, reflection of the structure of the neighborhood – 5 buildings lined up, another 3 on the other side and a park (0) between them. In Alta de Lisboa, “people who buy a house today [lá] say they live in Alta, but others are from PER 7 [um dos bairros de realojamento PER, de Lisboa]for example, and kids say they live in BGQ, because this is the old neighborhood of Quinta Grande”.
This is how António Brito Guterres opened a exhibition “Maps are too, maps aren’t either”, at Teatro do Bairro Alto, last Thursday (May 19th). The shows maps (social ones and the Metropolitan Area, exhibition of other maps) and the Metropolitan Area, where traditional exhibition and other cart.
Altogether, there are seven maps created with the coordination of António Brito Guterres, Fundação Aga Khan da Mensagem and members of the board of the previous conference collected “Os are also”. And that caused astonishment in the public who visit them: they have as music, the names of social neighborhoods, the idea of criminality, themes, those who live on the coasts of the city and the infrastructures. In addition to a free map.
Map 1: My neighborhood, my neighborhood, what’s your name?
In the dark room, all we see upon entering is an illuminated screen with Lisbon inside. But it’s not Lisbon that you know. “The green spots you are seeing are what city councils [da AML] points out as social neighborhoods and the perception of those who live in them is quite different”, begins by explaining António Brito Guterres.
In teamwork with Nuno Trigueiro, they designed a new seal for each neighborhood, aware of “a great disaffection between the nomenclatures used for social neighborhoods and those that the people there use”.
This is the case of Curraleira, Casal da Boba and Alta de Lisboa.
Map 2: What is your music?
Even when we draw them through music, a new map is drawn. It’s just that Lisbon isn’t just about Alfama’s fado. In the places where Rodrigues is bisaálias and the Alentejo is even heard, “there are young people who imitate the corner and their music, in their homes”. Who remembers him is Nuno Barbosa, coming from PER 7.
The digital map dedicated to music shows the locations of 300 musicians, almost all of them rap musicians, within a radius of 100 kilometers, who were born and grew up in the neighborhoods marked with a seal – those considered “social”.
This is where the two maps intersect. Nuno, the no, does not exist remembering how, “months a lot of transport between them” [artistas]connect connect with the music, that will all”. Problems, complaints and doubts are similar for those who live always feeling on the periphery.
Mynda Guevara seems to be a household name, which asks to go through the list looking for new artists. “Oh. Everyone knows Mynda.” And the Red Chickasfrom Arrentela?
Nuno Bara says that he has more opportunities to move than they do, but the country they use for digital platforms like Youtube faces of digital people has grown.
And how do they finance themselves?, asks the audience. “Go sing to my land, go sing to your land… That’s how it is”, he replies.
Map 3: The Castle map to count
There are few remaining inhabitants of Lisbon’s oldest population, the Castelo neighborhood, in Santa Maria Maior. Few to remember how the “biweekly market was an important point of the neighborhood’s social life”, the day when “the first telephone and first TV arrived in the neighborhood”, the “carriage transport, which brought products from the riverside market”. And “Senhor João, who had a tavern and grocery store” and who “at night gave the leftovers to the inhabitants of the neighborhood”. Or the “community oven and grain silo” that existed and how the purchase of various cereals was done “together by the families and each week one of the families made bread for everyone”.
It was to go after the memories that still remained of the neighborhood that the TRAÇA project was born. Organized by the Lisbon Municipal Archive since 2015, films collected from the personal memories of Lisboners, in order to show the memory of the city. But they quickly find it strange to be receiving images that are not one of the most photographed neighborhoods in Lisbon today.
“Probably the material to film and photograph because it is not available to everyone”, says Inês Sapeta, from Arquivo.
It is she who welcomes us to a long table where the cartography of this neighborhood lies, whose sentimental map was yet to be reported. “The neighborhood has been emptied since the 90’s rehabilitation. As people left, public spaces disappeared. Today, they are more in touch with the world as stories than foreigners, with,” she recalls.
Therefore, in 2015, together with a collective of anthropologists and with the help of residents, three questions were asked to the population of the neighborhood: one about the past, about memory; another about the present, about the route he takes in the neighborhood on a day-to-day basis; and another about the future, which area doesn’t know what it would like to see in the neighborhood or how it would show it to someone new.
This resulted in individual and collective memories such as the community oven. And as most of these stories are connected with Largo de Santa Cruz, “where people meet”. It was even possible “to unearth some myths”, such as the story of the “woman who lived in number 3 and, because the house was small, went to have the baby in the house next door, which was bigger”.
Map 4: After all, where is there more crime?
The fourth map in the exhibition is a provocation to prejudice. Bent over a table, José Baessa de Pina laments how, “to this day”, young people coming from neighborhoods on the periphery are easily “connected with gangs” [criminosos]”.
“I was one of those young people that society and the media connoted with gangs”, he says.
Ideas and prejudices that led António Guterres, from this coordinator, to compare the volume of news about crimes and the qualities in these peripheral areas that are more likely to be exposed with the real volume.
He smeared a map of the metropolitan area, where the stains count as news about crimes – the bigger the stain, the more space the word “crime” had in Portuguese newspapers. And here, with the naked eye, there is no doubt about the most stained area: Amadora, more specifically in Cova da Moura.
Already the data and appearance data in studies on crime rates show a spotty discrepancy. It is mainly in the center of Lisbon and in the Mina area that the highest crime rate is recorded.
But, in these places, the stains are so small or even null that anyone who opens a newspaper believe that they are the safest places in Lisbon.
José Baessa de Pina opens a reflection: if it is in these places that there is more crime, why are areas like Amadora more prominent in the newspapers as protagonists of crime? “A narrative to scare the old society” and that perpetuates the prejudices that affect the daily lives of those who live there, he says. “For example: I want to go to Boba at 5 am. The taxi driver says to me: ‘No, no. I only go to the precinct area’.”
Map 5: On the back of the city
About prejudice, Carla Alves and Mário Maia are good at talking. Born and raised in the old Curraleira, he gives the exhibition a different map of where they live and where they live today, 11 years after resettlement.
“Why did these people say they missed the old quarter?” The question began to be asked by la and other organizers of the community Carmo, the young people in the Quinta das families of the old Curral were relocated.
Doubt gave rise to a project to create murals on several lots in the Olaias area, where memories of the Curraleira and Casal do Pinto neighborhoods were marked – before they were built for the construction of new rehousing buildings.
Water was the common factor in each painting, because “it took a long time for people to have piped water and, therefore, memories went to the Alto do Pina fountain”.
“I, who am 40 years old, still remember not having water at home”, recalls Carla Alves, from Generation with Future association.
The little things she had they would fetch from the old Chafariz do Alto do Pina, she presents in almost all of her childhood memories: in play, for the inhabitants to drink, to give to the animals and even to save from the fires. Due to the lack of electricity, it was easy for a fire to spread in the neighborhood. Carla points to a cruise that has long been planted in Olaias in honor of a child who died in a fire in the neighborhood.
“The neighborhoods were built by those who came to Lisbon to work, not by criminals”, as they used to be called, says Carla. THE City Coast tourcreated by the residents, today even a tour for the residents, to change prejudices.
Mário says that “with Costas da Cidade, it was possible to bring people to the neighborhoods to have another image of them”.
And suddenly, the audience also brings stories. This is about a roundabout contest that local residents believe they are still protected to generate a roundabout with the exits studied. Struggling with future generations was the same feeling as being on the back of the city.
Map 6: The Talaíde phenomenon
Almost on the final stretch of the Lisbon cartographic circuit, António Brito Guterres opens the box to one of the greatest secrets of the metropolitan area. Ahead, we see a map that depicts the physiognomy of the “economic transition from an industrial city to an informational city and how an economic hegemony we produce that we have for the neoliberal economy”.
It sounds complicated, but it explains itself. At the center of the story is Talaíde, a fortress area in three municipalities: Cascais, Oeiras and Sintra. “A place that, not long ago, around 30 years ago, was rural”, recalls António.
Since 1995, “things have happened that are part of the construction of the space we see here today”, he points to the map. It was in the 1990s that Talaíde ceased to be rural to host subdivisions, “with model buildings, with a playground”.
Closed subdivisions that, after all, ended, never opened. “It is even possible to have motorcycle races there, because the highway code does not even enter there”, says the exhibition organizer.
At the same time, a few kilometers away, new lots were built for the relocation of the Navegadores neighborhood, “where there was no playground and 46% of adults only had fourth grade”. And, a few kilometers away, Taguspark, “a place where qualified people are located and who do not know the Navegadores neighborhood, although people from the neighborhood work there – but at night.”
Cons that were not revealed: the indifferent audience and ideas that were not launched in proposals from the latest maps, from the latest maps post-it notes written by the exhibition audience. “Shock on the side of the letter that seems to be a certainty, written in what looks like: “The city is much bigger than the center looks”.
Soon, all these maps, among others, will tell other stories here, in the Message.
Catarina Reis
Born in Porto 26 years ago, she was published by Lisbon as an internship for Público. A year in the newsroom of Diário de Notícias, today, where she delivers this equipment what the trench country that took her knows. There, she wrote mainly in the field of Education, in which she filled the paper and the news website every day. At DN, she investigated the former Casal Ventoso and won the UNESCO Human Rights & Integration Award in 2020.