UC Berkeley

This dissertation discusses the history of the so-called "clandestine" suburban subdivisions of the Lisbon metropolitan area of Portugal, focusing on the period between their emergence in 1958, as Salazar's dictatorship adopted policies of economic liberalization, and the beginning of political democratization in 1974. After the Second World War, a significant part of the new extensions of the city in Southern Europe--in urbs such as Barcelona, Rome, Belgrade, Athens or Istanbul--were produced informally, i.e. land subdivision and the construction of new housing were often unlicensed by municipal governments. Portugal's capital Lisbon was not an exception. The informal production of suburban subdivisions from the late 1950s onwards corresponded to a new form of working-class extension of the city, distinct from the older spaces of unlicensed self-building which took place in occupied or informally rented land. Those earlier "shack" neighborhoods, of which Quinta da Serra is a present-day example, had become part of Lisbon's expansion since the end of the First World War, but were always subject to periodic demolitions undertaken by the city's municipal government. In contrast, the creation of "clandestine" subdivisions by private developers in the late 1950s was done through legally registered sales of plots, in farms such as Brandoa or Casal de Cambra outside Lisbon's municipal limits. Since there were no provisions for subdivision by private developers in national planning law, the new subdivisions were informally created through successive lot splits. For Lisbon's low-income households, the process provided access to the ownership of land. Even though building was often unlicensed, this was initially not necessarily illegal, and in practice the local governments of the suburban municipalities around Lisbon rarely demonstrated a willingness to subject unlicensed housing to demolition practices. On the contrary, during the 1960s local municipalities started surveying the new de facto subdivisions and creating limited public infrastructure networks. However, at the same time the central state gradually changed national planning laws in an explicit reaction to fears about the "clandestine," illegalizing informal modes of suburban subdivision and building. By the early 1970s, the coexistence of illegalization by the dictatorial central state and transformation through tentative municipal planning practices fostered a state of expectancy for re-legalization and for the provision of full public infrastructure. This state of expectancy stimulated local community organization and participation in the creation of public infrastructure. In addition, the state of expectancy promoted the formation of municipal planners as entrepreneurial bureaucrats, employing elements of planning to manage the growth of spaces purportedly outside the domain of formal state planning. When political democratization started in 1974, the fundamental ideas of a national planning framework formed through the illegalization of informality were not challenged, and a dual planning regime became consolidated in the Lisbon suburbs. Today, this dual planning regime has not been fully dismantled. Even though full public infrastructure was provided to "clandestine" subdivisions during the 1990s, most informal land subdivision has yet to be licensed, as the existence of a thriving legalization industry shows. As for propertyless informality in present-day "shack" neighborhoods such as Quinta da Serra, demolition practices have recently been attuned to selecting households according to one of the ideas that has supported the management of the "clandestine" since the beginning: the need for the state to foster homeownership by low-income households.