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Interfaces of informality

Eduardo Ascensão

To cite this article: Eduardo Ascensão (2016) Interfaces of informality, City, 20:4, 563-580, DOI:10.1080/13604813.2016.1193337

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1193337

Published online: 13 Sep 2016.

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Interfaces of informalityWhen experts meet informal settlers

Eduardo Ascensao

What happens at the interface of states and urban poor populations that live in informalsettlements? How are academic disciplines, such as law, architecture or economics, and tech-nical instruments, such as computer software, summoned to the interactions between expertsfrom state or city governments and the laypeople whose housing and lives the former’s workis meant to improve? This paper reflects on these questions as it examines two differentexperiments, one historical and another from the recent past, in housing provision or ame-lioration for the residents of informal settlements. In post-revolutionary Portugal, the SAAL(Servico de Apoio Ambulatorio Local) housing program (1974–76) included ‘technical’ bri-gades of legal, architectural and economic experts tasked to help shanty town dwellersimprove their housing conditions, either by assisted self-building or classic new-build. Itwas a clear example of the progressive urban politics of the time, or dialogical technicaldemocracy avant la lettre. Some 30 years later, in Lisbon during the late 2000s, as a partof an urban regeneration program devised within the framework of multicultural urbanpolitics and delegative forms of democracy, a detailed survey of non- and sub-standardhouses was carried out with a bespoke computer software, which aimed at representingthe technical feasibility of rehabilitation, rather than replacement, of those dwellings.Both experiments constituted platforms with the stated objective of working for the commu-nity and through which new state–citizen relationships were to be forged with the urbanpoor, but how were the latter’s knowledges and wishes integrated?

Key words: urban informality, state intervention, experts and slum dwellers, assisted self-building, assessment of non-standard housing

Introduction

At the heart of Michel Callon, PierreLascoumes and Yannick Barthe’sidea of ‘technical democracy’ lies

the wish for a democratic arrangementbetween the multiple agencies of human andnon-human actors in techno-scientific endea-vors. A crucial element of these democraticarrangements involves the question of howto equitably achieve a representation of

minorities in such socio-technical assem-blages (Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe[2001] 2009, 226). Minorities here alsoequate to laypeople, thus the question lies inforging ways in which the latter—who arestill dependent on scientists and experts tohelp minimize the overflows of scientificand technological activity (i.e. the unforeseenproblems) in their life—have a say. Theacknowledgement of these problems hasbeen actor-network theory’s (ANT) and

# 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

CITY, 2016VOL. 20, NO. 4, 563–580, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1193337

Science and Technology Studies’ (STS) mostrelevant contribution over the past decade,and explicitly addressing ANT’s purportedde-politicized ontological project or STS’snaive objectivity (Farıas 2011, 366) has beena positive move. Recognizing that there areproblems with the representation of min-orities and laypeople in scientific practiceinevitably leads, then, to the need for thetype of inquiry which is able to trace, identifyand follow such minorities when they enterinto contact or collaboration with scientificor quasi-scientific interventions.

Outside the laboratory, many of the placeswhere such interventions often happen arecities, and the objects of intervention are ofan urban nature. What urban studies can con-tribute to this type of inquiry is its traditionof having been there, on the field, with thearmies of laypeople and minorities whoinhabit cities: unskilled migrants, low-income residents, the homeless or therecently dispossessed, and so on. One groupwhich experiences and understands betterthan most the built-in distance often createdby scientific and governmental interventionsbetween, on the one hand, formally sanc-tioned experts and, on the other, target popu-lations, is slum dwellers or informal settlers.In various cities across the world, they sitoutside the techno-scientific and administra-tive apparatus of housing and urban practice(consisting of architects, planners, engineers,municipal officials and many others) andare, or were, left to build an alternative cityfor themselves. This can occur, among otherreasons, by the lack of access to regularhousing markets, by sudden migratory influ-xes into urban contexts unprepared to inte-grate these influxes swiftly or bymodernizing projects that deem entire partsof urban poor populations as ignorable and‘un-modernizable’. Whatever the combi-nation of causes, after a period of time(whether years or decades after the initialsettlement, made under conditions of invisi-bility, illegality and informality), housingand urban administrative apparatuses tendto notice the settlements and organize

themselves to intervene on such extra-urbansites, as they then qualify them. The funda-mental reasons for this second moment ofintegration vary too: it can aim to improvethe housing and living conditions of slumdwellers and informal settlers when it isdeemed possible; less benignly, it can aim toforce these populations to ‘come back’ intothe regular city, a disposition which oftengoes hand in hand with the wish to forceillegal economies back (or for the first time)into regular markets; or, still more aggres-sively, to avoid violent insurrections whichwould perturb the broader social arrange-ments in a given city or country.

In any case, when scientists, engineers,planners, social activists, local politiciansand others enroll themselves in particularinitiatives to eradicate, curb, improve or reha-bilitate slums and informal settlements, whattends to occur is a dissonant dialoguebetween the experts and the residents; thatis, between those who produce the cityaccording to more or less updated techno-scientific paradigms and those who have pro-duced it according to very idiosyncratic adap-tations and variations of such paradigms.Such adaptations come, for instance, fromestablished popular traditions (such as verna-cular architectures); from the ad hoc learningof expert methods outside of formal edu-cation (as in the many cases worldwide ofinformal settlements built by workers of theconstruction industry); or finally by imagin-ation or human ingenuity (but beware, thelatter two tropes are often used by conformistobservers to rationalize unequal regimes ofprecarity, with the usual argument going‘look at the wonders that people do whenthey are adapting to poverty’).

There is a pressing need for a type ofinquiry that seeks to explore the more orless dissonant interactions between theexperts deployed (or self-deployed) to pro-jects of intervention in poor built environ-ments and the recipients of their attention.STS and ANT, having long studied the net-works consisting of experts and the thingsthat they surround themselves with, are

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well-equipped for this type of inquiry, as wellas for the special attention needed to theobject of dispute in cases of urban informal-ity—the informal dwelling. The shanty, orshack, or whatever local designation it has,is often at the core of the problem and canbe either identified as a cancer and stigma-tized to justify clearance; more explicitlydescribed as being in the way of the expan-sion of the formal city, or in the way ofcapital investment; or it can be opened tothe possibility of being rehabilitated, withthis option alternatively posited as either acheaper way of solving the housing difficul-ties of the urban poor (as in slum upgradeprojects) or as a way to grant the latter theirright to stay put in the area. Such differenttruth regimes need always to be judged inrelation to the political and historicalcontext of individual cases, with a specificfocus on the atmospheres of democracy inwhich professional expertise is developedand applied—in the sense that those atmos-pheres delimit the aims, methods and scopeof interventions and interactions. But theyneed as well to be put into a broader analyti-cal frame, into something akin to Latour’s(2005) conceptualization of parliaments ofmultiple agencies (of things, technologiesand people), in order to fully explore theenmeshment of scientific and quasi-scientificnetworks with what is considered to be thesocial—or, the city.

This paper looks at two different programsof intervention in informal settlements inPortugal in two different urban sites andfrom different periods (one from the 1970sand one from the very recent past), butbelonging to a common genealogy of urbaninformality; a genealogy that operatedaccording to specific Portuguese-speakingpolicy paradigms yet sharing plenty ofcontact points with global ones.1 This setsup a diachronic comparative gesture (Robin-son 2011) in analyzing the different ‘atmos-pheres of democracy’ where interventionswere developed. However, this paper alsoprovides a somewhat counterintuitivesequence of techno-scientific moments in

slum intervention, in the sense that it willshow a path from more to less democraticarrangements over time—or, to use Callon,Lascoumes, and Barthe’s ([2001] 2009)terms, from dialogical to delegative forms ofdemocracy—which to an extent questionstheir implicit assumption that as societiesget increasingly enmeshed with science andtechnology, so too are democratic instru-ments more and more generalized.

The first section shows the dialogicallyintense democratic experiments and interven-tions in 1970s Portugal with the SAAL(Servico de Apoio Ambulatorio Local) post-revolutionary housing program, whichaimed at improving the conditions of existingshanty towns with assisted self-building andfull cooperation between the state and infor-mal settlers. In a way a prototypical form oftechnical democracy, the interventions fromthis period used perhaps modest but highlyeffective instruments for fruitful interactions.The second section discusses the wateringdown of residents’ direct participation andrepresentation in the IBC (Iniciativa BairrosCrıticos) urban regeneration program inLisbon during the late 2000s, aimed at rehabi-litating a favela-style informal settlement, andhow people-to-people interaction was mostlysubstituted with computer software that rep-resented all the dwellings to be intervened on,with the intention of constructing a hybridresearch collective to make the rehabilitationof the non-standard urban fabric feasible. Itentailed an interesting circular process of del-egation and mediation, one crossing fromresidents to experts and back, through eachhouse’s fundamentals. However, the creationof such operational collective was also depen-dent on, and interacted with, forms of ration-ality that came from beyond the housingmilieu and techno-science, namely, judicialrationality on property law. In both sectionsthere is an explanatory tension between theneed to acknowledge that structural forces(most notably urban capital and its invisiblepowers of enforcement) are at play in con-temporary urban making, on the one hand,and the fact that promising dialogues or

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resistance are also possible, on the other. Thelatter include the way that potential futures(real or imagined) unleashed by democraticforms of engagement with laypeople canhave a great permanence in people’s mindsand imaginations, with cherished ideas some-times returning after four decades or more.The conclusion returns to these themes andto the question of how can techno-scientificsophistication be reconciled with effectiveurban democracy for the less powerful.

The SAAL: technical brigades doing therevolution with residents

For two years in post-revolutionary Portu-gal, between 1974 and 1976, a housingscheme captured the imagination andshaped the practice of thousands of residentsin shanty towns in Lisbon and in Porto’sinner-city tenement slums called ilhas, aswell as of the architects, urban planners,

legal advisers and other professionals whowere involved in the program. The SAAL—Servico de Apoio Ambulatorio Local(Mobile Service for Local Support)—was aprogram of assisted self-building or assisteddesign, which sought to respond to thesevere housing shortages in the Lisbon andPorto metropolitan areas that Salazar’s andCaetano’s dictatorship had not been willingto address. Although housing had been oneof the key arenas in which the constructionof modern citizenship in Portugal under thedictatorship was forged—namely, throughnorms of social selectivity in the allocationcriteria of the diminutive public housingstock (Nunes and Serra 2004; Pinto 2009)—in effect the urban poor were led to settle inscattered informal or illegal settlements inthe periphery or in over-dense inner-cityslums (Salgueiro 1977; Bandeirinha 2007;Pinto 2013; Queiros 2013) (Figure 1).

In response to the eruption of popularmovements across the country, including

Figure 1 A small shanty town in Lisbon, c.1969 (Source: # Arnaldo Madureira, courtesy of the Lisbon MunicipalArchive).

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those that demanded better life standards and‘decent houses for the people’, the SAAL wasenacted in August 1974, a mere three monthsafter the coup d’etat-turned-left-wing revolu-tion. This was possible because the newlyappointed Secretary of State for Housingand Urban Planning, architect and townplanner Nuno Portas, along with a generationof architects, municipal officials, lawyers andacademics (see Nunes and Serra 2004) had inthe previous decade and a half prepared theway for the transformation of urban spacethat the existing revolutionary situation nowallowed for.2 In accordance with the left-wing revolutionary zeitgeist, the programset up ‘brigades of technical assistance’ foreach of the neighborhoods or sites to be inter-vened on. It demanded that the constructionof the new neighborhoods was to be on thesame sites as the existing ones (followingthe Portuguese derivative of the ‘right to thecity’, the direito ao lugar [‘the right to theplace’, which precluded displacement]); that,in building their house, residents were toreceive aid in materials and ‘technicaladvice’ from the housing governmentalagency Fundo de Fomento de Habitacao(Housing Development Fund, from now onFFH) or from the freely elected City Coun-cils; and that rent payments to partly covercosts were to be calculated according toincome. Finally, it stated that the brigadesof technical assistance (legal, architecture,financial accounting and construction) werenot to substitute the populations: the govern-ment ‘lent a hand’ but those who were in needhad to ‘take initiative’ (Ferreira 1987, 83).This was a call to the cooperative grassrootsmovements (Bandeirinha 2007; Pinto 2013)and to facilitate it, the scheme was organizedat each site with a Residents’ Committeeresponsible for relaying to the brigadesexactly what was needed in terms ofhousing, land rights or social needs such asemployment—for instance, in areas withhigh unemployment, projects sought to sub-contract construction to unemployed resi-dents organized in cooperatives (e.g. SAALCurraleira Team 1984, 267).

The brigades’ work

Respecting the principles of participatorysocial architecture—resident participation,user control and the self-help/self-builtelement taken from Turner and Fichter(1972)—interaction and exchange betweenexperts’ and laypeople’s knowledge werethus intrinsic to the program’s methodology.Architect Alvaro Siza—who was theninvolved in two projects in Porto, one atBouca (see Rowe 1993, 294–295) and one atSao Vıtor—has recalled, ‘dialogue [betweenarchitects and residents] was brutally honest,even conflictual’ (Duarte 2014). This dialogueincluded exchanges about future house layouts(interior organization), morphology (densityand street grid) and land tenure issues, all tobe negotiated and designed in cooperation.

A fresh element in these discussions wasparticipation of women. They were stronglyinvolved in the design process, ‘drawing thehouses, telling [architects] where the bedwould be, how to cross from one space toanother’ (Andrade 2014). In a report, theSAAL team for the Curraleira neighborhoodexplained how they had worked in this respect:

‘Meetings were held with housewives in smallgroups of four where more detailed problemswere solved, such as relations betweenkitchen, living room, and work space bychanging partitions, doors, or equipment.Alternative finishes were also discussed anddefined at these meetings. Field trips to otherSAAL schemes in progress [. . .] wereorganized in this phase and to some housingcomponent prefabrication plants as well.’(SAAL Curraleira Team 1984, 268)

A second distinctive factor in the different dis-cussions involved the differences in modes ofinteraction related to age. In Porto, architectSergio Fernandez used different architecturaltools to show residents what their futurehomes would be like. These included models,but interestingly he recalled (Figure 2):

‘Older residents didn’t like looking at models,they said it didn’t give them a clear picture of

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the final product, and would ask, “So where isthe second story?” when it was there already.Younger residents liked models, but for theelder we brought in house plan diagrams withfurniture signs, and these worked really well.With these they understood completely thepotential of their future domestic spaces.’(SAAL Memory Meeting, Porto, 22November 2014)

ANT literature on the cognitive aspect ofarchitectural representation has shown that

representation via models has become astaple of architectural practice (Yaneva 2005).Here it was as if lay cognition of architecturehad to rely on the already tried and testedtwo-dimensional technologies of architecturalrepresentation to convert abstract represen-tations of space into self-visualizations oftheir future lived space, even if it meant fore-going a three-dimensional technology.3

These episodes are illustrative of the meth-odology of interaction. What was substantively

Figure 2 Discussion meeting between SAAL architects and residents, Algarve, 1976; model and house plan chartdesigned by architect Sergio Fernandez to explain future homespaces to residents of Leal, Porto (Sources: (Top) # Alex-andre Alves da Costa; (Bottom) # Sergio Fernandez).

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and intensely discussed, debated or nego-tiated varied according to the political andurban circumstances at each site. One of themost common dichotomies was betweenlow- and medium-rise solutions, sometimesassociated with the options of using vari-ations of vernacular or late modernisthousing languages. So, for instance, inLagos’ Meia-Praia scheme, architect JoseVeloso proposed a design which was able toreflect as much as possible, in concrete, thepositive elements of fishermen’s dwellingsin canes or used industrial materials. AtBouca and especially at Sao Vitor, Sizadesigned a careful approximation to theilhas’ morphology with a view to preservingthe existing sociability, but of course witheach house now having its own toiletinstead of sharing one at the end of an innerpatio (Grande 2010, 21). In Lisbon, on theother hand, head architect Raul Hestnes Fer-reira and brigade architect Vicente Bravo Fer-reira (part of a larger team) designed a latemodernist medium-rise solution in Quintada Calcada, with its back to the ring roadSegunda Circular and a system of innersquares to address the issue of street life.The various experiments were in dialoguewith the more progressive and participatoryarchitecture of the time, which often playedwith architectural evolution and adaptation(e.g. Habraken’s [1972] Supports). ArchitectFrancisco Silva Dias, for instance, designedthe Alto do Moınho neighborhood next toBairro do Zambujal in the Oeiras municipal-ity (today sitting next to an Ikea store) with ascheme that comprised self-built evolution,enabling residents to add rooms and otherspaces over time (Bandeirinha 2007, 385).He recalls that in the following years, ‘resi-dents would call me to ask for permissionto build a new room in such or such way’(pers. comm., architect Filipa Serpa).

A second recurrent issue debated by bri-gades’ members, residents and the FFH ascompeting technological frames (Aibar andBijker 1997) was the option between self-building and professional contracting of con-struction. In some places such as the Relvinha

neighborhood in Coimbra’s periphery, resi-dents wanted to build the houses themselves,‘to feel they were ours’ (Baıa 2012, 125). Inmore politicized areas such as Lisbon’s indus-trial belt, where the Portuguese CommunistParty or Trotskyist parties such as thePCTP-MRPP held considerable influence,residents complained about the ‘double exploi-tation’ of having to work during the day intheir usual jobs and then self-build theirhouses in the evenings, or well into the night(SAAL 1976, 119; Bandeirinha 2007, 141).Curiously, however, there was no overallwinning frame in the sense that at each sitethe population, in dialogue with the FFH andthe brigades, opted for what they decidedwas more convenient. This was an earlyexample of something that could be taken asindecision or temporization, but that Callon,Lascoumes, and Barthe ([2001] 2009, 191)appropriately call ‘measured action’.

Legally, too, important advances weremade regarding land property arrangements.In Outurela, Oeiras after the public expro-priation of land to construct the 18 de Maioneighborhood, the sub-divided individualplots became collective cooperative propertyof the Residents’ Association, which today isstill responsible for allocating houses (e.g.when an elder occupier dies) to its most-in-need members. Such implementation of acommons was aimed at avoiding futurespeculative activity with the land that hadbeen expropriated with the sole purpose ofguaranteeing housing for the poor.

These and other matters of concern allboiled down to one key issue, the speed ofimplementation. In fact, the different optionscould only be relevant elements for the newneighborhoods if the latter were to exist atall. From the start, projects were envisagedto be built quickly, that is, within an approxi-mate timetable of three years, to avoid despairover ‘failed promises’ and ‘unfulfilled expec-tations’.4 One strategy to prevent discourage-ment was to start construction early on, withwhatever means available, instead of waitingfor FFH’s bureaucratic decisions to releasethe previously negotiated funding (Baıa 2012,

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126). And all these things—dialogues betweenslum dwellers and architects, options regard-ing housing density or architectural style, con-struction modalities, expropriation andcollective property, urgency—were setamongst the revolutionary atmosphere, inwhich the citizenship status of slum dwellers(hitherto considered neglectable) and theway the city was produced (a capitalist-cor-porate mode of production) were to be radi-cally altered.

A parliament for the recently enfranchised

The Residents General Assembly at Porto’sPalacio de Cristal on 5 April 1975 was oneof the pinnacles of this atmosphere of dialogi-cal democracy; it was a hybrid forum where allthe expectations and tensions were raw andvisible. The expectations and a heightenedsense of democratic intensity came from,among others, the fact that after 48 years ofpatriarchal dictatorship, women were votingon matters of concern to their household,indeed, were leading the way (Figure 3(a)).The tensions were related to the strong senseof urgency in getting construction underwayor houses completed because people werestarting to realize the revolution period wasin danger of coming to an end—as it did,after the failed Communist coup on 25November 1975. Hence very rationally, lay-people wanted to replicate the customary poli-tics of expert or governmental faits accomplis,but for once to their benefit: they wanted tosee houses on the ground before the programwas reversed. They thus complained aboutslow implementation: in the balcony abovethe representatives of each of the local associ-ations, a banner demanded ‘Down with theparasites at FFH’ (Figure 3(b)).

What did social architecture during therevolution achieve?

If we analyze the SAAL with Callon, Las-coumes, and Barthe’s ([2001] 2009, 160)

parameters for dialogical procedures, we canargue the program’s methodologies andexpert–laypeople interactions involved ahigh degree of intensity (translation for theinvolvement of laypeople in the explorationof possible worlds and the concern for thecomposition of a collective); as well as ofdiversity (translation for the diversity, inde-pendence and representativity of laypeople inthe established action groups); but that,regarding its quality (related to the seriousnessand continuity of the voice of laypeople), itoscillated between an undeniable ‘seriousnessof voice’ and an unfortunately curtailed ‘con-tinuity of voice’ owing to the program’sdismantlement.5

With hindsight, Alvaro Siza proposed, withsemiotic precision, that this process wasintense but that it still involved a form ofmediation: ‘Commitment to residents did notmean to directly assume all their aspirations,but rather to be permanently aware of beingin the process of representing their intereststhrough a particular form of representation,which in this case was architecture’ (Siza inBandeirinha 2007, 254). In other words,although architecture as a scientific disciplinedid not supersede laypeople’s aspirations orworldviews, it still formatted them. Dialoguewas instituted but circumscribed within dis-crete disciplinary boundaries. In addition, theproduct of the exceptional circumstances ofinteraction, over time, became more a currencyin experts’ knowledge and careers (i.e. anexperience which they could translate to build-ings designed later on, in more classic situationsbetween architect and client) than a basis forthe continuation of laypeople’s emancipation.The Progressive Era was coming to a halt.

The IBC: computerizing the builtenvironment

We fast forward to the recent past. After theSAAL, Portuguese housing policy was re-oriented to general supply through homeownership. After a second explosion of infor-mal settlements in the 1980s, due to the

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incoming migration of poor postcolonialmigrants who were priced out of thehousing market and unable to access publichousing (comprised of a meager 100,000units countrywide), a comprehensiveprogram of slum clearance and rehousing inthe Lisbon and Porto Metropolitan Areas,the PER, was enacted in 1993 (see Cachado2013; Ascensao 2015).6 Coming at the tailend of the PER, the experimental scheme Ini-ciativa Bairros Crıticos (Critical Neighbor-hoods Initiative, from now on IBC) soughta departure from the PER’s top-downapproach and in a way resumed the intention

of a participatory politics applied to housing(Ascensao 2013, 165–166). It focused onthree areas deemed ‘critical’, one of which isthe favela-style settlement Cova da Mourain the municipality of Amadora nearLisbon, a much studied settlement with amajority of African immigrants (see alsoBeja-Horta 2006). Partly inspired by theFavela-Bairro program in Brazil and partlyby European urban regeneration programs(again we see the links to the differentbranches in a complex genealogy), the IBCat Cova da Moura instituted a holisticapproach to the regeneration of the

Figure 3 A parliament for the recently enfranchised: the SAAL meeting at Palacio de Cristal, Porto, 5 April 1975. Top,women vote. Bottom, the representatives of each local association (Source: # Alexandre Alves da Costa).

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neighborhood. The most important develop-ment strands focused on land legal regulariz-ation, on the rehabilitation of the builtenvironment, on youth employment and par-ticipation, on the reinforcement of the localeconomy and on supporting pre-existinggrassroots associations.

Regarding the second of these strands, onwhich this section focuses, the rehabilitationof the built environment here meant a willto refurbish or rehabilitate all the dwellingsin the neighborhood, instead of clearing thesite and building a new housing estate.Underpinning this will to rehabilitate wasthe wish to materially grant the populationits right to the place (i.e. the right to stayput and not be displaced), which was alsolinked to the idea of a recognition by thestate of the culture and knowledge of thepopulation who had built the neighborhoodwith informal techniques and collectiveeffort over the previous 40 years. This was asophisticated way of assuming that thereexisted a proxy morphological and architec-tural identity in the neighborhood’s urbanlayout and the dwellings’ architectural con-figurations, one that needed to be preserved.What is commonplace in the regenerationschemes of historic centers—upgradingurban and habitability conditions whilemaintaining the genius loci—was hereapplied to an informal settlement with sub-standard dwellings.

This was an interesting and somewhatcounterintuitive approach, in the sense thatit implied that experts recognized that a sig-nificant part of the buildings—which hadnot been built according to any architecturalor engineering by-laws—were nonethelessstructurally sound enough to withstandmajor improvement works. Set within a mul-ticultural urban politics aimed at fully inte-grating the aspirations and cosmologies of apopulation of postcolonial immigrants, itwas a nod to informal contractors’ and resi-dents’ expertise in building, over the previous40 years. Such a refreshing attitude towardsthe informal city was particularly exceptionalif we consider that, for the past two or three

decades, the issue of buildings not being‘structurally sound’ had been one of themain rhetorical tricks deployed in urbanregeneration projects worldwide to justifydemolition and displacement of residents(e.g. Jacobs, Cairns, and Strebel 2007, 624;Lees 2014, 923, 929). At Cova da Moura, atleast initially, such rhetoric was disavowed.7

The key issue thus concerned the actualpossibility of these dwellings being rehabili-tated. It asked whether they were really struc-turally sound and could be upgraded, forinstance, with pinpoint interventions at gasjoints, water or sewage connections, lightingand so on; with small architectural acupunc-ture such as opening windows in closedfacades, thus improving light and air con-ditions inside the dwellings; or with thedemolition of adjoining houses that mightimmediately improve the habitability ofseveral others. Establishing the veracity ofthese ‘uncertain facts’ (Callon, Lascoumes,and Barthe [2001] 2009) was to be answeredby an independent assessment of the builtenvironment, to be carried out by theNational Laboratory of Civil Engineering(Laboratorio Nacional de Engenharia Civil,from now on LNEC). The ‘official science’of housing and engineering had been sum-moned to arbitrate this urban uncertainty.

Because of time constraints, instead of athorough structural analysis with ultra-sounds and other robust methods, theLNEC devised a methodology of visualassessment of all the 1617 surveyed dwellingsunits in the neighborhood, based on a 20-minute visit of each one. These visitsfocused on the individual dwelling’s rehabili-tation needs as well as its relation to theadjoining dwellings. Such individual charac-teristics came both from the ‘naked-eye’observations by the engineers and architectsinside the houses and from a list of recurrentanomalies they had to check and tick the cor-responding boxes in the individual file (see indetail, Ascensao 2013, 166–173).8 Theseelements were then input into an individualdatabase file and an algorithm renderedthem into overall scores that suggested the

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need for light, average or comprehensiverehabilitation the dwelling required per seand in relation to others. Finally, this wasgraphically represented in different maps ofthe neighborhood, one for each of the maincharacteristics to be assessed (e.g. ‘walls/bays without fire resistance’; ‘air and lightin inhabited spaces’; etc.; see more, LNEC2008) (Figure 4).

What does the computer algorithm generate?

The computer assembles the dwellings andgives them representation in a new collective,which is the neighborhood in map form.These maps, then, become the assembly ofall dwellings—with their families, dramas,problems and joys related in each case tounique, non-standard, material houses—intoone coherent whole. The machine enabled

making uniform what was utterly non-uniform to begin with, in a case of ‘distribu-ted intelligence’ (Callon, Lascoumes, andBarthe [2001] 2009, 57) between humanobservation and the aptitude of the instru-ments used for the elaboration of knowledge.This was a positive trait, given it wouldenable operationalization of a particularlycomplex urban fabric by the architecturaland engineering team that would be respon-sible for the detailed urban design of the site.

Dialogue and participation was a far moredifficult process. The top-down tradition ofurban planning in Portugal (Cardoso andBreda-Vazquez 2007) was visible in some ofthe public participation meetings at theneighborhood, with politicians from thecentral government, the mayor andmembers of the project team making expo-sitions on how the process would proceedbut failing to integrate people’s complaints

Figure 4 Each house laboratorized, one neighborhood represented: LNEC’s visual assessment methodology and com-puter software assembles data from all dwellings into a coherent form (Source: # Author).

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and anxieties into the policy process (researchobservation, public participation meetings,February and July 2008). There was transpar-ency in disclosing information but only tokenparticipation, as noted by the most vocalresidents.

Essentially, the representation of people—that is, of each family—was made through thecharacteristics of their dwellings in a diagramrather than through any type of human-to-human dialogue. The entities that were rep-resented were the dwellings, and the pro-gram’s later configurations would respondonly to those. Such a situation belongs tothe almost imperceptible shifts in the natureof social operations in late modernitywhereby the agency of ‘things’ is increasinglyenmeshed with, and sometimes substitutes,the agency of ‘people’ in policy andimplementation; but, it is also an example ofCallon, Lascoumes, and Barthe’s ([2001]2009, 106) cycles of translation and del-egation in scientific activity, from reality toresearch collective and back to reality.However, in practical terms such type ofmediated representation made clear that theultimate objective it was designed for—therehabilitation of the dwellings and of theneighborhood in general—was entangledwith a paradox hard to undo.

The evaluation results exposed a veryfragile situation regarding many buildings,and the maps tellingly show that to grantmost families a material amelioration oftheir dwellings, some of the more dense clus-ters of houses had to be broken up, with thosein worst conditions demolished to makespace for improvements. As such, a part ofthe population had to be displaced (Ascensao2013, 174–175). This was the closest tocertain and certified knowledge the expertshad reached. The research collective had ana-lyzed the dwellings as proxy indicators ofsocial reality and in getting back to thelatter (the neighborhood’s residents) it essen-tially informed them that a possible solutionwould rationally have to involve the neigh-borhood’s re-configuration in terms ofurban fabric, and thus also in terms of social

composition. As a micro-political problem,it could have been solved by managing toget those who wanted out of the neighbor-hood (into new-built apartments in the vicin-ities or, should they opt to, other places) asquickly as possible in order to free space forthe rehabilitation of those who preferred toremain. Indeed, this was envisioned as a poss-ible course of action by the project team(interview, 2008). The fine-tuning wouldhave been difficult and susceptible to someinjustices, but possible.

But instead, it was solved by the other wayof solving paradoxes, which is to bury themunder a new, big fact. Such a new, big factcame from the outcome of the internationalcompetition to select the architectural andengineering team responsible for the detaileddesign and building of the new neighbor-hood. There were two main entrants, bothof which had previously been engaged instudies in the neighborhood. The first onewas a consortium of university specialists(from geography, architecture and other dis-ciplines), which planned to implement therehabilitation approach but with a morerobust consultation than previouslymanaged, including a survey of all the house-holds, ‘visioning workshops’ and walkinginterviews with selected residents (Raposoand Malheiros 2010). The second one was aprivate architectural office, close to themayor’s office, which instead proposed amore directive clearance and medium-risesolution, that is, it proposed to avoid all thecomplications of consultation or partici-pation at the micro-level and implement anabstract plan from scratch (Cunha 2010).Each proposal was clearly located within adifferent branch in the broad genealogy ofintervention in informal settlements men-tioned in the introduction to this paper. Thewinner was the latter, which meant the dis-missal of rehabilitation and reversion into anew-built solution, with clearance of all theexisting dwellings. Within such a solution,there was now a clear loss of ‘parliament rep-resentation’ for the dwellings, and indirectlythis also meant a loss of parliament

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representation for their families, memoriesand expertise that the original solution wasdevised to respect. In the original plan, thecomputer software introduced a type of tech-nical rationality that tends to override politi-cal considerations—algorithms producevalues independently of judgement.However, by creating a representation forthe dwellings, a supposedly ‘apolitical’ tech-nological procedure de facto guaranteed atechno-political representation for thefamilies, in which the dwelling and thefamily household were entangled in onesingle entity. This loop was particularly con-structive because it seemed to be able toprevent a scheme entirely imposed from thetop. By contrast, in the winning proposalthe diagnosis work and the technologicalmediation described above would be wastedand a straightforward top-down solutionimplemented. Furthermore, the bigger riskfor families was that this loss of represen-tation could mean (as it still can) that theywill not get to stay in the new buildings butrather be displaced to other sites, furtheraway, as was common in the previous PERprogram.

All along this process, the first strand con-cerning land regularization was not achievedbecause the family who owns the land—which was neglected and abandoned whenthe settlement began yet never expro-priated—successfully made every legalinjunction possible and rejected all negotiatedsolutions with the municipal authorities andthe central government, in order to be ableto cash in on a property that has since seenits value appreciate due to its excellentlocation on top of a hill as well as its proxi-mity to urban infrastructure, such as thenearby Damaia train station. Such ‘specu-lation by absence’ (interview, 2008) hasbeen tolerated by the judicial system andfailed to be confronted by the different gov-ernments with powers to expropriate theland (which could then be reverted to thepopulation through forms of collective orcooperative property such as those of theSAAL), and this led to a critical impasse.9

The final nail in the process came at thevery end of its first stage. The IBC had usedproject funding from EEA Grants to coverthe initial diagnosis and action frameworkdesign. For the second stage concerninghousing rehabilitation to be fullyimplemented at Cova da Moura, a newcycle of funding would be needed, mostlikely to come from the state budget.However, with the abrupt cuts in publicexpenditure in all sectors of the economy fol-lowing the Structural Adjustment ProgramPortugal signed with the IMF (InternationalMonetary Fund), the ECB (EuropeanCentral Bank) and the European Union inMay 2011, the IBC was left hangingwithout any resource pool to draw from.The program was suspended and later aban-doned, yet another victim of European aus-terity policies.

What can be argued about this course ofevents is that after the delegation to a researchcollective and the reduction of social realityinto measurable parameters, the finalmoment consisting of the extension of theresearch findings back to reality encountereda problem that came from beyond theplanned procedures of technical democracyyet proved to be stronger and supersededthem. First, the architectural competitionre-configured the original issue at stake,which the experts had been summoned toarbitrate—whether rehabilitation was poss-ible, and what would it entail for each indi-vidual dwelling and household—and wasable to revert it into a broader binary decisionon how to intervene on the site (either rehabi-litate or clear and re-build). It thus re-openedthe door for an option that was not there atthe beginning of the process, indeed the oneoption that the process had been initiated toavoid. Second, such a regression to thetypical adversarial options regarding contextsof urban informality, and the re-emergence ofthe possibility of clearance and displacement,inexistent at the start of the process, was par-ticularly advantageous for the landowners,who wished to develop the site for middle-class residential development rather than for

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the low-income groups who inhabit it atpresent. To achieve it, they enrolled a differ-ent set of rationality forms (legal and judicialrationalities, particularly those pertaining toproperty law within a market society) todefend their case, and did so successfully.

So a perceived failure of technical democ-racy in this case was not truly caused by itsconstitutive elements nor by technocraticrationality failing to institute more dialogicalprocedures (which were visibly absent butcould still be introduced, as the first entrantin the competition proposed), but rather bythe interrelationship between the four thingsthat happened in succession: the technicalassessment of buildings (which came up witha new matter of concern); the architecturalcompetition (which redefined the issue atstake and enabled the re-emergence of theoption the whole process was meant toavoid); the judicialization of property issuesin combination with an accessary local auth-ority (the description of this relationship isnot in the remit of this paper); and finally anabrupt cut in public expenditures on housing(which meant that the current status quo willstay). Each of these things was stronger thanthe former and the potential of technicaldemocracy to address the overflows comingfrom the rehabilitation experiment was over-weighed by these other elements.

Conclusion

These two experiments show that urban his-tories and state or scientific interventions ininformal settlements at various locales donot necessarily follow a linear development,indeed that they can take regressive turns atvarious junctures. The two cases areespecially illustrative of the tension betweentechnical democracy’s tenets and workingframeworks (dialogical or delegative), on theone hand, and the workings of urban capitalformations, on the other. In 1970s Portugal,the SAAL constituted a progressive housingprogram, which instituted participatorydemocracy and a collaborative framework

between the state, experts and target popu-lations to solve an urgent problem, but itwent against the capitalist status quo (particu-larly regarding urban land property) and washalted. In 2000s Lisbon, the IBC, despite theabsence of a full-on dialogue between resi-dents and experts, was enacted within abenign technocratic multicultural atmos-phere under which the experiment of ‘repre-senting-residents-through-their-house-con-ditions’ was attempted, but austerity-relatedcuts and, again, pressures from urbancapital, made it derail and fail to reachconclusion.

In light of these cases, Callon, Lascoumes,and Barthe’s ([2001] 2009) hopeful toneregarding the potential of technical democ-racy needs to be weighed against actuallyexisting outcomes of proto- or full technicaldemocracy initiatives—especially in thosearenas where the power imbalances betweenexperts and laypeople are extreme (and inter-vention on slums is one such case). The twocases presented suggest that at least in theurban arena the potential of technical democ-racy tends to interrelate with, or come upagainst, other elements, including urban capi-tal’s particular type of agency. Mechanisms ofurban capital accumulation, although notnecessarily a pervasive hidden force whichsupersedes all things, nonetheless tend tominutely disrupt, sabotage, suspend orcancel actually existing initiatives of cogentexpert–laypeople interaction and generalsocial emancipation. For spatial Marxism,the particular feature of cities and urbanspace is that they are where capital for-mations, ethereal until then, ‘land’ andbecome palpable (e.g. Harvey 2001; Lefebvre2003). In the process—whether we take thisstandpoint as the final and exclusive expla-nation for the urban process or instead as animportant one among a networked constella-tion of other forces, maneuvers and strat-egies—we factually know that real-estatefunds, developers and so on can, and oftendo, tweak, subvert or bypass regulatoryframeworks to their advantage (includingusing judicial, architectural and planning

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technicalities as instruments for their objec-tives, as we have seen). A by-product of thissituation is that the collaborative efforts andmultiple agencies assembled around thepotential of technical democracy can bebrushed aside or crushed (see also Farıas,this issue). This is one of the main evidentiarypoints this paper has tried to point to.However, becoming aware of this fact doesnot mean, in any way, to suggest that thepotentials of technical democracy are irrele-vant (quite the contrary), only that theycome up against adversarial elements andneed to be prepared to face them (see alsoBlok, this issue).

An example of the strength of urban capitalas counter to technical democracy relates tothe cases presented comes from one ofSAAL’s sites, Siza’s Bouca in Porto. In the1970s, only its first phase was completed.The second phase was finished in 2006, butit essentially paved the way for the gentrifica-tion of the neighborhood, now being boughtby Porto’s young creative elite because of itsexcellent location and the appeal of inhab-iting a house designed by a celebrated archi-tect. In an open talk meeting in 2014between the architects who worked for theSAAL and the target populations, Siza wasconfronted with the issue. He attempted todisarm it and replied that his intention inthe original plan was to build an ‘inter-classistand inter-generational neighborhood, as thewhole city should be’ (Duarte 2014), but thetension related to gentrification was visible.In particular, in the past few years of acuteeconomic crisis in Portugal (2011–present),a strong sense of nostalgia for the ideas andpractices the SAAL encapsulated emerged inthe architectural and planning professions aswell as in public opinion in general. Chiefamong these ideas is the nostalgia for partici-pation, for a dialogical and committed way ofproducing urban space where the people(everyone) can live and work.

The current context is different; more tech-nologically sophisticated than before, as theIBC shows, but a significant part of the ques-tion remains: what is needed to reconcile

expert knowledge and technological sophisti-cation in initiatives of slum rehabilitation orregeneration with urban democracy for theless empowered, in Portugal and elsewhere?I risk the answer that what is needed, at alltimes, is a political atmosphere where theurban poor are taken as citizens or voters towhich policy and initiatives on the groundneed to respond, instead of numbers ordetails in broader strategies of state legitimiza-tion, reconfiguration or sovereignty coupledwith urban capital accumulation; in thelatter, no matter how righteous the begin-nings, the urban poor tend to end up as neg-lected entities in the network. Technicaldemocracy is only such a thing (and notsimply technocracy) if laypeople’s wishes areintegrated in procedures and operations.Regardless of how modest the tools for suchintegration are—such as SAAL architects’cardboard house layouts to explain and inter-act with residents—what matters is that theyare wholeheartedly integrated. As Callon,Lascoumes, and Barthe ([2001] 2009, 248)identify with precision: ‘What is essential forordinary citizens and laypersons in dialogicdemocracy is not participating, but weighingup and contributing.’ This is easier statedthan found, but it is a point from which todepart if we are to recognize that the tenetsof dialogic technical democracy are not onlyobvious but much needed in any futurearrangements for a truly just cosmopolitics.

Empirical or theoretical advances startingfrom this point dovetail with the discussionBrenner, Madden, and Wachsmuth (2011)and Farıas (2011) have initiated on the politicsof urban assemblages and critical urbantheory, a discussion which can be productiveif both sides seek points of convergence. Puttelegraphically, such a discussion can moveforward if the latter acknowledge that urbancapital formations have a specific type ofagency (as put forward above) and thusneed to be factored in a particular way inany explanation, or that indeed, urban assem-blage theory perhaps needs to specify furtherthe historical geographies of power in urbanassemblages (rather than merely emphasizing

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an irreversible ontological shift that will dis-pense with them); but also if the formerunderstand that there is nothing inherentlyuncritical in ANT’s or STS’s symmetricalprojects, nor that most of those or of assem-blage-inspired analytical efforts are based ondecontextualized standpoints that ignore‘actually existing social relations and insti-tutional arrangements’ (Brenner, Madden,and Wachsmuth 2011, 225). This paper triedto work through such a potential conver-gence by being attentive to both the insti-tutional arrangements and the networkedprocedures and operations that make upexisting interventions.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Ignacio Farıas and AndersBlok for their perceptive comments on an earlier versionof this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by theauthor.

Funding

This work was supported by a postdoctoral grant from theFundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia [grant numberSFRH/BPD/95806/2013].

Notes

1 From modernist models of slum clearance and tabularasa new-built to progressive assisted self-building, orfinally sophisticated in situ rehabilitation models, thehistory of intervention in Lisbon’s shanty towns overthe past five decades has several continuitiesregarding intervention models, rhetoric and broadpolitical objectives, all of which are in dialogue withsimilar situations in other cities across the world. Thecountry’s and the city’s particularity, related to itssemi-peripheral geographical location, is that suchpolicy and intervention dialogues are sometimesdeveloped within urban paradigms associated withcities in the Global North, but at other times

developed within those associated with cities in theGlobal South. Furthermore, these shifting urbandialogues are also situated within the colonial–postcolonial transitions of cities such as Maputo,Mozambique; Luanda, Angola (both with acatalogue of UN Habitat assisted slum upgradeprojects); and even, to an extent, Rio de Janeiro,Brazil. There is thus a need for a careful analysis ofsuch translocal policy assemblages in their relation tobroad, longue duree political histories, if we are tominimally understand what is, or was, going on atdifferent sites in different time periods. See more,Ascensao (2013), Raposo and Oppenheimer (2007)and Valladares (2006).

2 This preparation included the subversion of technicaleconomic parameters of conservative housing policyCasas Economicas (Affordable Houses) to make wayfor more democratic urban forms, materialized in theplanning and architectural construction of grandensembles of modernist buildings such as Olivais Sul(Nunes 2007).

3 Remember, for elderly people in 1970s Portugalan architectural model still had an element ofnovelty. We can speculatively transport such adistinction to the present if we think about an elderlylayperson today perhaps preferring to look at amodel instead of at a more detailed AutoCADrendering.

4 This was in line with Turner and Fichter’s (1972)findings from Latin America that land regularizationand self-built housing projects need to beimplemented within a maximum time span of threeyears.

5 By 1976, the program’s exemplification of directdemocracy, which had served to legitimize thenew democratic state, was considered by many athreat for the country, now exiting its revolutionaryperiod and entering a period of normalization,towards a market society. Any experiences thatcould be seen as alternatives to ‘normal’,parliamentary and representative democracy wereswiftly eliminated. Bandeirinha (2007, 175–218)describes this winding down in great detail: theresponsibility of implementation was passed fromthe FFH to the different municipalities where siteswere located; the latter were much morepermeable to private interests from corporatelandowners or to top-down ideological diktatsregarding the irrevocability of private propertythan the circumscribed and coherent SAAL team atFFH (the Porto offices of which were bombed byright-wing militants on 14 January 1976), whichwas highly flexible regarding the differentsolutions for each site, provided residents’ wisheswere fully integrated into them. The SAAL’sdismantlement can be summarized by the fact thatonly 7000 of the planned 40,000 dwellings wereever completed.

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6 A situation which continues and is well illustrated forinstance by the latest official figures for the1987–2011 period, which show an overwhelming73% of all of central government’s housing-relatedfunding dedicated to homeowners’ mortgagesubsidies and only 14% to public housingdevelopment (IHRU 2015, 4). This indicates a deepfinancialization of the housing sector.

7 As I have pointed out (Ascensao 2013, 166), thiswas not a slum upgrade implemented in order to savemoney on the possible costs of new-built apartmentson the same site; rehabilitating these dwellings wasestimated to cost around 120% of the average‘technical cost’ of an apartment in a new-built estate(interview, 2008).

8 The methodology is presented in Vilhena, Pedro, andPaiva (2011), and is in dialogue with other Europeanresearch on condition assessment of buildings (e.g.Straub 2009).

9 At this point we must track back to note that thepopulation’s decades-long demand for in siturehabilitation (and infrastructure provision in theinterim) was leveraged by successive trade-offs withlocal politicians (Beja-Horta 2006, 276). However,when push came to shove the previous mayor ofAmadora—who was in office from 1997 to 2013and who in 2004 was suspected by judicialauthorities of receiving illegal payments from real-estate developers (the case was dropped in 2013)—swung to the landowner’s side.

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Eduardo Ascensao is Postdoctoral Researcherat the Centro de Estudos Geograficos, Uni-versity of Lisbon. Email: eduardoascensao@campus.ul.pt

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