Returning to the future: utopias, retrotopias and heterotopias in the regeneration projects of the Marvila neighborhood

Abstract

Marvila is a post-industrial neighbourhood of the city of Lisbon, geographically very central, but socially perceived as very distant due to a long history of poverty, discrimination and stigmatization of the resident population. In the last decade, Marvila has been the subject of a large-scale urban regeneration process that has seen luxury housing projects, the opening of restaurants, art galleries and clubs, as well as “smart” and “creative” industries transforming the abandoned industrial buildings. The relevance of this study lies in analysing how these transformations often deepen pre-existing social inequalities and disrupt local ways of life. The aim of this paper, based on anthropological research carried out in the Marvila neighbourhood (Lisbon, Portugal) as part of the H2020 ROCK project, is to present the project’s areas of intervention, with their dystopian, utopian and retrotopian imaginaries. The methodology combined participant observation, individual interviews, focus groups and documentary analysis, enabling a triangulated understanding of empirical experience and symbolic dynamics. By revealing the different types of utopias that guide the imagination of futures that have not been but could have been, and by critiquing the dominant political perspectives on the place, this paper presents the societal concerns that people experience in their everyday lives, caused by demographic, economic and urban changes. It further investigates how memory and place intersect, showing how the past is evoked as a retrotopian ideal or a dystopian burden to be erased, shaping conflicting narratives of urban renewal. These processes offer a privileged perspective from which to imagine alternative futures in which ‘we have already been in the not-yet’, beyond apparent possibilities, and to provoke alternative paths that might be worth pursuing. It concludes that the regeneration processes in Marvila function as material interventions and as symbolic operations that selectively erase the past, reconfigure belonging and redefine urban citizenship.