The presentation analyses the experiences of governance of occupations and evictions in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA). Forced evictions have recurrently been approached as a phenomenon of the Global South, related to rural land crabbing or urban slum clearance, ejecting people from their homes in the name of “progress”. However, in the current context of housing financialisation and austerity urbanism, there is all the time more evidence of violent displacement in the Global North, related to new forms of social inequality and heightened housing insecurity. The city of Lisbon and its metropolitan area provides an interesting case to investigate these dynamics. The housing crises in Lisbon can be roughly grouped into long-standing crises which involving the comparative disadvantage suffered by immigrants from the Portuguese ex-colonies upon their arrival to Lisbon. The new housing crises, on the other, relate to austerity policies, real estate speculation and transnational tourist gentrification. In terms of eviction, in Portugal, there is a long history of demolition of shanties, in a process during which only a part of population has been offered alternative housing, resulting in some parts of population being simply displaced. These expulsions continue until today in some Portuguese municipalities, such as Amadora and Vidigueira. This is an interesting backdrop to the more recent phenomenon of financialisation of housing and the evictions from private rental apartments. The presentation draws from a PhD research for which ethnographic and activist research was undertaken in Lisbon Metropolitan Area from December 2017 to April 2019. The research involved participation in the actions of two social movements, Habita and Stop Despejos, participant observation and informal and semi-structured interviews, conducted with residents who have occupied social housing apartments without permission, representatives of council-level authorities tasked with managing social housing estates, and activists of local social movements. The presentation focuses on the management of the social housing estates and the occupations in the social housing estates. It focuses on the procedures of access to social housing and management practices of the social housing units, asking what has led to the situation in which so many social housing units are left vacant for years, leading to the consequent occupations without permission. It analyses how occupations and the evictions that follow the occupations are framed by different actors involved with them, how they are managed by the council authorities, and lastly, how these processes are being negotiated, reworked, supported or contested by diverse groups of actors.

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evictions,occupations,social housing,governance,Portugal