The municipal building at 69 Rua Marques da Silva, occupied in 2017 by a collective against gentrification and real estate speculation, is to be transformed into six affordable apartments. Construction is due to start in early 2026 and finish in 2028.
O he council building at 69 Rua Marques da Silva, in Arroios, which was occupied in 2017 by a collective fighting gentrification and real estate speculation, will be turned into affordable rent. The building, vacant for a decade, will now be redeveloped with funds from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) and should have residents again in 2028.
According to Public, This property will have six apartments completely rehabilitated for affordable rent. The redevelopment project should be completed by the end of this year, “the contract is expected to be launched at the beginning of 2026”, the Lisbon City Council told the newspaper.
O building is on the list of properties “in rehabilitation and to be rehabilitated” within the scope of the plan conceived by the municipality for this purpose and based on the survey of municipal assets carried out for the Lisbon Municipal Housing Charter, writes Público. It is one of the 42 municipal buildings identified in this document, approved last year, with the potential for “rehabilitation, reconstruction and conversion for residential use”.
The history of the occupation
Unlike other European capitals, Lisbon doesn't exactly have a tradition of occupying vacant buildings as a form of protest. But on September 15, 2017, on the eve of the October 1 municipal elections that would give victory to socialist Fernando Medina, number 69 Rua Marquês da Silva was occupied by a group of activists who introduced themselves as the “Lisbon Occupation Assembly” (AOLX). This occupation continued for four and a half months, and the occupiers were only expelled on January 30, 2018.
At the time he policy followed in the city of Lisbon was the target of criticism from the left, by voices that denounced growing real estate speculation, gentrification of neighborhoods and rising rents, in a context of strong growth in tourism and the arrival of foreigners. The city council, which was led by the PS, a situation that the October elections did not change, seemed to have little commitment to protecting the population and the municipal heritage - evidence of this was the fact that the property that was occupied has been empty since 2015, deteriorating, despite being located in a central area of the city, where demand for housing was and is high.
When the occupiers entered the building, they spread several tarpaulins outside the window. One of them read: “We're not speculators, we're spectacular.” The warning was a kind of white flag of peace, from someone who doesn't want to do harm, just to do something for access to housing in the capital. “The city belongs to those who occupy it”, was another of the phrases hung up by the activists. Entering the building would have been easy, as the door was only propped open. The occupiers did the necessary cleaning and changed the locks.
The group had a blog on Tumblr, now deactivated, in which he presented himself as “a group of people, without any institutional affiliation, united by the desire to bring an abandoned building back to life”. He wrote on this online channel that wanted to remove the council building from “meshes of speculation” and make it “a space for social enjoyment, be it residential, educational or cultural”. They just didn't know what specifically. On one of the first days of the occupation, “more than 150 people” participated in an open assembly to collectively decide on the use to be given to the property - the invitation went out to the whole city and anyone who wanted to take part in the process was welcome.
The local newspaper The Crow reported, on September 19, 2017, on some of the ideas discussed in that assembly two days earlier, such as the installation of a “observatory for housing issues”, It could also be used as a cultural center or rehearsal space for bands and artists. As for giving it a residential use, Nuno Couto, one of the group's spokespeople, told O Corvo that “proposals to this effect have been heard” and that it was a possibility that, like the others, would have to be discussed further at the next session of the assembly.
“At the same time, the image of the city as a sunny, picturesque and peaceful place, promoted by tourist industries, has contributed to an increase in the number of people interested in visiting and living in Lisbon. The market is booming and so are prices. The market is booming and so are prices. Neighborhoods where rents were once minimally affordable have seen their values rise brutally. The destructive recomposition of ways of life in the city, now reserved for those who can afford to pay more, is illustrated by the successive eviction cases”, read the AOLX blog.
When the occupation of number 69 Rua Marques da Silva, was the recent launch of the Accessible Income Program (PRA) by the Lisbon City Council, which in 2017 envisaged between 5,000 and 7,000 studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom houses with rents between 250 and 450 euros, below market values. The program was to be implemented in the following years on municipal land or buildings, through public construction or concessions with private individuals, and it is now known that it fell far short of expectations - the major PRA projects, such as Benfica or Alto do Restelo, were never launched.
Back in 2017, AOLX criticized the city council's initiative, saying that it would be “far from being an effective response to the problem”. “Its aim is more symbolic than material, contributing to the legitimization of a housing policy marked by a lack of initiative, the squandering of assets and complicity with investment funds, including in the definition of supposed social policies”, the collective wrote on its blog.
Despite distancing itself from the city council's policies, the Occupy Assembly was willing to talk to the city council, which, in an electoral scenario, preferred to remain silent about the occupation. There were only two visits by the Municipal Police, who reportedly had only four people and threatened to tell the PSP to “coercively evicting people from the house after the elections”according to wrote the activists on Facebook, in a post made on September 18, 2017. “There are two ways: either the council recognizes that the house was in fact vacant and there is an alternative that involves a group of people who want to do something positive there, or it continues to have a vacant property.”, Nuno Couto told the newspaper O Corvo that there were a large number of unused council properties and that it was extremely difficult to find decent, affordable housing in Lisbon.
How it all ended
The story of the occupation of the municipal building on Rua Marques da Silva came to an end on January 30, 2018. On the morning of that Tuesday, an operation carried out by the Lisbon City Council (CML) heritage services and the Municipal Police, with the support of the PSP, resulted in the property being emptied. According to O Corvo, only one person was inside, a member of the collective that had occupied it four and a half months earlier.
“We have always been willing to talk to the mayor, to whom we sent a letter explaining our position. Just a few days ago, we reiterated our willingness to talk, but we never received a response”, Pedro Rita, one of AOLX's members, told this newspaper at the time, regretting that the capital's municipality had “opted for force and violence rather than dialog”. One proposal made by the collective was to hold “an autonomous public tender” for the allocation of the six dwellings in that building to those who needed them, with “fair rents".
Many of the house's regulars gathered in the vicinity and watched the eviction, reports O Corvo, also reporting the presence of Tiago Ivo Cruz, then a municipal deputy for the Left Bloc (BE), who spoke of an action “unreasonable and disproportionate”, “demonstrating authoritarianism”; and Rita Silva, from the Habita association, who said she had doubts about the legality of the eviction, although she admitted that the occupation had also taken place outside the law. “CML has a lot of empty houses and if their social function isn't being fulfilled, with the property left to deteriorate, without any understanding of the municipality's desire to put it to good use, we can talk about a legitimate process. We're talking about a space that had a socio-cultural activity and could be part of the solution”, he told the newspaper.
At the time, O Corvo reported that this building could be demolished as part of the construction of the Caracol da Penha Garden. This didn't happen in the end. Only the buildings on either side of number 69 were demolished - one of which was used to create the entrance to the garden.
