“Intendente is brilliant in terms of urban possibilities, of encounters”

Marta Silva is a dance teacher and a artistic director and cultural manager at the cooperative Largo Residências – recently expelled from the area known as Intendente, in Arroios. Marta was originally from Porto, but she has rooted herself in Lisbon for 20 years now and she has been a witness and an active agent in the cultural and community regeneration of Intendente – a derelict, criminal and prostitution area. This dynamism has managed to resist to the pressures of the real estate market – but not for long. It is now in another process of gentrification.

The real estate speculation is taking over and many cultural associations are being expelled. Largo has gone to Quartel de Santa Bárbara in Largo do Cabeço de Bola – with more than 150 people (artists, professionals, freelancers, journalists) from over a dozen collectives and entities. Now they are moving again to Hos, as the Quartel will be replaced by a housing project.

How was the Intendente area before the installation of the cooperative and before the public space’s revitalization?

There was a line dividing two worlds – Rua Maria Andrade, and Bairro das Colónias, Bairro Inglês, and then Intendente, which was a non-area, a non-place due to all the negative things associated with it. There was a clear division in a neighbourhood that was already inhabited by many young people, no longer the aged neighbourhood it used to be. I could see it from the students’ registration forms – their professions, origins, and ages. It was already a very central and remarkably cheap neighborhood, with architecturally attractive houses.

Many people were moving in, including families, students, and workers, adding to a neighbourhood that had an elderly population and had already hosted a large migrant population for about 60 years.

You could already sense a demographic shift.

I wasn’t even from Lisbon yet – I’m from Porto, I’ve been here for almost 20 years – and I remember being a kid, when I was a dancer and started doing dance workshops in Lisbon.

My father would say, ‘Don’t get off at the Intendente metro station, I’ve heard it’s very dangerous.’ This reputation of a name and an area, it was a non-place, it was a place that was psychologically bigger than a physical place.

This territory attracted you.

From a very young age, from the age of 16 or 17, I worked in Porto on the relationship between arts and social inclusion. First in educational contexts, in social neighbourhoods of Porto. It’s a territory I have a strong affinity for.

And, therefore, I’ve always had this habit, unlike the majority of people who weren’t born here, who take the avenue to avoid passing through here, I always preferred to walk through the streets and areas that supposedly seem dangerous. I would pass through here and through these alleys.

I have this personal preference, and I’ve always passed through these places. Since I was 16 years old, I’ve been doing this, and also because I have this background in dance and the body, it’s part of my way of living, trying to communicate with people without speaking and trying to say good morning and show that I’m also from here – just to say good morning and start building these trust relationships.

This place is extraordinary, and any other area in any other capital… I mean, a square in the city center that is like a living room because it’s protected from the traffic on Avenida. It’s brilliant in terms of urban possibilities, for gatherings.

You could see how it was a pity that this didn’t really have a different dynamic.

How did Largo Residências come into being, and how did it establish itself here?

Largo is a cooperative founded by an association to which I and others involved in the founding of Largo were already connected, and it actually has a history in the neighbourhood dating back to 2004, almost 20 years ago. However, it started as a movement, a group of people that essentially had its headquarters, which is more in people’s memory, where BUS (cultural association) is now – a space on Maria Street with Forno do Tijolo Street.

That’s where everything was born and when it all began. Several people began to come together with the common interest of developing the territory that was their neighborhood, either because they lived there or worked there.

I gave dance classes to several hundred kids in the last few years. I only stopped two years ago, so more than 10 years of teaching children who were growing up. Children are always an excellent way to enter any territory because you get to know the parents, the grandparents, the aunts, the businesses and the shops.

Before Intendente and Largo Residências, knowledge of the social tissue of the area began with the cultural association SOU.

The dynamic that SOU had in the Bairro das Colónias, which was the end of the Anjos parish before the administrative reform, was fundamental for much of the work we later did, which was basically getting to know the people, the territory, the resources, and common interests.

I identified in the parents of the students a common interest in the common good of the territory, not the typical conversation you find when people are interested in an area – “I want to set up my business,” right? There are two ways to enter a territory: wanting to take individual benefit from it or being concerned with the collective benefit.

How did Largo Residências come into being, and how did you come to Intendente?

We moved here in July 2011 and a 10-year lease was signed in 2012. We signed the lease and renovated the first floor and the ground floor. We only had all the doors open, with the café which was the last to open, in late 2013.

On this side, there was absolutely nothing, except for the Viúva Lamego store. The community association from Figueiró dos Vinhos had just closed down. [On the other side], the Sport Clube Intendente was in operation, as was a building of the Social Security, a functioning union. The health center clinic upstairs was just about to close.

We were designing the project to develop here and apply for the BIP/ZIP program, and I had a conversation with a contractor who was doing the renovation work for António Costa’s office. That’s when I asked him, and at that time, the news hadn’t yet been made public that António Costa was moving his office here. He told me that no, that it was already occupied here. “I think the Mayor is coming here.”

How was the transition of the Mayor’s office to this square experienced by the community?

One day, António Costa passed by here. He had a very natural attitude. He didn’t enter here with police or force, and there was no major fanfare. The inauguration event for his office was among neighbours, without the media.

He sometimes came by metro, passed on the street, and talked to people in a very natural way, quickly building a good relationship with this place. I also think he likes this area, and occasionally, he still comes here. It’s not just him; his office staff all worked here. Sometimes when I run into them for some reason at City Hall, they tell me they miss this place.

It was an experience of the scale of a City Hall exercise. It felt like the City Hall of a village; suddenly, there were only a handful of workers. It had a very particular scale.

On the other side of the square, there was also the “Amigos do Minho“, a restaurant and community that had been there for over fifty years and was forced to close in 2017.

I already knew “Amigos do Minho“. I used to go there because, being a northerner, one of my first great frustrations when I came to Lisbon was the Sunday family lunch. I used to have Sunday lunch there with my family from here every Sunday.

With Largo Residências established in Intendente, a collaborative effort began that brought together all local actors and resulted in the revitalization of the area and the dynamics experienced in the following years.

There was strong networking with the organizations along the Mouraria-Intendente axis.

There was a significant level of acceptance and communion. Many of the people who joined the team were from the old school of Intendente, and our partners were the old neighborhoods and the community associations; it was a very interesting work.

Gradually, new projects began to emerge. Vida Portuguesa came, Bike POP came, Casa Independente came, Mob came.

Until 2014, these were the golden years, as I like to call them. New projects kept arriving, but there was compatibility, dialogue, and a close relationship with the old school of Intendente – the 12 or 13 traders from the old neighbourhoods here.

We organized a lot of joint programming and many meetings about this and that.

And yet, there was still a stigma that this wasn’t an area to invest much in. It was like a paradise. We were basically creating a collective trip here. It was an environment of extreme neighborhood pride.

But it was already starting to become a meeting point for people, that “living room.”

Yes, it started to become a bit more trendy. From 2014 to 2016, I see another temporal cycle here.

This place was growing, becoming more talked about – ‘Fantastic area, more hipster,’ but where the real estate crisis madness hadn’t hit yet, and there was a great balance between new and old businesses. So, there wasn’t this crash, this antithesis, this annihilation to replace.

Not even the people who used to come here were asking for this – because there was no business for it. Right after they opened the terraces, more tourism started coming, and immediately, this place began to take on a different dynamic. Prices started to rise, and neighbours had to leave.

So, 2017 is, for me, the year of transition.

It’s when we started to get together with the neighbourhood partners and try to understand what right to the city we have – the housing crisis, the crisis of public space. I remember doing a debate in 2017 at the [Todos] Festival, which was about occupying, the right to the square, and my son, who has grown up here since he was 4 years old – he’s 15 now – this is where he learned to kick a ball, this is where he learned to ride a bike, and it was the neighbours who took care of him while I was busy.

We were talking about the right to public space, and he came up to me and said, ‘Well, this is all very nice, but nowadays, the police won’t let me play ball; they say I disturb the terraces.’ These are symbolic comments and moments.

This place became a meeting place. It used to be a meeting place long ago, where all the older neighbours – Mr Júlio from the barbershop, Mrs Lídia, Mrs Lourdes, the older people – have memories of a commercial Intendente. They would come, pass by, and be here.

What caused it to stop being a meeting place at that time?

It was during the post-closure years of Casal Ventoso, that many issues were concentrated here. It ceased to be a place to stay and became a place to pass through, and in those early years, it turned into a place to be again.

It wasn’t just about passing; it was about being. But this state of being started to evolve into a form of being that was not very compatible in terms of interests concerning the use of space – the terrace that didn’t want to be bothered by those who asked for money or consumed. Tensions started to emerge here.

Was this the arrival of gentrification in Intendente?

These are mental gaps that I describe in terms of perception. It was in 2017 or 2016 that the Sport Clube began dealing with rising of rents, and we started trying to help them reorganize associatively.

The same thing happened with Amigos do Minho. They had rented the first and second floors, but the rest was never rented. They didn’t even know the landlord. They had leased it from the Lisbon Association of Landlords, so they had never seen the landlord in their lives. Every month, they paid that association. For a long time, they tried to establish a dialogue with the landlord, because they were the ones who provided some security to the ground floor, which was often invaded.

Once, they told me, ‘Something should be done down here because it’s vacant.’ And I said, ‘Here’s what we can do: I always have people looking for workshops, and I’ve even met two or three ceramists looking for workshops. How about starting a project?’

[The idea] was to create ceramic workshops and carry out a community-driven facade rehabilitation process to occupy the ground floor space. The facade was deteriorating and was already in a dangerous state.

We secured support for this. However, it was a real challenge to start the rehabilitation because they were not the owner of the building, meaning the owner had to grant permission. We spent months trying to reach the owner but couldn’t.

We didn’t even have official contacts. So, with an assessment from SOS Azulejo, we managed to prove that it was a matter of public safety and carried out the work without requiring the landlord’s permission. But, as you can imagine, people started talking about it, the nice building, and not even a year later, the landlords showed up.

The work was completed in 2016 or 2015. It matches this transition in 2016, 2017 when things started to be sold here at higher prices. And finally, these landlords appeared. They saw that the building had been renovated and then came the bad news that they wanted to sell it.

Is this when the square starts to empty and lose the recently gained vitality?

When the neighbourhood started to come to life, these associations also began to rejuvenate. Now, the time needed for these newcomers to become members of the society and join the management teams, wasn’t there.

A community movement where this could happen wasn’t three years; it was ten. If there were a way to freeze the evolution of prices and external interests in all of this… This needs a different time for things to gain natural and not forced rejuvenation.

The timing these collectives had to handle this shift didn’t allow them to cope with all these changes.

The gentrification process was already underway.

Gentrification, not as an act of ‘forcing you to leave’ but of ‘convincing you to leave.’ A place that was never seen as a place of monetary value. It was instead a place of community value and, suddenly, they start convincing people that maybe the compensation is quite good.

Amid all this, there’s no talk of non-renewal [of lease contracts], just that everything is for sale. And, of course, if everything is for sale, they won’t renew [the lease].

All of this is much more valuable now: empty. No one can rent here because [the owners] don’t want to. Empty, empty, empty, empty. It’s becoming empty because emptiness is valuable. Fullness is an obstacle to real estate investment.

That happened with the 10-year lease contract that Largo Residências had: it wasn’t renewed.

We already knew there was no renewal [of the contract] because we saw this for sale on the high real estate networks, and we started to be visited by people walking around the square looking up – they are the investors.

They were doing investment calculations, we were visited by people in suits. I said, ‘Okay, we’re done.’ Then we confirmed that it was for sale.

Since then, we started to create a kind of investment network and began talking to the City Hall. The City Hall was still a tenant, and they were still there. In fact, when we found out that the landlords were putting it up for sale we immediately contacted the City Hall. They didn’t even know; we were the ones informing them.

If this is sold, what remains of the community process? What remains? Of the projects that emerged: us, O das Joanas, A Vida Portuguesa, what will be left if this is all cleared?

And there the City Hall said, ‘It can’t be. You are structurally important here.’

But it couldn’t be stopped; it was already privatized. There was no hand in its destiny, as it had become a luxury hotel. And the municipality said it would try to exercise the right of first refusal. Something we couldn’t do because this is a lot. It wasn’t even sold per building. It was buying the block for 21 million or 23 million.

The municipality does have negotiating capacity and is more flexible in dividing it later. We convinced the municipality: maybe we have every interest in exercising the right of first refusal and we can even divide and sell to avoid financially burdening the municipality, we can resolve to sell a certain building.

So, the municipality started negotiating and expressed an interest in exercising the right of first refusal with them. But the real estate company played another trick: it no longer sold the property and announced the sale of the real estate company. At that point, there was no way to legally exercise the right of first refusal unless it was the only asset they had, but it wasn’t.

Is this when you realized you would have to leave Intendente?

This is where we talked to the municipality and told them that we felt that the mission in this territory was not over. On the contrary, it’s a failed project – the vulnerable population is still here and the investment that was made in this square is all going to hotels. We feel that we are still useful here, and the cooperative either continues the work here or decides to close because replicating this elsewhere is not possible.

If we leave a million euros in rent and renovations here, fine, it was a crazy decision that we chose to make. Now, the asset you create with a territory, the work, the relationships, the people – it’s worth much more than a million, so that’s not our mission.

But you wanted to stay in the territory.

This is where we have to continue, but there were no public buildings here, none at all.

What was the plan, then?

Since 2013, I participated in decentralized city council meetings. We had a huge number of support requests from the sector and projects that also asked us. ‘Do you know a cheap place to rent?’ We were very active in attending these meetings, asking the city council for an interlocutor with the heritage that is in transition, whether it is private or public, governmental or municipal. Empty blocks that could be occupied, even with temporary activities.

How did you realize that the future of Largo Residências and your territorial intervention could move to the other side of Avenida Almirante Reis while remaining in the Arroios parish, in the former GNR barracks, at Largo do Cabeço de Bola?

We had already done a show inside the barracks. In 2013 or 2015, I questioned [the City Council] about the barracks, and that was put on hold.

We realized that we needed to create a transitional project to avoid disappearing. And with the pandemic, our annual festival, Bairro em Festa, became impossible to hold in the middle of the street. So, we remembered the barracks — one more reason to talk to the municipality and ask about its status.

With António Costa in the government, there was a decree approved in the Assembly of the Republic to halt the privatization process of the barracks and Miguel Bombarda.

We knew that the barracks would be empty, and since we organised the festival in partnership with the municipality, we suggested talking to the GNR to see if they could temporarily lend it to us for the festival. We succeeded. We entered the barracks and said, “Leaving this place empty for a few more years is a crime, and there are numerous other entities losing space, losing space, losing space.”

How did the cooperative view the move to a temporary location, knowing that it was waiting to be transformed into public housing?

The transitional project can also serve as a statement on how to experiment with the city.

If we have space, let it be an open gate, a neighbourhood, and not an artists’ condominium, as that’s not exciting at all.

Returning to Intendente, how do you see it now, and how do you imagine that territory will be ten years from now?

Intendente is not easy to predict because it has its own unique energy and life that is being influenced by the process of gentrification, but it won’t change radically. My grieving for leaving this place was four years ago when I learned about the non-renewal of the contract. I didn’t become sad now.

The feeling of being in a neighbourhood where everyone knew each other has been lost to some extent. Now, I wouldn’t let my daughter walk around here alone, as I allowed my son to do when everyone said this place was dangerous. In recent years, it stopped being a safe place because it was no longer an area where people more or less knew each other. More people came here to drink on weekends, but still, there was a lot of identity and trust here, with references, faces, families, people, and old neighbours.

In recent years, it has changed very quickly. The number of faces you saw mostly was unknown, and I was robbed. I mean, what used to be the unsafe neighbourhood that everyone thought it was before actually became less personal, less distinctive, less secure in the last few years. I even said that Intendente was no longer worth it.

As for how I imagine this place in 10 years: this is going to be a luxury hotel, and over there, Soho House, a club for millionaires. Down there, it will be a luxury hotel. All of this will be sold as a block.

This is a square of luxury hotels and apartments. It’s not what was envisioned.

Has the Intendente that persisted for so many decades ceased to be?

I don’t know, it’s a mystery because I thought it would have disappeared by now. It’s been happening for a few years, and it hasn’t disappeared. We were a neighbourhood hub, but Café O das Joanas was as well. So, when O das Joanas closes, I’m not sure if it’s by the end of the year or next year, without the more neighbourhood cafés, there will be another void.

I think it will go through another one or two years of being a non-place-empty building. Construction noise for two, three, four years.

In the last three years, there hasn’t been any sound of construction. The construction noise will return. So, the soundscape will be different. It may last another five or six years, and then, during that construction period, you might still see an influx of unlikely and contrasting people here.

Attracting the wealthy, hotels, and terraces can change a lot, but it is still a pass-through and gathering place for more vulnerable people.

It’s not clear what came first, whether social services came because there were vulnerable people or if vulnerable people came because of the social services.

For many years, even decades, Intendente has been a human corridor in terms of energy. All the more vulnerable people pass through here.

I was already convincing myself that this was no longer interesting for organizing festivals or events because the dynamics were not the same anymore, but it was a wake-up call. We organized a week of events here, and I felt again that parallel to all this new external layer, there is still this magnetism of Intendente, with more vulnerable people who continue to linger around and always pass through here.

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