Lisbon · Story of Place · Conference
Conferência “LISBOA VIVA”
Seeing Lisbon as a living being — and what that enables.
Could it be that most of our current solutions are part of the problem? Change needs to happen upstream, starting on how we think about Lisbon.
Lisboa Viva asked a single, disarming question: what if the city isn’t a set of problems to fix, but a living system we all participate in? Rather than opening with metrics or masterplans, the conference began with a provocation — that Lisbon behaves like a parasite toward the rest of Portugal — and used it to pull 100+ participants out of problem-solving mode and into a different register entirely: seeing the city not as a sum of infrastructure and the people in it, but as people, river, hills and buildings being one interdependent living organism with a past and a potential future sourced in its uniqueness.
The day’s real achievement was a shift in paradigm, not just content. Bayo Akomolafe’s invitation to “embrace the monsters” and Ben Haggard’s grounded case studies (Penha de França, La Garrotxa) gave that shift both edge and evidence — proof that living-systems thinking isn’t abstraction, it’s a workable lens for real neighbourhoods.
What emerged, in the end, wasn’t a list of solutions but a re-storying of Lisbon itself — as a threshold between land and sea that nurtures and is nurtured by flows of people and other living beings; as a place that has always metabolised diversity into a layered living culture. The conference’s core value was to create the first step towards an ongoing space of inquiry and collaboration among diverse stakeholders about Lisbon’s essence and its potential.