Lisbon, a Project for the Metropolis?

Expansion and Identification of the Lisbon Metropolis

Abstract

With the country returning in the mid-1980s to its original frontiers in the European context, Lisbon initially increased its ancestral urban center, reinforced by its own political centralization, while at the same time intensifying the occupation of its metropolitan territory. Since that period, important changes in the political and economic environment have deepened the political and urban role of its territory, in light of which the spatial divides and social segmentations that internally cross and differentiate the metropolitan space become more visible. But it is also in such a context, due to its relative stability, even in its own economic and social asymmetries, that the need to give it an adequate status arises more clearly. We therefore need to deepen some of the available empirical information about that most recent period, trying to break the limits of that tendentially regional entity that is know as the "metropolitan area" of Lisbon. It is thus in the context of this debate that it seems pertinent to place the institutional question of identifying this other entity, which we have precisely designated as the Metropolis of Lisbon.