The exposed wound.

Metropolitan governance in Lisbon in Covid-19 times

Abstract

This triple crisis – sanitary, economic and social – will leave nothing and nobody indifferent. The reflection presented here focuses on the difficult and even incomprehensible relations between a national level of command and the intermunicipal and local operational levels responsible for its territorial translation. The recognition of the invisibility of the supramunicipal level by both the central administration and the local elected representatives themselves may legitimize the question: Who cares about their erasure? This devaluation in the context of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area has induced additional risks in the present and with potential consequences in the future, by applying the general guidelines issued by the health and civil protection authorities according to the differentiated views of their 18 municipalities and hundreds of other public, private and associative entities. This reflection concludes with the idea that if at this time of reconstruction of a new urban and metropolitan imaginary it is not possible to make significant progress in its governance, autonomy and political legitimacy, then we are likely to witness the slow agony of a structure condemned only to single protagonists and interest groups from both the national and local levels.