Places of resistance

This paper examines the changing nature of spatial discourses and the dynamics of grassroots organizing in the migrant squatter settlement of Cova da Moura, in the periphery of Lisbon. It focuses on official discourses on this neighbourhood and the ways in which these have shaped local collective organizing. The first part of the paper maps out the origins and development of the settlement, focusing on the emergence of migrant neighbourhood‐based organizations. The second part explores how dominant official discourses and policies have produced, in the last three decades, an ideology of illegality and of ghettoization. The discourses of space are understood in relation to the concrete social and historical conditions in which they emerge. In the third part, special emphasis is given to the processes of negotiation, and resistance produced by local collective mobilization. It is argued that the ideologies of illegality and ghettoization have been a major driving force in shaping power relations and the nature of social action and collective consciousness. At the broader level, the paper draws on the case study of Cova da Moura to illustrate how grassroots mobilizing in slum neighbourhoods needs to be understood in the battleground of competing forces for the social production of space. This spatial politics constitutes the meeting place where domination meets resistance, where collective struggles become expressions of a greater awareness for the intersection of oppression, marginalization, exploitation and space.