Friday, November 25, 2016

Lisbon: the forbidden city – Diário de Notícias – Lisbon

Fernando Medina perhaps love hopelessly in Lisbon and this has led to open all the yards at the same time, frantically, as if suddenly his life had come in the works deep, and this dynamic was as inevitable as the fall of leaves in the fall. Or so the president of the chamber just wants to win the municipal elections, the most likely hypothesis and the banal, and believes that you should show the work – lots of work, works in the streets of the legs to the air, before the elections arrive, to impress the locals and scare the opponents.

In the second case, to scare the opponents, the Medina may be able to some thing, although Santana Lopes to be the eternal candidate, the candidate position which perfumes the attributes and you dont really nothing to walk around. As to the intention to entice the locals through the concrete, the strategy seems risky.

Lisbon has become a trap for cars and a headache for pedestrians. I imagine that if the works were focused in an area of the city, it might be possible to work around the problem. But general Medina distributed the machines, the workers, and municipal police by the 24 parishes of the capital, as if to prepare a kind of invasion of Mosul. It is not, unfortunately, a blitzkrieg, it’s a siege that will last the four seasons of the year, and more still, no one knows. This maze between the trenches is traversed very slowly, slowly, so slowly that in the last days I’ve even compliance with some of the workers as if we were old friends trapped in an elevator malfunctioning, and every day the machine stops on the same floor.

- So, and the Sporting, yesterday? Bad hem? And the Domingues, better not talk about it.

If the second circular had fulfilled its true – and until now unknown — vocation, to be a lung city and not an exceptional “smoking point”, it would become even difficult to conceive how Lisbon would be able to move in the midst of so much upheaval and grip. Fortunately, there are people serious bit that win public tenders and that, already in extremis, that crashed the operation green bird – could this be the name of the works thought (thought not)… in the works invented for this major axis to the fluidity of Lisbon.

I don’t know. Want to say: I know. It is a problem of scale. Fernando Medina has planned everything as if she was thinking at Expo ‘ 98: an intervention radical in a smaller space, set and artificial with no locals around, except on the borders of the work. But the multiplicity of holes, and surveys of land which in these days tremble Lisbon whole are the opposite of this and show a strange disregard for the people. It should not be that the assumption of any decision: figure out how to improve without grief, without the annoy and harm residents and visitors?

Not even it’s any consolation the advanced information on the placards that accompany the dozens of works. There are no deadlines visible, there is not enough information for it to survive at least the idea that, one day, however far off that day is, by the more fanciful that it presents, the revolution will end in peace.

There’s even a placard, there may be several of the kind, that says, in a tone of apocalyptic: avoid the riparian zone. A type off guard scares you: what there will be for those bands, a cholera outbreak? None of this: they are the works, lord, are just the works of the holy Medina. The camera could not have found a formulation more gentle, less aggressive, more friendly? Do the locals did not seem a good idea for those who aims to win the local elections.

The most disconcerting is not, however, this voluntarism, perhaps well-intentioned, Fernando Medina. What amazes and worries is the lack of interest of the people of lisbon. They beep and wear, but do not mobilize, they do not protest with the minimum of the sense of requirement. They see all this nonsense operating with a dose of resignation without parallel. Complain much when you are inside the car, but as soon as they come out of it lose the glow and earn the submission. Not even the politicians of the camera, that should be and make the opposition leverage to demand and complain. There is no debate in Lisbon, there is no policy in Lisbon.

The city has made a long way since the times of Krus Abecasis, from the madness of Tomás Taveira and many other frenzied pencil in hand, but remains apathetic and sleepwalking even when it is threatened from within, by their, by those who even know, for who should rule. The city’s inhabitants live in a sort of laziness of which some will only wake up on the day they fall into a hole any. And even so, you may shake the dust of the pants and is already. Lisbon is not beloved by the locals, is not.

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