The Battles around Urban Governance and Active Citizenship: The Case of the Movement for the Caracol da Penha Garden

Abstract

Building a civil society that can act as a collaborative voice in the processes of change that take place in the territories does not always come about naturally and peacefully but is often something that needs to be won, based on concrete episodes in daily life. These changes are framed by the ongoing trend of shift from a form of power carried out in accordance with the old values of opacity, autonomy and imposition to one dominated by transparency, informality and sharing. The consolidation of governance processes in line with the legitimate exercise of local, national, regional or metropolitan government therefore makes sense. A descriptive methodology is adopted here of the process of affirmation of an organic movement of citizens, identifying step by step the interactions between actors that led to the reversal of the initial decision taken by the municipality. This emblematic case is framed theoretically by the ongoing paradigm shift related to the modes of exercising power at the local scale. This analysis of the case of the Movement for the Caracol da Penha Garden in Lisbon, Portugal is a contribution to understanding how this slow and difficult transformation takes place in urban and metropolitan environments and how the learning that can be taken from these processes can be of great benefit to all urban stakeholders.