On Relational Histories of Spatial Law and Transgression

Abstract

This chapter explores a particular aspect of spatial transgression, based on Henri Lefebvre’s conception of space–time as a category that involves both the built environment and social space, and inspired by the work of urbanist Ananya Roy and architectural historian Nezar AlSayyad on inhabitation under conditions of urban informality. My interest in the latter arose from my embodied, situated knowledge as a Lisboner, intrigued that Urban Informality did not include a chapter on an European city. Growing up, I often did not have school in the afternoons, and with a couple of other unwitting teenage derivists, took buses to the end of the line, and walked around. Much later, when I started preliminary doctoral fieldwork and walking around the informally created subdivi sion of Casal de Cambra (Fig. 3.1), the motivations of the first dwellers were both unexpected and sensible: they had moved from central Lisbon in the 1960s due to a lack of affordable housing, instead of being the rural migrants described in most accounts.