Following engineers and architects through slums: the technoscience of slum intervention in the Portuguese-speaking landscape

• Autor(a) principal: Ascensão , Eduardo
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.31447/AS00032573.2013206.07
• topic: urbanismo colonial e pós-colonial; reabilitação de barracas; Cova da Moura; Portugal; colonial and postcolonial urbanism; slum rehabilitation; Cova da Moura; Portugal; .

This article revisits the long genealogy of State intervention in informal settlements and poorly built environments throughout the 20th century, in cities such as Lisbon, Porto, Rio de Janeiro, Maputo or Macau, to better frame some socio-technical complexities involved in the current project of slum rehabilitation in Cova da Moura, Lisbon. Then, it draws upon ethnographic research with experts from the National Laboratory of Civil Engineering (LNEC) during a scientific assessment of informal dwellings to show that the “evaluation” of informal dwellings with a view to “reconfigure” them, is a socio-technical operation based on a “laboratorisation” of the dwelling, but one that is crucially dependent on the subjectiveobjective experience of experts.