Perhaps the irony is that I came to Lisbon as part of the very class of people stoking change.
I was raised in London, a city I no longer feel I belong to, and moved here with the kind of mobility many Portuguese people do not have. I know that makes my concern complicated. I’m inside the problem, trying to live with some awareness of it. But that’s also why I feel it so sharply.
I’ve seen what happens when a city becomes increasingly organised around capital rather than belonging. I’ve seen parallel worlds emerge: one for those with money, mobility, and international networks, and another for the people who carry the place through ordinary life.
In Lisbon, I feel the parallel worlds too: the expat world of specialty coffee, brunch, English-speaking spaces, and aesthetic consumption; and the Portuguese world of families, workers, elderly neighbours, sarcasm, saudade, and the slight twitch of memories from difficult political histories. These worlds occupy the same streets, but they don’t always meet.
I’m learning Portuguese. I read Camões and the country’s history. I feel at home amongst the soulfulness and sarcasm of the Portuguese. In many ways, I felt more kinship here than in the city that raised me. I try, imperfectly, not to treat Portugal as a lifestyle accessory. But I still feel the weight of being grouped with those who arrive without curiosity, humility, or any real desire to belong beyond consumption.
There is a strange loneliness in loving a place while knowing my presence may symbolise something painful to the people who are from here.
Lisbon’s transformation is not wrong because growth is wrong. It is wrong if growth turns the city’s own people into background characters in a prosperity story written for investors, tourists, remote workers, and elites. A humane society should not ask ordinary Portuguese people to sacrifice their homes, neighbourhoods, and sense of belonging so the country can appear successful from the outside.
I feel for the Portuguese not because I imagine myself morally separate from the problem, but because I’ve already lost a version of home to it.
London taught me what happens when ordinary people are priced out of the places that formed them. So when I see Lisbon beginning to split into parallel worlds, I can’t pretend it’s harmless.
I know what this story looks like when it is allowed to continue.