Lisbon isn’t just its buildings, restaurants, hotels, sea views, and investment returns. Lisbon, or any city, is memory. It’s family networks, small shops, old neighbours, ordinary routines, language, humour, grief, pride, and continuity.

It becomes a form of exploitation when investors are allowed to bid for a culture nurtured over generations, prune its rough edges, and then sell access to it for maximum profit…rendering it beautiful, but hollow. Meanwhile, those who created much of its value are left with higher rents, weaker communities, and a growing sense that their own country no longer has room for them.

But at least it enriches a narrow class /s

To be clear, the danger isn’t tourism itself. Tourism brings money, jobs, visibility, and cultural exchange. The danger is this modern extractive form of it. And it does not take much imagination to consider the consequences. You only need to look at London, Paris, Geneva, and countless other cities where wealth has preserved the surface while displacing the life beneath it.

I write this seemingly naively, as if private equity and wealthy investors are merely oblivious to the effects of their quarterly goals. Unfortunately, and with great insomnia, I know it’s a business model: privatise the gains and socialise the losses. All enabled by regulatory capture, political incentives, and a dash of scorn that community isn’t as profitable as individual isolationism.

Moral imagination is key, and unfortunately, sparse. I struggle with whether to accept unwarranted accumulation as an inevitable human impulse, or whether doing so is already a kind of defeat. Greed often feels more powerful than kindness not because it is deeper, but because it is easier: easier to take than to care, easier to extract than to preserve, easier for a few determined people to damage what many gentler people are trying to protect.

A country shouldn’t measure success only by how much capital it attracts, how much property appreciates, or how many luxury developments appear. It should ask whether one of its young people can afford to live near their family. Whether an elderly resident can remain in the neighbourhood they know. Whether workers in the tourism economy can build stable lives from the wealth they help generate. Whether local people feel included in the future of their own city.



A city that forgets whom it belongs to may still be beautiful, but it has already begun to disappear.

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.


I came to Lisbon with the mobility of a London expat, but not with a face people associate with that world. Sometimes I feel suspended between the Lisbon of remote workers and the Lisbon of Uber drivers, Glovo riders, and service staff working behind the scenes…people whose presence is relied upon, yet rarely welcomed with the same ease

Close enough to see both, and sometimes to be misread by both, but not quite belonging to either.

Even within the outsider class, there are hierarchies.

AI won’t determine the future nearly as much as how the gains end up being distributed. I think what the AI faff has exposed is the gap between economic systems and human needs.

It’s a fair aspiration to remove work from human hands (ongoing for millennia), but it’s not fair to gate-keep the value that comes with it.

Bigger Q:
What happens when intelligence is a commodity in a system built on scarcity?
How will our identities, structures, and search for meaning change?

Entering a small elevator, especially if someone’s already inside:
First “Bom dia/tarde/noite”, then “Posso?” before entering

As you reach to press your button:
“Com licença”

When exiting:
another “Bom dia/tarde/noite”

It may sound too formal, but I’m firmly on the side of these small pleasantries. They’re the soft edges of a community… a small “price” to pay to stop a place from feeling like everyone’s just passing through each other. We are wired for connection, after all.

Tbh I’ve said “bom dia” to more people in a month, in Portugal…. than I’ve done in 30 years in London.

I read Moxie Marlinspike’s (Founder of Signal) critique of democracy recently, that there are problems inherent to the system itself:

• Democracy turns people into passive selectors of pre-made options, implying that those who control the agenda hold real power.
• The majority imposes decisions on minorities, even though technically the “majority” is often just the largest minority group.
• Built-in (unfixable) vulnerabilities include: demagoguery, lobbying, and corruption.
• It presents itself as the only legitimate system, and synonymous with freedom. But voting gives an illusion of control, real power remains elsewhere.
• Participating in elections legitimises the system. It channels dissent into safe, limited actions instead of direct change.

Their alternative is anarchy (self-organisation and direct action), which is great for smaller scale matters, but how would that work for the public service elements? Transport, power grids, healthcare. These things necessitate long-term infrastructure planning, oversight, maintenance, standards, among other considerations. Fragmented decision-making from loose voluntary groups most likely cannot deliver outcomes efficiently enough. There would still be a need of some form of large-scale coordination system.

I always think about, “How do we keep large-scale coordination, but give people more direct influence and control?”. Some rabbit holes:

• Preferendums during elections (rank issues on priority, giving leaders a mandate to follow)
• Energy co-operatives in Schönau and Feldheim. Owned and run by the people.
• Use tech for faster feedback loops. Continuous engagement by proposing policies and voting more frequently
• Citizens assemblies to deliberate on specific issues
• Participatory budgeting: Schools vs roads vs parks etc

In the 1860s, a man named James Croll began writing about how the Earth’s movements shape our climate, particularly ice ages.

Fascinatingly, he wasn’t even an academic, but a janitor at Strathclyde University (formerly Anderson’s University). He spent evenings in the uni library, teaching himself physics, hydrostatics, mechanics…whatever he could get his hands on.

What fascinates me just as much though, is who gets remembered (and who decides that). We all know of Einstein or Newton, even if we can’t quite explain their work. But there are countless others who’ve helped make sense of the world, including teachers, priests, and gardeners.

Some people wait for Glastonbury, Coachella, the new season of X Factor, or Stranger Things. Meanwhile I’m just here, patiently waiting for pomegranate season.