Monopoly Street

Urban speculation is reaching levels that were almost unimaginable just a few decades ago. Since the financial crisis in 2008, a vast amount of capital has poured into cities, homes, buildings and the built environment, seeking returns less readily available in other markets. As a consequence, homes, public squares, neighbourhoods and streets are becoming assets, investment opportunities, and elements of financial strategies that tend to operate on a scale far removed from the everyday lives of those who live there.

However, if a city is to function as a space for capital accumulation, it must undergo a process of transformation. The needs of its investors overtake those of its people in influencing how it works. Where once residential housing, local shops, community organisations, meeting places, and neighbourhood networks were to be found, now tourist accommodation, hotels, and property developments spring up, along with activities primarily geared towards non-resident consumers. The connections that facilitate urban life gradually weaken as the exchange value of its spaces takes precedence over their use value. The city’s role thus shifts from being a space dedicated to its residents to a vehicle for profit generation.

The trend is not limited to a single city, and it cannot be regarded as an exclusively local phenomenon. It is happening, with diverse degrees of intensity and with a range of characteristics, across many parts of the world. In Europe — and this is particularly evident in southern European countries following the 2008 crisis — property and urban investment became one of the main avenues for capital seeking new opportunities for returns. National governments, European institutions, monetary policies, tax incentives and legislative reforms have all contributed to creating the conditions for significant amounts of money to flow into the built environment. Monopoly Street points to Portugal, where a multitude of laws have been passed to attract speculative capital to its cities, as a poster child for this phenomenon.

In this context, Lisbon serves as a textbook case. This book — the result of research carried out by the Criar Cidade cooperative with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation — carefully sets out the extent to which the transformations the city has undergone cannot be explained as simply a result of spontaneous, inevitable market evolution. Behind these changes lie political decisions, legislative changes, tax incentives, strategies of internationalisation, tourism policies, and urban planning reforms aimed at attracting investment and facilitating the inflow of property capital. The narrative pieced together and described in Monopoly Street allows us to observe how various administrations, particularly since the financial crisis, have created the conditions to accelerate market-driven regeneration, facilitate investment, and transform significant parts of the city into spaces increasingly linked to tourism and profits to be gained from property.

There is a contradiction worth highlighting here. When proposals are made to regulate the market to protect tenants, guarantee affordable housing, preserve local shops, or observe the city’s social functions, concerns are frequently raised that too much public intervention could disrupt or even ‘destroy’ the market. However, when it comes to guaranteeing a return on investment, attracting international capital, and turning urban planning into a platform for profit-making, intervention seems to know no bounds. Legislation is passed, incentives offered, procedures streamlined and the regulatory system is reorganized. At this juncture, the market relinquishes its facade as a natural entity, wholly independent of politics, and unveils its true nature as an institutional construct sustained by tangible decisions. Monopoly Street illuminates the extent to which Portugal has become a case in point of this approach to legislation.

The problem is that these decisions have real-world consequences. They result in the loss of housing and displacement of city residents, the erosion of traditional commerce, and the disappearance of community and associative spaces. In Lisbon’s Baixa district, the process meticulously described in these pages exemplifies this gradual substitution of diverse urban functions with a city increasingly orientated towards tourism and consumerism. Between 2011 and 2021, Santa Maria Maior faced a loss of a large proportion of its population and residential housing, along with an increase in pressure from tourist accommodation, empty or second homes, and property development.

Monopoly Street conceptualizes a city as a game board, where buildings, streets and neighbourhoods pass from one set of hands to another following the logic of accumulation. But, unlike the game, the squares here are not sitting empty: they contain homes, shops, associations, memories, social relationships, and people’s lives. When capital plays an exclusive role in shaping a city according to its own needs, it invariably does so in direct conflict with the interests of those who live there.

Here, research becomes essential. Finding out who is buying a certain building, which companies are behind a deal, the funds involved, the structure of the transactions, what policies make them possible, and the relationship between investors and public institutions is neither a secondary exercise nor a question of local gossip. It is key to elucidating underlying mechanisms that are frequently deliberately obscured. For political discussion about these transformation and organized resistance against them to take place, the major players and their modus operandi need to be identified.

This is one of the great strengths of Monopoly Street. Firstly, it reconstructs specific processes of urban transformation in Lisbon, revealing the financial, business, institutional and political networks involved. The three case studies demonstrate how buildings originally intended for housing, local shops, or community activities are gradually sucked into investment cycles and end up transformed into hotels, tourist developments, and property assets.

But perhaps more saliently, Monopoly Street does not stop at to merely denouncing or describing this phenomenon. It aims to share a method. The second part of the book transforms the research into a toolkit for others to use. Techniques described include observing what is happening on a given street, speaking to those who live and work there, consulting property registers, tracking companies and their beneficiaries, reviewing licences, searching for information in the media, and learning from what local movements and organizations already know. The objective is for this research to be replicated and adapted to other contexts.

This is especially important because many urban changes are experienced before they are understood. One day a shop closes. Soon after, the residents of a block of flats move out. Construction works begin, ownership changes, vacation rentals proliferate, and rumours of a major real estate development begin to circulate. We know something is happening, but we cannot always see who is behind it, how it came about, or where to find the information to put the process together.

Monopoly Street starts at that very moment: with the first sign, the suspicion that something is changing in our street, our neighbourhood, or our city. It challenges us to turn that intuition into research; to follow the clues, connect the data, ask questions, cross-check sources, and collectively build knowledge about what is changing the places where we live.

Making these processes visible is also a way of intervening in them. Investigating who owns the city, how the capital that transforms it is organized, and what institutions enable these transformations allows us to challenge the narrative that all of this is simply inevitable. And when what seemed inevitable begins to take definitive names, laws, corporations, funds, decisions, and responsibilities, it also becomes possible to figure out how to confront it.

Monopoly Street, then, is not simply a book about Lisbon. It is an invitation to look at our own streets in a different light. It invites us to ask ourselves who is transforming our streets, for whom they are being transformed, and what sort of city we want to protect and build. It invites us to change our perspective, to recognize that the streets, neighbourhoods and cities belong to those who live in them, not to those who would profit from them.