Reframing the colonial in postcolonial Lisbon: Placemaking and the aestheticization of interculturality

Abstract

Festivals play a prominent role in enhancing and framing the programmatic ideal of the intercultural city, both as collective rituals and technologies of production of urbanscapes. This chapter examines the Todos festival that has been staged annually in Lisbon since 2009. Conceived and planned in cooperation between local political authorities and representatives of the independent arts scene, it combines cultural programming, urban regeneration, and social inclusion under the rhetoric of intercultural contact and the ethics of encounter and tolerance. The festival is part of a process of placemaking that seeks to affirm Lisbon as a multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious city. The analysis reveals how heritage allegories reframe Portuguese colonial history and memory as well as strategically use local multiethnicity to reconstruct urban public space and make it attractive to tourists, to gentrifiers, and for the purposes of the urban leisure market. Todos thereby produces and reproduces ideologies of consensus and a rhetoric of the conviviality of difference while also aesthetically reframing the ‘contact ZONES’ where different groups meet and struggle with each other. Conviviality is thus mediated by institutional, political, and cultural actors, favouring the emergence of a festive space and a socially shared discourse that celebrate togetherness.