Marvila Residents Cry Neglect as Lisbon Council Boasts of "Massive Investment"

The Lisbon Municipal Assembly recommended this Tuesday the dissemination to the population of Marvila of the ongoing and planned interventions in the Lisbon parish, following a petition that denounces the abandonment of this territory, a criticism that the council denies.

In the assembly meeting, the councilor for Housing and Municipal Works, Filipa Roseta (PSD), said that Marvila is the parish with the most public housing in the city and "has been a center of massive investment", with over 150 million euros of municipal investment.

"It is the parish with the most investment in this mandate (2021-2025)", pointed out Filipa Roseta, emphasizing that Marvila is not abandoned and that this territory has several works in progress, with new buildings, rehabilitation of existing buildings, schools, sports parks, and gardens.

Despite stating that Marvila has been at the center of the executive's action and the municipal budget, the councilor noted: "I know that much is missing, I know we have to reach more, but I also know that it is not due to forgetfulness".

The issue revolves around a petition for an intervention by the Lisbon City Council "to combat the abandonment of Marvila", which was considered by the assembly and resulted in a recommendation, approved unanimously, for the municipal executive to disseminate to the parish population "the ongoing and planned interventions", particularly regarding interventions in elevators, recovery of degraded housing, maintenance and improvements of public space, especially sidewalks, pedestrian paths and waiting spaces, and mobility.

Another point of the recommendation is for the council to promote meetings between the municipal company Carris, the petitioners, and the Marvila Parish Council, to adjust the routes and schedules of the bus lines that currently serve the area, aiming to meet the residents' needs.

On behalf of the residents' and users' committees of Marvila, the petitioner, Tiago Gonçalves, denounced the degradation of elevators and the housing stock of municipal neighborhoods, the accumulation of garbage in public spaces, and the lack of responses to healthcare and public transport services.

"Marvila is forgotten and those who live there feel they are being treated as second-class citizens", said Tiago Gonçalves, considering that the narrative of vandalism regarding the elevators of municipal neighborhoods "is a stigmatizing, prejudiced, unfair, and offensive discourse", which serves to "wash hands of political responsibility, to continue feeding a social prejudice that in Marvila nothing is preserved because people do not care".

Tiago Gonçalves said that there is a lack of a structured intervention, rigorous planning, regular maintenance, and "political will to solve, in a consequential way, the problems that have been accumulating for decades", downplaying the information from the current executive that Marvila has never had as much budget as now, because although the budget is larger, this "is nothing but empty rhetoric to try to silence the discomfort of reality".

"What is at stake is not how much money is thrown on the table, but what the solutions are to overcome this framework of social urgency", said the petitioner, arguing that the residents of Marvila cannot continue "without elevators, without health, without security, without dignity".

Participating in the debate, the PEV said that the struggle of the residents and users of Marvila "is not new", the PCP considered that the denunciation of the parish's abandonment "is serious" and the IL stated that "Marvila was effectively forgotten, but it is not abandoned", and contested the idea that saying there is vandalism when it occurs is stigmatizing people.

At the beginning of the meeting, the assembly approved, unanimously, two votes of condolence presented by PS and CDS-PP for the death of the architect and urban planner Nuno Portas, who died on Sunday.