Description
“Who owns Lisbon?” is a collaborative investigative project between the independent media outlet Mensagem de Lisboa and urban geographers from the Centre for Geographical Studies (CEG/IGOT) at the University of Lisbon. Faced with an acute housing crisis, the project addresses a critical knowledge gap by linking a unique, large-scale dataset of land registry records to real-world outcomes through field reporting and corporate tracing. Focusing on central Lisbon, the investigation aims to uncover the systematic reality of property ownership structures—such as speculative investment, corporate landlords, short-term rental concentration, and the fate of former public assets. Ultimately, the team will produce a series of six multimedia investigative articles to replace assumptions with evidence, fostering a more transparent, data-driven public debate on the structural causes of housing inequality.
“Since we launched Mensagem de Lisboa in February 2021, our editorial meetings have repeatedly returned to one fundamental issue: the lack of data that would allow us to understand the ownership structure of the city of Lisbon — who owns the city’s roughly 20,000 Airbnbs, its approximately 50,000 vacant homes, and what ultimately happens to the public property that has been sold off by both the national government and the City Council, removing it from the pool of assets that could help address Lisbon’s acute housing crisis, the most severe among all European capitals. But we never had the data — it simply didn’t exist. Thanks to the work Ana Gago has been developing, and which the Science Alliance fellowship will now allow her to expand, we will finally be able to answer all of these questions through groundbreaking research unlike anything previously undertaken in Lisbon or Portugal.” – Frederico Raposo, Lead Journalist, Mensagem de Lisboa
Project Team
Media outlet
Research organisation
Instituto de Geografia e Ordenamento do Território
Lisbon, Portugal
https://www.igot.ulisboa.pt/
Eduardo Ascensão
Researcher
Portugal
