The Lisbon Waterfront: Perspectives on Resilience in the Transition from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century

Introduction

Over the past forty years, from 1973 to 2013, the port of the city of Lisbon has declined. With a favorable geographic location at the westernmost point of Europe, inside a large deep-sea estuary, from the 1500s it was one of the busiest ports in the world. Once the capital of the Portuguese Empire and the preeminent port in Iberia, it now hosts less container traffic than Vigo, the tenth busiest port in Spain. No natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis) and no human disasters (wars, nuclear incidents, chemical spills) caused this decline. New climatic patterns might be a cause, but local master plans have gradually introduced strategies for adapting to climate change. Worldwide changes in the port industry, particularly the advent and dissemination of containers, have been much more immediate major challenges to the region. The innovations in the shipping industry since the 1980s (bulk cargo, container, cruise ships, etc.) and the relocation of the shipbuilding industry to Asia are among the main challenges that the port and the city have faced. ¹

Indeed, it would be simple to blame the decline on overall decreasing volume of maritime transportation and economic activity. Yet other Portuguese ports have increased their traffic: the Port of Setúbal has been expanding at an unprecedented rate; the Port of Sines has become the fourth busiest port of the Iberian Peninsula, attracting a considerable amount of foreign investment for the construction of new container terminals; and the Port of Leixões in the north of Portugal has also been expanding. Meanwhile, Lisbon missed opportunity after opportunity to adapt to these changes—neither relocating nor expanding port facilities—and it has been repeatedly unable to mitigate the resulting loss of competitiveness. The incapacity to transform the port compromised the local economy and negatively affected the community, in particular those working in maritime-related activities. Moreover, the port has not been able to adapt to the urban environment around the estuary, which has changed dramatically over the same period. Finally, Lisbon has changed from a busy maritime port with heavy industries to a city focusing on services, culture, and tourism.

The port had led to the creation of the city, but throughout the last four decades, the port’s incapacity for change has brought the city down. The port of Lisbon did not secure major investments to expand the deep-sea container terminal or create a multimodal platform. The harbor conditions were favorable, the stakeholders were supportive, the demand was there—but the creation of a stronger, improved city did not happen. The Lisbon case illustrates what the lack of resilience can mean in a port city. Among a wide range of authors discussing urban resilience, Ayda Eraydin has defined a resilient system in terms of “its ability to absorb change and disturbance, and the persistence of systems while retaining its basic functions and structure.” ²

Turning to Vale and Campanella, we can find a broader perspective that helps us begin to understand why Lisbon lost resilience. They extend “the ability to absorb change and disturbance” to the conditions of the community: “Sometimes, social and political disasters are even self-inflicted, usually by regimes seeking drastic overhaul as means to promote massive, rapid modernization.” ³

In 1974, as the capital of Portugal, Lisbon was the stage for the “Carnation Revolution” (revolução dos cravos), a transition from dictatorship to democracy that took place quickly and brought profound change to the social organization of the country and to the exercise of political power. The following years were marked by short-term elected governments, which swung between left wing and right wing. Both sides passed laws to empower the people. Yet each precarious regime also implemented extreme measures lasting only a few weeks. These “regimes seeking drastic overhaul” did not support the Lisbon port and its maritime activity, which had defined the local cultural identity for centuries. At the same time, unions became stronger and better organized, including the port workers’ union, and were able to impose Soviet-inspired workers’ leadership and labor values. The transformation of labor laws and constant strikes contributed to the overall instability of the maritime sector. The revolution affected all sectors of Portuguese life, and the port of Lisbon was one of the most susceptible to the economic disaster due to the influence of its powerful workers unions. The instability in governance of the first years of democracy caused effects only perceived years later. ⁴

Lisbon did try to respond to the changes that containers brought, formulating several urban plans over the forty years in question, but due to a number of factors, which will be discussed in the context of the five listed plans, only one was partially implemented. Each plan intended to engage the competitiveness of the port, but to some extent actually contributed to its decline, though some urban resilience happened at the waterfront. In this article, we will argue that one particular generation of leaders failed to be proactive in dealing with the complexity of the situation.

Change itself was not necessarily the problem. Transformation does not by definition compromise resilience. Quite the opposite, according to Yoshiki Yamagata, Principal Researcher at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan: “Resilience is not a static state of a system. It is a process. A city is dynamic and is always changing. . . . Resilience is transformative, and in each transformation, tries to create a stronger, improved city.” ⁵ That is, resilience itself can be understood as change.

The Five Plans

The five plans were produced in part by municipalities around the estuary. The Municipality of Lisbon (CML—Câmara Municipal de Lisboa) played an important role. The Great Metropolitan Area of Lisbon (AML—Área Metropolitana de Lisboa) was created in 2004 to develop a common strategy among the municipalities. Local residents elect the mayors directly (e.g., of the CML) and the mayors of the AML elect their president. The other major force behind the plans is the central government, through the Lisbon Port Authority (APL—Administração do Porto de Lisboa). The APL President is a political appointee of the central government. The relation between these different actors, and other local, regional, national, and European institutions (e.g., European Maritime Safety Agency [EMSA]) creates a fragmented governance structure of the territory, with nonmatching timelines and sometimes incommensurable aims. Since elected representatives hold office for a period of four years, many political decisions follow the short-term cycles between elections. Municipalities aim to improve their citizens’ quality of life, while ports are interested in efficiency and competitiveness on a global scale. Meanwhile, changes to port infrastructures presented by APL require longer periods of time to be implemented and depend on continuous, not drastic, change. At the national level, each political regime sought to impose substantial reform, promoting rapid modernization within their own short-term period of governance; but the next regime in power would not carry out the plans of the preceding government, creating a conflict between maritime transportation, environmental protection, and urban quality of life.

The five selected plans are follows:

Each of the five plans aspired to transform the port and to promote the resilience of Lisbon as a waterfront city. Each engaged with dynamic and ever-changing systems and dealt with environmental protection organizations, communities’ demands, and eventual lawsuits, among other disputes. Although they differed from each other and even conflicted with each other, in part because their respective actors played on different political sides, they shared a consistent bias in favor of urban development and the construction sector.

Plano Estratégico—First Strategic Plan (1990-1992)

The APL, which holds legal rights in the waterfront territories, prepared the “First Strategic Plan 1990-1992,” which proposed “solutions for the expansion of the port of Lisbon.” The plan pointed out possible areas in the estuary for new port facilities. The focus of this plan was relocating container terminals and redeveloping port infrastructure. At the time, planner and geographer Peter Hall observed that container terminals had gotten much larger:

. . . the ratio between the length of a berth and the amount of back-up land needed for cargo has changed dramatically; while one or two-hectare terminals had to be replaced by facilities of 10-15 hectares and more. ⁶

Expanding the port area for handling containers in turn changed port activity. And the containers came in larger ships that required deeper water. The APL was struggling to keep high levels of activity in the face of these two serious infrastructure challenges. The plan therefore was to reorganize the whole port area.

Specifically, the main focus of the plan was a project for container terminals at Trafaria, on the south bank. This project (Figure 1) was developed and presented by the APL, which had to find financial support for the construction; one possibility was to exchange land with the city. The plan also called attention to the value of land located along the city center waterfront and further raised its value by creating the possibility of waterfront development. The general debate on port cities has evolved toward more sustainable solutions, but in 1990 these were the questions at the center of the debate involving several port cities worldwide, including Lisbon.

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Figure 1.

Port authority master plan (detail), titled Future of the Port of Lisbon. Shows the location of the new deep-sea container terminal at Trafaria presented in the First Strategic Plan (1990-1992). ©1992 APL—Administração do Porto de Lisboa, SA.

Container operators are efficiency-oriented when making decisions, and they observe that industrial areas require special infrastructure in which operational mechanisms determine functional procedures. From the technical perspective, a well-designed cargo terminal should lead to good results. But the logistics of intermodal operations cannot rely on good design alone to guarantee efficiency. A competitive port also depends on a community that supports maritime activity and understands its role in the economy, whether national or local. Changes in ports ⁷ have a socioeconomic effect on city life as well, as architectural historian Ariane Wilson notes in the case of containerization:

“Communities of dockside professionals lost their monopoly of maritime exchanges to the profit of world-wide operators not tied to any home port.” ⁸ Besides this new global order, when it comes to Lisbon, the local conflicts between the Port Authority and the surrounding municipalities accelerated the loss of competitiveness in the maritime industry.

Building a new or expanded port would free upland near the old town of downtown Lisbon for other uses, such as waterfront redevelopment. Change would bring challenges, but it would also bring opportunities. Global players pressured local decision makers and stakeholders. But no one could find the right balance. Ultimately, the container terminal on the south bank was never built and the port did not expand; port activity stayed where it was. The port subsequently lost competitiveness, which had a negative impact on the economy of the city.

In 1990 the Portuguese Architect’s Association launched a competition to discover the best design proposals for the waterfront of the former port area located along the historic center of Lisbon. ⁹ As in many other port cities engaged in urban waterfront renewal, the relation among the municipalities, the port authority, and the different stakeholders registered the ongoing change. David Harvey commented on a similar process in his 1990 book, The Condition of Postmodernity:

Cities and spaces now, it seems, take much more care to create a positive and high quality image of place, and have sought an architecture and forms of urban design that respond to such need. That they should be so pressed, and that the result should be a serial repetition of successful models (such as Baltimore’s Harbour Place), is understandable, given the grim history of deindustrialization and restructuring that left most major cities in the advanced capitalist world with few option except to compete with each other, mainly as financial, consumption, and entertainment centres. Imaging a city through the organization of spectacular urban spaces becomes a mean to attract capital and people . . . ¹⁰

The failure to implement the plan severely interrupted the growth of the activity of the port of Lisbon. This had consequences for strategic planning and influenced the organization of land use in the Estuary. Municipalities started to envision urban development plans located on port territories. Problems in the urban environment increased, since the largest container terminal operating in the country was located in the central area of Lisbon, even before any expansion. A few thousand containers were carried out every day through the nearby residential areas, bringing noise, pollution, and traffic disruption. The relocation was continuously debated over the following decades, but the plan has still not been implemented.

Plano do Ordenamento do Porto de Lisboa—Port of Lisbon Waterfront Plan “POZOR” (1994)

In 1994, the APL commissioned an urban development plan for the industrial port, following the First Strategic Plan (1990-1992), based on the premise that container terminals would be relocated, freeing the central port area near the city center for new urban design. The plan—Plano do Ordenamento do Porto de Lisboa (Port of Lisbon Waterfront Plan)—became known as POZOR. It presented strategies for attracting investors, and it proposed a major urban development for the former port area, creating new buildings within a new urban design frame (Figure 2). These new buildings would be 450,000 m² in the Santo Amaro—Alcântara area, and 160,000 m² in the area called Rocha Conde D’Óbidos—Santos; in addition, the Multi Development Corporation International (MCDI) was supposed to build on an 82,000-m² area at Cais do Sodré. ¹¹

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Figure 2.

Detail of the Waterfront Plan of the Port of Lisbon, POZOR (1994) urban development between the railway line and the Alcântara Dock. The dashed line represents the connection between the Alcântara Container Terminal and the hinterland. ©1994 APL—Administração do Porto de Lisboa, SA.

This first version of the POZOR plan had several problems. It focused on short-term urban development and did not contain any ideas regarding the long-term urban improvement of the waterfront–city relation. Second, the plan ignored the railway line, a physical barrier between the city and its port ¹² that effectively cuts off the port area. ¹³ Third, the planned new buildings in the port area would block the city’s view of the river.

The APL realized that public opinion was strongly against the project when a group of prominent citizens organized the anti-POZOR committee. They argued that POZOR could jeopardize the port area, a very important area of the city itself. ¹⁴ Some rejected the plan, but no one presented any alternatives. The proposal failed to gain the acceptance of the public and faced major criticism in the media; APL was pressured into redesigning the project, postponing a design solution.

The port area had become a brownfield located along the fabric of the city. The question became whether the APL should continue to lead the discussion on how to fill it or should the municipality intervene to end the “divorce” between the port and the city. A survey found that a majority of those surveyed wanted at least one other entity working with APL on this, as quoted by Castro ¹⁵ :

The opinions expressed by 38% of the interviewed people defend that the waterfront must not be exclusively administered by only one entity, and the Port Authority (APL) and the Municipality of Lisbon (CML) should share the management of the area. About 24% of the inquired considers that all entities (CML, APL, central government, private entities, other public entities, etc.) may act in a coordinate way, in different occasions, in order to raise the opportunities offered by the area and to increase its profitability. (p. 94)

Meanwhile, the APL itself developed a couple of smaller projects, including residential, commercial, and office buildings, based on a strategy of project finance. That is, each project would generate revenue that would pay for new infrastructure, such as better access to the port area. “Intervençõesna zona ribeirinha–Waterfront interventions” were smaller projects for the Matinha/Cabo Ruivo and Pedrouços areas that the APL did not present to the public (they are only available at the APL Project Department).

The POZOR plan had proposed changes to the city and would have required citizens to have a dynamic perception of the built environment. It expected new urban development on prime terrain near the city center to achieve high levels of profitability and help finance the relocation of the container terminals. Instead, the failure to implement this plan contributed to a decrease in the competitiveness of the port. Nonetheless, in the long run the failure avoided hurting overall resilience of Lisbon as a city: the substantial urban development would have benefited only a few white collar residents and would have profoundly altered the relationship between the city and the river.

Exposição Mundial de Lisboa Expo’98—Lisbon World’s Fair (1998)

Lisbon Expo’98, among the five plans presented here, is the plan that achieved the most success in that, despite criticism and problems, it was actually carried out. If each plan aimed to contribute to the transformation and resilience of the city of Lisbon, this is the one that was most successful in developing the waterfront area.

The 1998 World Fair created exceptional planning conditions in Lisbon. Its site quickly expanded from a 50-hectare development, the central core of the World Fair, to a 500-hectare urban development located on port areas that had become obsolete on Lisbon’s northeast side, with approximately 4 km of riverfront. The site was located at the northern limit of the city, and it stretched over into the neighboring municipality of Loures. The plan became known as the Expo’98.

All of the five plans discussed here received political support from national, regional, and local governmental entities, but only the Expo’98 plan was implemented as people took advantage of decisions that created unique conditions. The whole operation was expected to be self-financed through sales of the land to developers. Almost half of the Expo area was initially the property of the APL, who sold the land to Expo’98 for a fairly low price. The agreement was possible because both were public institutions and answered directly to the central government.

Expo’98 became the flagship of the regime, a project for the future, while the APL retained the old infrastructure, ¹⁶ carrying the heavy burden of past. There was a growing agreement between politicians to support the new and neglect the old. Expo’98 constantly delayed payment to the APL and ultimately never paid for the land—just a hint of the complexity surrounding the whole Expo’98 case. In his analysis of the urban development, João Cabral and Berta Rato explained as follows:

The experience of the “free-hand” given to an administration that is in itself a public company and a political compromise, while acting as a private developer, emphasizes the conflicting role of the capitalist state in urban planning. ¹⁷

As a process, the Expo’98 project had a discretionary nature in regard to the decision-making, and it excluded the local communities’ interests, which have not been listened to. ¹⁸

The area of Expo’98 also gave the city the highly anticipated opportunity to re-establish an uninterrupted relationship with the estuary since the construction of the industrial port along the waterfront in the 1900s (Figure 3). Once the World Fair ended, the Central Government created an entity called Parque Expo to manage the area of Expo’98. Parque Expo was a public company, partially autonomous from the local municipalities. Several authors pointed out a major problem: that the Parque Expo operation was located away from the city center in areas not expected to become heavily urbanized. According to architect Nuno Portas, the Parque Expo intervention at the Expo’98 area aimed to create a new center away from downtown, and invested in creating in new ways to get to the site ¹⁹ : a railway station, a subway stop, a new bridge, and freeways. Claude Chaline and Teresa Vilan, ²⁰ from the Paris Institute of Urbanism, established the following comparison:

It is clear that the Lisbon case has a lot in common with the London case, and that both national and international conjuncture defines the perspectives of relations between old and new centrality poles.

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Figure 3.

Marketing material produced by the Expo office in 2003 following Lisbon World’s Fair. Expo’98 (1998) Containers are selected to graphically explain the concept of “terrain vague” that conducted the process of transformation. The publicity text announces how their office “started the greatest challenge of environment and urban development in Portugal, from a deteriorated area to a world expo.” ©Pedro Ressano Garcia.

The creation of a new centrality requires major investment. Expo’98 had an initial investment of €561 M, and by 2003, Parque Expo had sold 95 percent of the plots of land, generating direct revenues and taxes of €4,800 M, evidence of the successful financial process.

Nevertheless, some problems of the urban development project became apparent after the World Fair. One of the repeated criticisms pointed back to access, here the lack of passages and other connections with the surrounding neighborhoods of low-income housing. Indeed, Duarte Cabral de Mello, the architect responsible for the three-dimensional development plan of the northern part of Parque Expo, argued that during the process of construction of his plan, the promoter Parque Expo chose to reduce the investment in the integration of the surrounding residents in the neighborhoods located along the Expo area. Mello was critical in his essay about the procedure, and while his Master Plan was being implemented, he pointed out that

. . . not only the barrier formed by the railway line separating the Parque Expo from the western quarters was not removed, but also the links between the existing urban fabric and the new area were reduced to the minimum. . . . So, instead of the expected continuity of the city, an urban insularity imposed the third world model of a private condominium where only the electrified fences are missing. Public spaces that were designed from the beginning to be unusually generous and well equipped became dysfunctional and depreciated. ²¹

The municipalities (Loures and Lisbon) and the APL, still on opposite sides, were included in the discussions of the plan but did not lead the process. The creation of Parque Expo as an independent entity proved to be an effective way to implement a new centrality. It brought large revenues to the State, but the continuous delay in paying APL for the land also contributed to the decline of the port of Lisbon over the next decades.

Plano geral de intervenção na frente ribeirinha—Waterfront General Intervention Plan (2008)

The APL started renting out warehouses and buildings in the city center. The income accounted for 30 percent of the APL’s income, ²² and the group intended to use it to partially finance future terminals. But the media, along with some voices from the Municipality of Lisbon (CML) itself, claimed that the APL was more interested in the urban development of the land under their jurisdiction than in dealing with maritime transportation and port-related activities which were their core business. But it is also true that until the Waterfront General Intervention Plan in 2008, the Port Authority had been protecting its land from commercial speculation and expectations of real estate developers. Alcino Soutinho, one of the most prominent architects of his generation and a consultant architect for APL for a period of eight years, believed that

when the time comes for the Port Authority to cease their administration over the port area, the land will be sold to developers by the municipalities that are in a difficult financial situation. ²³

The public’s perception of the APL was nevertheless negative, and the CML decided in 2008 that it was the best moment to take over APL’s land located along Lisbon’s city center, CML and central government belonging to the same political party. At this point, CML formulated the Waterfront General Intervention Plan in collaboration with the central government through the Ministério das Obras Publicas (Public Works Ministry). The Ministry supervises the APL and gave instructions to the APL to hand over some of their land to the CML.

These lands were landfill, originally built ²⁴ and paid for between the 1890s and 1910s by the APL. They never belonged to the city. Now, the Deputy Mayor of Lisbon, who coordinated the plan drafted by the CML, stated that planners were testing a new model for the future, whereby land built on and owned by the APL would be given to the CML for free. This policy had been a result of a wide consultation process among all competent authorities; it included the “Maritime Policy Green Paper” (2006), the “Blue Book—An Integrated Maritime Policy for the European Union” (2008), and most importantly the “Integrated Coastal Zone Management—ICZM,” first published in 2000. Specifically, it contravened ICZM goals to

. . . over the long-term, to balance environmental, economic, social, cultural and recreational objectives, all within the limits set by natural dynamics. “Integrated” in ICZM refers to the integration of objectives and also to the integration of the many instruments needed to meet these objectives. It means integration of all relevant policy areas, sectors, and levels of administration. ²⁵

This arrangement brought an apparent truce between the leaders of the two public authorities, the APL and the CML, for the first time since POZOR and Expo’98. The local media claimed that the leaders had succeeded in formulating a plan to solve the problem and found new ways of management.

But the then APL President Manuel Frasquilho stated that the terms of the deal—handing over port areas to Municipalities—were actually not in accordance with the EU Integrated Maritime Policy. The plan did not reflect the Policy’s holistic perspective, said Frasquilho; there was no convergence of objectives between the two institutions (CML and APL), and it ignored the recommendations of European Good Practices. On the contrary, the Deputy Mayor of Lisbon, who was responsible for Urbanism at the time of the 2008 plan, Manuel Salgado, stated that

the enhancement of the natural environment and the cultural landscape of Lisbon’s waterfront stands as one of the strategic projects of the Municipality, taking advantage of the institutional spirit of cooperation between Municipality of Lisbon (CML) and Port Authority (APL) in the sense of defining a strategy for territorial integration of the port areas and waterfront areas with other use. ²⁶

The Administration of the APL and the CML’s Administration had had an adversarial relationship ²⁷ for years, following a conflict of interest that had started in the 1990s. Twenty years later, the CML and APL were still not sharing a common vision, and the agreement continued to be controversial. The President of the APL claimed that a takeover of APL lands would compromise the future of the Port of Lisbon, while the Deputy Mayor of CML curiously claimed there was an “institutional spirit of cooperation between CML and APL.” The 2008 plan (Figure 4) frayed the relation between these institutions managing the waterfront territories and consequently decreased the resilience of the port city of Lisbon.

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Figure 4.

Waterfront General Intervention Plan (2008) presented by the Lisbon Municipality (CML). Includes territories under the jurisdiction of the Port Authority (APL). ©2008 APL—Administração do Porto de Lisboa, SA.

Nevertheless, on the land considered by the Waterfront General Intervention Plan, some buildings have been designed, built, and inaugurated in recent years: individual projects related to culture, European institutions and research centers. These were architecture projects that preceded the Plan and responded to specific needs of the entities that commissioned them, adding value to the city center. Those projects are

Each project is unique: the EMSA land is in the public domain, which means that the APL cannot sell the land under their jurisdiction; the Champalimaud Foundation is a private foundation; the Ribeira das Naus (Ancient Vessel Quay) waterfront project had already been designed by the CML, and lastly MAAT belongs to the Fundação EDP (Electricity of Portugal Foundation). Each project was a one-off and followed its own specific procedures.

Arco Ribeirinho Sul (ARS—South Bank Arch), Margueira, Barreiro and Seixal (2009)

In 2009, the ARS (South Bank Arch) combined three development plans into the largest urban development ever designed for the Lisbon Metropolitan Area: a plan for Margueira/Almada (Lisnave) and one for Barreiro (Quimiparque) (Figure 5), both areas located on former industrial sites on the estuary’s south bank, and one for Seixal (Siderurgia Nacional). Barreiro was the biggest industrial area in Portugal and Margueira the biggest shipyard. The ARS plan took into consideration the much broader regional plan from 2002 for the whole Great Metropolitan Area of Lisbon, or PROTAML (Plano Regional de Ordenamento do Território da Área Metropolitana de Lisboa). PROTAML provided an integrated vision for the whole estuary region at the scale of a larger territory, the first since the 1964 Plano Director da Região de Lisboa (PDRL), prior to the forty years period discussed in this article. PROTAML was realized but its revision, proposed in 2008, was not. Then, in 2009, the Regional Planning Commission (Comissão Coordenadora da Região de Lisboa e Vale do Tejo—CCDR/LVT) discussed the smaller and more recent ARS plan. But the split between the local municipalities and the regional leadership of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area meant that they were unable to create an integrated strategic vision for the region.

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Figure 5.

Arco Ribeirinho Sul (ARS)—South Bank Arch. Includes major urban development for the areas of three major industrial facilities, Margueira (former shipyard Lisnave), Barreiro (Quimiparque), and Seixal (Siderurgia Nacional).

The financial premises of the ARS plan were based on rising real estate values in Portugal before the Euro crisis. Luis Santiago Batista commented on such projects in his text about Margueira, “Considerations Around the Terrain Vague”:

In fact, these are areas of high real estate value, in which the authorities try to combine the development of significant parcels of the existing urban fabric with large-scale economic and financial operations. ²⁸

These areas of potential high real estate value were currently “terrain vague”—former brownfield (industry, ports, and shipyards) located in areas of potential high real estate value—attracts projects for new housing, marinas, and leisure facilities. In this model, the new urban development would be disconnected from the economy of industry and production (which had previously attracted and supported the local community); and in fact these leisure activities would replace industrial activities.

Yet this financial model for urban regeneration does not take into consideration the community—the people who actually live on the land—and it neglects to integrate urban activities with port activities. ARS was eventually put aside because of the financial crisis and might be reconsidered when the economy improves.

Conclusion/Inference

In the twentieth century, Portuguese industrial ports were financed by public investors and managed by public authorities as part of the public domain. ²⁹ Commercial real estate interests have come to play a stronger influence in Lisbon since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Each of the five plans studied here has challenged the city of Lisbon’s political leaders and stakeholders to consider broad solutions to technological changes and challenges in the port. Yet despite high hopes, every plan has contributed to the decline of the port, and sometimes to the decline of the waterfront or the city as a whole.

Before the forty-year period, integrated visions often succeeded: the PDRL from 1964 is evidence that previous generations were able to establish constructive cooperation between institutions. Indeed, strategic visions ought to include national, regional, and local institutions. In contrast, during the period under study, many decisions neglected the territorial identity and competitive geographic situation of the port’s harbor and the environmental assets of the estuary. From the perspective of the economy of the port and other maritime-related activities, these plans lost competiveness and decreased the resilience of the port city of Lisbon.

Yet from the environmental perspective, the planned but not built industrial landfills in the Estuary helped preserve the natural environment and add value to the region. Lisbon is now planning to build new infrastructure to enhance the harbor functions and systems that contribute to its identity, and the preservation of the natural environment plays an important role in the process to mitigate losses and adapt to climate change thus enhancing resilience.

Today, the Port of Lisbon certainly faces new, complex challenges. Container volume has continuously decreased in the last years while cruise ships are a fast-growing industry. In 2014, Lisbon was Europe’s leading cruise destination and the industry continues to grow by 15 percent per year. In the past forty years, the central question has been how to adapt to change through proactive plans that re-invent the identities of the port and the city. To what extent can the city remain resilient when unable to implement plans to adapt to change? We have argued that the generation of leaders who emerged after the 1974 revolution did not deal with the complexity of the problem and contributed to the decline of the Port of Lisbon and consequently to the lack of resilience of the port city of Lisbon.

At present, APL and the Barreiro Municipality agree on a future €600 M investment to build a new container terminal in the south bank. They are negotiating with foreign investors, including Maersk and other major international players, to finance its construction; this project also depends on the construction of a new railway line on an as yet unbuilt bridge across the estuary. The lack of an integrated vision still compromises the debate about redevelopment and how best Lisbon can remain resilient, as Yamagata points out, how it might create a stronger, improved city. Resilience awareness will integrate the Lisbon waterfront future discussion. The creation of a stronger city is a process that extends over decades, and as Eraydin notes must aim for flexibility:

Resilience planning is not to define the most effective actions or goals within a comprehensive framework but rather to define priorities that ensure a no-regret situation and create a system that is not only adaptive to slow changes. ³⁰

In this article, we discussed the challenges faced by a generation of leaders who disregarded port activity and nearly banned it from the city. Optimists and pessimists agree that the port is in trouble, but they disagree over the extent to which the city of Lisbon and its waterfront have nonetheless remained resilient. For the optimists, the system adapted to city’s slow shift from port activity to tourism-related activities. Other factors (community, economic activity, environment, etc.) have influenced this adaptation, thus enhancing a culture of resilience within the port city of Lisbon. From their perspective, the Expo’98 plan contributed the most to Lisbon’s resilience because it succeeded in turning former industrial brownfields into a new urban environment with housing developments and a new center for services and commerce.

But for the pessimists, the Expo’98 plan contributed to the decay of the port: Parque Expo did not pay for the land that belonged to the APL, so it had no money for relocating port infrastructure. During this forty-year period, all of the following failures compromised Lisbon’s competitiveness: the incapacity to implement the First Strategic Plan (1990-1992); the inability of the city to generate revenues from empty port areas located in the center under POZOR (1994); the failure to receive the money owed for purchased land after the Lisbon World’s Fair (1998); and the handover of land along the city center to the CML (Waterfront General Intervention Plan 2008). The generation that faced these challenges continuously misunderstood the opportunities before them.

A minor blessing is that at the same time no large-scale projects with long-lasting negative consequences were undertaken, and this has inadvertently contributed to the resilience of the Lisbon waterfront. And the new facilities that were built (EMSA, the Champalimaud Foundation, Orient Museum, the new public spaces along Ribeira das Naus, and more recently MAAT) along the waterfront of the central part of Lisbon have enhanced the identity of the city and contributed to its move into a nonindustrial future. If resilience is transformative, as argued by Yamagata, these facilities have created a stronger, improved city. This is where optimists and pessimists agree.

But the pessimists also argue that political leaders who tried to implement the plans have been in conflict with the community, the economy, and the environment. Although each plan aimed to absorb change and develop systems to retain the city’s basic functions and structures, each instead brought conflict, which reduced the competitiveness of the port of Lisbon. ³¹ For instance, pessimists criticized the cost of the new cruise terminal, as the income brought by tourists is lower than the income brought by the cargo and containers. ³² Also, the location of the terminal—in front of the Alfama historic quarter—was controversial when first discussed and it did not win consensus, ³³ dividing APL and CML again. In the end, the CML supported the decision to build a new terminal ³⁴ in this location and, years later, the APL paid for it. Decision-makers followed opposing goals, with CML favoring tourism and commercial activities and APL pressing about the maritime-related activity. CML deliberately encouraged urban expansion and the development of new facilities on APL land even while excluding the APL from the key decisions about its own territories.

It is hard to predict what will happen in the Estuary of Lisbon in the next forty years. Will the port grow and expand, or shrink and even vanish? To improve resilience, the city will need to expand deep-sea container terminals, construct new cruise ship terminals around the estuary, and expand multimodal platforms. ³⁵ Projects that try to develop an interface between port opportunities and city renewal are more likely to find the support of the community. Urban and economic development aimed at redeveloping the whole city, taking advantage of its territorial identity and geographic situation, are more likely to contribute to the resilience of the city. While it is uncertain what will be carried out, we envision three possible scenarios.

In the first, the city and the port agree to construct a new network interface in the city center to maintain container activity in the Alcântara deep-sea terminal and also build a new, not deep-sea terminal in Barreiro. The Barreiro terminal would be the alternative for expansion and would try to attract new investors (shipping operators) in addition to the current operators, YLDRIN, LISCONT, and SOTAGUS.

A second scenario involves a national strategic decision to relocate the deep-sea container terminal either to the south bank (Trafaria) or the north bank, just west of Lisbon (Algés). ³⁶ The APL would then use its facilities at Alcântara and Santos for tourism while allowing maritime activity to recover its lost competitiveness just outside the city.

The last scenario is to give priority to the container terminal at Sines, ³⁷ close the deep-sea terminal in Lisbon, and implement waterfront urban development on port land, which would also mean shifting Alcântara and Santos facilities toward new uses. These changes would inevitably weaken the APL and Lisbon’s port activity, since the revenues generated by container activity would continue to decrease.

The new paradigm of resilience for the twenty-first century port cities relies on their engagement in a permanent dialogue with nature, developing solutions that enhance a symbiosis with their natural conditions. The protection of vulnerable waterfront areas depends on the implementation of sustainable solutions that integrate complex systems and find new strategies to adapt to climate change, and to invent increasingly greener maritime transport.

To do all this, Lisbon will need to invest in a collective institution, a legal and regional body that is also closely linked to the local authorities, which are elected by the local communities. Inter-municipality agreements do not have the economic means to make necessary investments in infrastructure, because they depend on central government and regional leadership for financing. There is an urgent need for such a body that can promote a vision for the region of the estuary and the ocean, coordinate future strategies, and gather together the stakeholders—the community, political leaders, environmental organizations, and port operators—to pursue development and conservation, dialogue, and integration. As a capital city, Lisbon has been in a position to attract other sorts of investments than maritime, thus easing competitiveness with other port cities. But to create a stronger, better city that could establish a solid position in the North Atlantic, Lisbon needs to implement long-term strategies now for the environment of the estuary and the ocean, promoting an inclusive diverse community and fostering the economy of the sea adapted to the twenty-first century.