Shifting Grounds
Islands, Wetlands, and Memory: Lusophone Africa’s New World Heritage
UNESCO’s latest World Heritage sites in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau challenge colonial conservation models—and place community-led ecology at the center.
Shifting Grounds
Terrains in transit, truths in tension.
Shifting Grounds
The Curve and the Edge: Architecture as Promise and Protest
What Brazilian architecture reveals about class, ideology, and the battle for public space.
Shifting Grounds
The Bulldozer Arrives Before the Solution: Evictions, Spectacle, and the Politics of Exclusion
As real estate speculation thrives, the Lisbon periphery becomes a battlefield where precarious lives are crushed under the weight of police operations and policy failures.
Shifting Grounds
Traffic as Theatre: Lisbon’s Rush Hour as Performance of Urban Anxiety
From medieval alleys to motorway gridlocks, Lisbon performs modernity while choking on its own choreography.
Shifting Grounds
A Man with a Shovel: The Trees That Hélio Built
One man’s quiet campaign to reforest São Paulo, tree by tree.
Shifting Grounds
Postcards from Nowhere: The False Paradise of Portugal’s Coastal Boom
The Coast Is Clear—Of Locals, Laws, and Limits.
Shifting Grounds
The River Between Us: Almada Between Memory and Masterplan
What exactly is at stake for Almada? And what does this say about the future of urban Portugal?
Shifting Grounds
Reclaiming the Tracks: Transpraia’s Second Life
On a forgotten beach line, Portugal reimagines a future of collective movement.
Shifting Grounds
The Soft Violence of Discovery
From admiration to erasure: reflections on being a foreign creative in a country slowly pricing out its own.
Shifting Grounds
Ginjal, From Rubble to Renewal: A Riverfront at a Crossroads
As Almada transforms its shoreline, the battle for public space, cultural memory, and inclusive urban futures begins anew.
Shifting Grounds
Tourists Welcome, Tenants Evicted: The Cartography of Displacement
How Airbnb transforms neighborhoods into tourist zones, creating “dead zones” where locals can’t afford to live but tourists cluster.