The Bulldozer Arrives Before the Solution: Evictions, Spectacle, and the Politics of Exclusion

On the outskirts of Lisbon, bulldozers arrive faster than solutions. This week, in two municipalities bordering the capital, the cycle of eviction and exclusion replayed itself yet again. In Amadora, city authorities proceeded with the demolition of 22 shacks, while in Loures, families in the Bairro do Talude Militar faced riot police dismantling their homes, plank by plank, under the cold lens of the media.

The housing crisis in Portugal is not new, but its management increasingly reflects the country’s deeper structural inequalities: poverty is racialized, solutions are bureaucratic, and the spectacle of eviction has become part of mainstream television.

A Crisis Decades in the Making

The roots of Portugal’s informal settlements stretch back to the post-revolutionary period, when waves of African migrants from former Portuguese colonies arrived in Lisbon in the 1970s and 80s. Many came to rebuild the metropolis, working in construction, cleaning, and public services. Yet despite their contributions, they found no affordable housing, no access to the formal rental market, and no state-supported alternatives.

Peripheral neighborhoods like Amadora and Loures became zones of improvised architecture—shacks and precarious housing cobbled together from what materials were available. Over time, these settlements solidified into communities, though always living under the threat of demolition.

According to INE (Instituto Nacional de Estatística):

• 16.4% of Portugal’s population currently lives in severe housing deprivation, a figure that doubles in the Lisbon periphery.
• Amadora has the highest immigrant population density in the country, with over 12% of residents born abroad, many from Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Cape Verde.
• Since 2015, Lisbon’s rental market has exploded—rents have increased by 93%, while wages stagnate.

Eviction as Urban Policy

Municipal authorities often justify shack demolitions by citing urban hygiene, safety, or development regulations. But for residents, eviction is not just about losing shelter—it’s about losing community, work proximity, and access to schools and healthcare.

“We have no alternatives,” one resident told a journalist during the Loures operation. His words echo a systemic failure: Portugal’s Programa de Apoio ao Acesso à Habitação, intended to provide housing support, remains slow, underfunded, and mired in bureaucracy. According to the Observatório da Habitação, more than 37,000 families are currently on waiting lists for public housing, with some waiting over a decade.

In most cases, demolitions happen without prior rehousing plans, violating guidelines from the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, who has repeatedly warned that such evictions constitute a breach of human rights obligations.

The Spectacle of Eviction: CMTV and the Politics of Fear

If the bulldozers are moving faster, it’s partly because the cameras are always rolling.

This week’s demolitions were broadcast live by CMTV (Correio da Manhã TV), Portugal’s most-watched private news channel. But coverage like this isn’t just about public information—it’s about spectacle.

Compareble to the New York Post or Fox News, CMTV operates at the intersection of tabloid television and populist panic. Its programming thrives on live police operations, crime scenes, and social disorder, turning public services into entertainment.

In eviction scenarios, CMTV frames law enforcement as the protagonists, while portraying precarious families as a social problem to be managed. Bulldozers, riot police, and the dismantling of homes are presented as order-restoring interventions, rarely as symptoms of a broken housing system.

Sociologist Cristina Roldão argues that this media framing normalizes racialized policing and desensitizes the public to the violence of forced evictions. The underlying message: eviction is security, not a social failure.

In recent years, this spectacle has fed directly into the narratives of Portugal’s rising far-right party Chega, which exploits CMTV-style broadcasts to push anti-immigrant, law-and-order populism. The result is a feedback loop, where sensationalist media coverage shapes public opinion, and that opinion justifies harsher state actions.

Racialized Displacement

The people affected by these demolitions are not an anonymous mass. According to studies from the Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra, the vast majority of those evicted in Loures and Amadora are Afro-descendant migrants or their children, many born in Portugal but living without secure tenancy or citizenship rights.

This process is not new. In the 1990s, Operation Outono Quente saw similar demolitions in Amadora, sparking public unrest and accusations of institutional racism. Decades later, the pattern repeats: Afro-Portuguese communities are evicted to clear land for redevelopment and speculative real estate projects, with little regard for historical displacement.

The Legal Contradiction

Portugal’s Basic Housing Law (Lei de Bases da Habitação), approved in 2019, enshrines housing as a constitutional right. Yet the gap between legal theory and lived reality widens with every demolition.

Critics argue that municipalities prioritize land value over social dignity, with evictions clearing space for urban renewal projects, Airbnb expansions, or private developments. The Lisbon area, now branded as a global tourist capital, is less accessible than ever to the workers who keep it running.

What Future?

As the housing crisis intensifies, grassroots organizations like Habita!, STOP Despejos, and SOS Racismo are calling for:

• An immediate moratorium on forced evictions without dignified rehousing solutions.
• An expansion of public housing stock, not just subsidies for private rentals.
• A national audit of informal settlements, with community-led urban planning initiatives.
• The dismantling of media narratives that criminalize poverty and migration.

Portugal faces a stark choice: continue treating its housing crisis as a spectacle for prime-time news, or confront the deeper structural inequities that make shelter a privilege instead of a right.

For now, in the outskirts of Lisbon, the frontlines of the housing crisis remain occupied by bulldozers, cameras, and police uniforms—not social workers, architects, or agents of inclusion.

• INE (Instituto Nacional de Estatística), 2021 Census Data
• Observatório da Habitação e da Reabilitação Urbana, 2024 Report
• CES - Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra, Racial Inequality in Housing Study (2023)
• UN Special Rapporteur Reports on Adequate Housing, 2019–2024