In the soft chaos of a Rio favela or the midday quiet of a vacant Lisbon lot, something is shifting. Not in dramatic gestures, but in small, stubborn moves: a splash of colour on a forgotten wall, a garden bed in a derelict plot, a painted crosswalk that wasn’t there yesterday. These aren’t accidents. They’re signals. Across the Portuguese-speaking world, a wave of community-led spatial interventions is redrawing the meaning of public space—often without permission, sometimes without resources, always with intent.

From Brazil to Angola, Portugal to Mozambique, communities are refusing to wait for urban planners or development agencies to catch up. What’s emerged is a loosely connected yet ideologically coherent movement often called tactical urbanism: low-cost, temporary, and profoundly political acts that reclaim neglected city spaces and reinsert life into the cracks of failing systems. But in the Lusophone context, it becomes more than a planning tool. It becomes a language of resistance.

Paint It Back: From Rio’s Favelas to the World

In 2006, in Rio de Janeiro’s Santa Marta favela, two Dutch artists—Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, known as Haas&Hahn—collaborated with local youth to paint a mural of a boy flying a kite on a massive concrete wall. It was meant as a one-off. But the energy it sparked grew. Within a few years, that spark became the Favela Painting project, a sprawling initiative that transformed entire facades into bold technicolor artworks—7,000 square meters of resistance against invisibility.

But this wasn’t imported art therapy. The artists trained and paid local residents, embedding the project within the fabric of the favela. In a city where public space is policed and aestheticised from above, this project flipped the hierarchy: the view from the hill was now setting the tone for the city below.

In another Rio neighbourhood, Pereira da Silva, a group of kids started building a tiny favela out of bricks and LEGO in 1997. What began as play became Projeto Morrinho, a 450m² miniature city with its own political dramas, gangs, festivals—and its own aesthetic logic. Today it’s a full-blown cultural initiative that has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and represents the kind of embedded urban critique only those living it could stage.

These are not fringe projects. They’ve reshaped how favelas are seen—by outsiders and insiders alike.

Lisbon Doesn’t Wait Either

Thousands of kilometres away, in Lisbon, another logic unfolds. In a city known for both its ornate tilework and its brutal housing crisis, empty lots often sit untouched for years, casualties of speculation or bureaucratic inertia. But communities are no longer waiting for formal permission. In neighbourhoods like Marvila or Graça, residents have taken over plots, transforming them into shared gardens, playgrounds, or temporary cultural venues.

These aren’t just aesthetic acts. They’re gestures of survival, care, and insistence. They say: we’re still here. And we’re not going anywhere.

In the northern suburb of Sacavém, the now-iconic housing complex Quinta do Mocho was once known mainly for its marginalisation and lack of public services. But in 2014, residents teamed up with artists and activists to turn the estate’s walls into one of Europe’s largest outdoor street art galleries—over 90 large-scale murals now cover the buildings. The transformation wasn’t just visual. It changed how public services saw the area—bus routes were extended, public perception shifted, and the stigma began to fade. As one local organiser put it: "We painted our way into visibility."

Survival as Design: Luanda, Maputo, Bissau

In Luanda or Maputo, tactical urbanism takes on an even more urgent tone. The state, often overwhelmed or absent, leaves entire neighbourhoods to self-organise. Here, community-led interventions become tools of survival: rainwater cisterns built from salvaged containers, compost hubs replacing informal dumps, hand-built playgrounds nestled between auto repair shops.

These acts aren’t waiting for funding. They’re not being documented on urbanist blogs or TED stages. But they are what keeps the city alive. They are not about fixing the informal—they are about legitimising what already works.

In Guinea-Bissau, artists and rappers speak of “building infrastructure with lyrics” as much as bricks, transforming cultural spaces into multi-use safe havens, skate parks, or classrooms. The materials may be modest, but the architecture is radical—fluid, hybrid, and deeply social.

Beyond the Buzzword

“Tactical urbanism” may be the term academics reach for, but on the ground, these projects are rarely labeled as such. They’re described instead as “getting things done,” “fixing what we need,” or simply “living.” In Portuguese-speaking contexts, the ethic often emerges from mutirão—the long-standing practice of collective labour where neighbours come together to build, repair, or plant, without waiting for external permission.

It’s not just spatial—it’s relational. Trust replaces contracts. Intuition replaces zoning. And aesthetics emerge from constraint.

The results are rarely polished. But they’re rarely fragile, either. Because what’s being built isn’t just physical space—it’s agency.

The Tensions Are Real

Still, these projects don’t exist in a utopia. When they succeed, they often attract attention—from politicians, developers, and speculators. What begins as community-led reclamation can easily become co-opted, repackaged as “urban revitalisation,” and sold back to the people who made it possible—at a price they can no longer afford.

The same murals that changed perception in Quinta do Mocho also drew investors. Artists who once painted for free now see their work used in real estate brochures. Without protection, tactical acts risk becoming aesthetic bait for gentrification.

And there’s burnout. These efforts demand constant care, maintenance, negotiation. Volunteers grow tired. Materials run out. Legal ambiguities loom. There’s no safety net for those who build the city without being asked.

What Governments Are Learning—Or Not

Some cities have begun to pay attention. In Lisbon, temporary-use permits have allowed community groups to formalise their claims, at least temporarily. In Rio, tour agencies now include Morrinho and Favela Painting as official cultural stops. But these recognitions are often reactive, not proactive—less about support, more about image management.

The real challenge is whether institutions can support without co-opting; facilitate without flattening; fund without controlling.

Futures We Can Touch

What’s happening in Lusophone cities is not just a set of isolated projects. It’s a pattern. A political mood. A design philosophy born not in studios but on sidewalks, rooftops, and alleyways. It’s about doing more with less—and sometimes doing it better.

And it may well be a blueprint for how cities survive the next century: not through grand masterplans, but through iterative, embedded, communally owned adaptations. As climate pressure mounts, inequality deepens, and democratic institutions wobble, the ability of communities to reshape their environments quickly, cheaply, and collectively may prove not only valuable—but vital.

In the end, the power of these interventions isn’t in how they look, but in what they shift. They don’t just change space—they change people’s sense of what’s possible.

Because once you’ve painted your street, planted your own garden, and turned an abandoned corner into a dance floor, the city doesn’t look the same. And neither do you.