The line of colour. Intersections of race and space in Lisbon.

The urgency of coping with the uneasiness of tackling race in Europe motivates this dissertation to explore how the racial and the urban connect. Scholars warn that a new era of conflicts played on racial lines is opening up hitting mainly the cities. As a result, race and the city are of increasing concern in public discourses. However, outside the US, the effects of race are often neglected or even denied. Although difficult to grasp, the race process has material and tangible effects that I explore in the case of a Southern European city, Lisbon. The research considers race as a thorny social issue, a controversial concept, and an embodied variable and analyses the materiality and experience of the spatial processes of racialization, mobilising mainly geographical and qualitative approaches. A spatial analysis approach provides a handy lens and allows for undermining power structures and acknowledging people’s resistance. The theme of visibility is wholly mobilised in this exploration since it is intrinsically connected with how race works in the urban space. Indeed, the urban – as a subgroup of space in general – and blackness – as one of the possible race declinations – are interconnected in the visible realm. Consequently, the urban space plays a role in sustaining differences based on one’s appearance and turns up as the active mediator of processes of racialization. This contribution aims to enrich the contemporary debate by demonstrating how innovative spatial perspectives shed light on the urban dimension of blackness and enable reading space and race together at different topographical and topological scales. The theoretical premises – as well as some conceptual advances – were exposed in Chapter 1 drawing on a wide range of international literature about space and race, while Chapter 2 provided the contextual frame to the case study focusing on the geographical area of the European South. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 were devoted to the unfolding of three distinct empirical analyses: a detailed examination of urban policies (3), an interpretation of the “sense of place” of ten in-depth interviews with black women (4) and the content analysis of online urban images (5). Lisbon case study is a dense and privileged site to probe the various and multifaceted ways in which race functions and performs at the margins of Europe and to rethink race-urban paradigms beyond the dichotomies between North and South of the world. It results in a city strongly marked by race mechanisms but also the scene of strong negations around race-urban matters. It is characterized by a self-representation of anti-racial and multicultural aspects while being in fact a deeply and historically racialized metropolitan area. In conclusion, this research pinpoints spatial configurations of racialization made up of material omissions in the urban core and erasures and displacements in the peripheries, to which it opposes different strategies of tackling, ignoring or limiting the consequences of racialization through subtle but powerful subversive actions of black placemaking.