Lisbon · Conference · Regenerative development
Conferência “LISBOA VIVA”
Seeing Lisbon through the paradigm for regenerating life.
What if the way we are thinking about a problem is part of the problem? We heard this reframing from our guest speaker Bayo Akomolafe earlier on. It was one of the many insights that endured as we thought about what needs changing in Lisbon and what is our role in that.
Lisboa Viva aimed to disrupt our habitual ways of thinking, asking us what if the city isn’t a set of problems to fix, but a living system we all participate in? Thus the conference opened with a provocation — that Lisbon behaves like a parasite toward the rest of Portugal — and used it to pull 100+ participants out of problem-solving mode and into a different perspective entirely: seeing the city not as a sum of infrastructure and the people in it, but as people, river, hills and buildings being one interdependent living organism with a past and a potential future sourced in its uniqueness.
We explored shifting paradigms, not just learning content. Bayo Akomolafe’s invitation to “embrace the monsters” and Ben Haggard’s reflective dialogues with partners in Lisbon (Impact Hub Penha de França, Lisbon Municipality) and Catalonia (Resilience Earth) gave that shift both edge and evidence. Living systems thinking isn’t an abstraction; it’s a workable lens for real change in places and neighborhoods.
What emerged, in the end, wasn’t a list of solutions but a re-storying of Lisbon itself — as a threshold between land and sea that nurtures and is nurtured by flows of people and other living beings; as a place that has always metabolized diversity into a layered living culture. The conference’s core value was to create the first step towards an ongoing space of inquiry and collaboration among diverse stakeholders about Lisbon’s essence and its potential.