Where Will The Airport Land? A Narrative about the Locative Uncertainty of the New Lisbon Airport

Abstract

It is an established fact that an airport can be an instrument for development on a national and regional scale while having significant repercussions on the local level. It is equally true that it is an enormous investment wrapped in great project complexity. The specific case of the New Lisbon Airport (NLA) is a good example to prove these assumptions, and can also be considered a paradigm for a particular way of thinking about the territory. Thus, the NLA must be perceived as a heavy infrastructure and a complex process in its materialisation and also in the shock waves that it generates in the territory. However, to these obvious observations should be added other less neutral issues, regarding technical and political aspects. Those issues were the ones that disturbed (and still disturb) the NLA process. The political matters are related to the asymmetry on public investment between Northern and Southern Portugal, which the Northern social and economic actors consider to be a reinforcement to the already existent distributive inequities. It is not just about the sum involved but also about the opportunity costs, as the basis of the discussion is the priority given to the NLA project. Regarding the technical aspects, the need for the airport has never been clearly proven, the chosen locations were never a unanimous decision, and the type of airport to implement was never consensual. All of this complexity and tension has been portrayed in very diverse ways by the media, either through news articles, reports, debates, analyses or opinion pieces. The complex relations that this paper aims to describe are based on the collection, processing and systematisation of journalistic material published between 2007 and 2012, available through Google© News, and a posterior analysis combining that information with the decision-making documents identifiable through the Diário da República editions. The NLA story hasn’t ended yet. There is a constant deepening of its complexity (ANA was privatised, the NLA was suspended, studies were made to materialise the “Portela+1” solution) and its implications on the territory and the communities (plans that are suspended, reconsidered or restarted, preventive measures, agreements with the Action Program for the West and Tagus Flatlands 2008-2017 of around 2 billion euro, etc.). This research helped to demonstrate that even for an investment that implicates an enormous financial effort and delicate consequences on land-use planning, decisional drifts are a reality. The territory, regional development and technical matters are moved to the background in a process that is juggled between the published opinions and the politics’s (in)decision.