Drawing Futures in Lisbon: Diversity, Heritage, and Religion

In 2012, the Lisbon city hall announced the construction of a new square in downtown Lisbon, the Moorish square, which will include the relocation of a previously existing mosque functioning in the vicinity. Based on an ethnography of this architectural project, this chapter reveals how it mobilizes ideas and practices about locality, more specifically about heritage, religion and secularism, and their corresponding temporalities. The aim is to analyse its rationale, the polemics it has raised, and how it produces aspirations and expectations of inclusion, diversity, and citizenship, in an urban space in which the temporalities of secularism, in the form of religion as heritage, and the temporalities of lived religion, of worship, are entangled in the production of diverse futures. It will also be shown how such entanglements lead to tensions and anxieties about heritage and the place of Islam and Muslims in contemporary Portuguese society.