Hard Engineering: Propositions for Future Ruins (2) explores how the urban environment is produced by everyday acts and how the city is constructed from material and immaterial structures of civic organisation, representation, power and control. Six speculative guides to Lisbon re-imagine the contemporary urban environment by exploring overlooked livelihoods, traces of profound social mutation, and the scars of past natural disasters, economic crisis and human conflict. These propositional interpretations of Lisbon are the result of interdisciplinary collaborations across Art, Architecture, Civic Engineering, Physical and Human Geography and Social Anthropology. The videos on display are made up of short moving-image episodes of transformation and decline, thoughts and propositions for identifying and navigating the future ruins of the city.

To go with the exhibition of the six speculative guides of Lisbon, conceived by a group of artists, architects and curators (see part 1), the Art Library chose from its collections a set of guides published throughout the 20th century. The exception is the book of James Murphy voyages in Portugal at the end of 18th century published in London in 1798.

Throughout the 20th century the production of guides to Lisbon increased and took on new formats. In graphic terms, if the photograph complement profusely the written information, illustrating it, making it more suggestive and showing attractive and unexpected sights and perspectives of the city, the maps also gained another visual relevance. With variable dimensions, often detachable and / or foldable and autonomous, the maps can both offer an overview of the global urban space or only provide graphical guidance for selected routes from which each visitor will discover the city.