“Returning architecture back to the city” — Screenshot of the website MundoMouraria.com (also on Facebook).

The historical Mouraria neighborhood in Lisbon, Portugal, can now be explored in a ground breaking web documentary, Mundo Mouraria. In a true digital narrative form, the documentary makes a map available to help visitors wander the streets, sounds and flavors of Mouraria while getting to know the stories of six local dwellers. Its synopsis reads:

Here is a handful of interrogations: What does it mean to inhabit? What is the dialog between space and life solutions for the here and the now (the ‘crisis’)? 

Miloca, Joaquim and Nina are the human geography of dreams. Or better, they are evidence: the geography is (also) dreams and the space of now is already being nourished – literally – through the hopes of a future. A clandestine Guinea, a Latin America for hymns, a Portugal with self-employment.

Precious lesson taught to us by Rita and Leader: To preserve is to reinvent. Language, work, knowledge, knowledge transformed into flavors.

Salvino is memory-geography. All the Callicians of his generation have already left or died. He is here to look straight into our eyes in the presented perfect of “has beens”, “has comes” and “has hads” which are historic proof of existence.

And life always surprises the route: Mundo Mouraria, should be understood as worlds, as plural. The global world at every corner, in local answers to challenges that are out there, somewhere in the global undefined.

Mundo Mouraria was launched on October 15, 2013 at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, and marks the debut of the recently launched co-op Bagabaga Studios. Paulo Querido, a leading figure of online journalism in Portugal, has described [pt] this multimedia narrative as “pioneer in the history of Portuguese journalism”.