Hard Engineering: Propositions for Future Ruins explores how the urban environment is produced by everyday acts and how the city is constructed from material and immaterial structures of civic organization, 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 project presented at the Gulbenkian Foundation and National Museum of Natural History and Science, both in Lisbon, is made up of short moving-image episodes of transformation and decline, thoughts and propositions for identifying and navigating the future ruins of the city.