Introduction

When Lisbon is presented in touristic and official discourses, it is often the city's post-imperial culture that comes to the forefront. The city and its monuments are associated with the history of its Navigators and with the Portuguese Empire, and many elements are presented as ‘remnants of empire’. The city centre contains different historical layers (such as a 13th-century Moor neighbourhood, elements of the 16th-century maritime world or late-18th-century rationalist urban design; see França, 2008) but the one thing linking five centuries of history together is the reference to empire. Heroic navigation, scientific expeditions, settlement colonialism and miscegenation, all are summoned to describe the undercurrent of the nation's and of the city's history.

Today, several parts of the city centre are undergoing a rapid process of regeneration and/or gentrification, and these historical themes are often deployed in narrations that legitimate the city's embourgeoisement. In the central areas of Avenida da Liberdade, Chiado and Princípe Real, transnational property-led developer gentrification is flourishing – windows are awash with CB Richard Ellis and Sotheby's real estate agents’ billboards in both the residential and commercial areas – and is directed at the (national and foreign) affluent populations that, in the past three decades, have fled to the better-off suburbs along the Cascais train line. This is academically referred to as nobilisation (nobilitação), in a way, a nuance of the label gentrification given that these areas have always been the more aristocratic ones. Since 2011, this process has been accelerated with the forced ‘devaluation of everything’ (salaries, labour rights, rent controls, tenant rights) except for the currency (the Euro), under the structural adjustment programme signed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Commission and the European Central Bank. The recession-inducing remedies (poison) of irrational one-direction austerity (strict conditionality for countries; unconditionality for the finance sector) have created the perfect storm for a revanchist takeover by the upper-middle and upper classes of Lisbon's historical centre.

Even in the face of this, housing and urban studies academics in Portugal tend to minimise the relevance of the concept of gentrification for the case of Lisbon – implying that it belongs exclusively to the repertoire of the Anglo-American city. Exceptions go back to the early 1990s, but were mostly student dissertations (eg Branco, 1992).