The journal ‘City & Community’ of the American Sociological Association has published this August a work written by some members of LXNIGHTS team: Jordi Nofre, Íñigo Sánchez Fuarros, João Carlos Martins and Patrícia Pereira from CICS.Nova (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Daniel Malet Calvo from CIES-IUL (ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa) and Miguel Geraldes and Ana López Dìaz (IGOT – Universidade de Lisboa).The presented article summarizes several topics explored in our researches, such as touristification, studentification and gentrification, using a case study in the Bairro Alto, Lisbon
Exploring Nightlife and Urban Change in Bairro Alto, Lisbon
Here an excerpt of the ‘Introduction’:
Over the last three decades culture has played a central role in the urban renewal of many cities worldwide. The inner city has thus become a socially, politically controlled “theatre of consumption” (Ritzer 2010). Correspondingly, the urban night has emerged not only as a significant space–time of productive economic activity but also as a key strategy in the urban regeneration of downtowns (Chatterton and Hollands 2003; Farrer 2008, 2011; Hae 2011, 2012; Tadie and Permanadeli 2015; among others). In some Southern European cities the rise of new urban nightscapes in their historical neighborhoods (Crivello 2009; García-Perez 2014; Nofre 2013) is largely connected to urban, social, and economic impacts caused by the neoliberalization of the city (Brenner and Theodore 2005). This is the case of Bairro Alto in Lisbon (Portugal), where the university student and tourist nightlife in this historical neighborhood of the Portuguese capital may be seen as part of a broader public and private-led strategy of internationalization of the city as advertised on the website of the Lisbon Tourism Promotion Agency: “Lisbon’s nightlife is known as one of the longest and most vibrant in the whole of Europe and the world.” Indeed, over the past 10 years, the exponential growth of international tourists visiting Lisbon and the increasing attractiveness of the Portuguese capital for hosting national and international university students have caused some social, spatial, economic and cultural impacts in the inner city (Galhardo 2014; Malheiros et al., 2012; Mendes 2006, 2011, 2014; Nofre 2013; Rodrigues 2010). But how is student and tourism-related nightlife contributing to the urban change in Bairro Alto?