It´s The Smart City, Stupid!: A critical study of Smart narratives, Attraction Hysteria & the production of Smart Space in the European Green Capital 2020

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It´s the Smart City, Stupid!

A critical study of Smart narratives, Attraction Hysteria & the production of Smart Space in the European Green Capital 2020.

Joel Göransson Scalzotto

Institution of Human Geography Master’s Degree 30 HE credits Human Geography

Masters Programme in Globalization, Environment and Social Change

Spring Term 2020

Supervisor: Ilda Lourenco-Lindell

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It’s the Smart City, Stupid!

A Critical Study of Smart Narratives, Attraction Hysteria & The Production of Space in the European Green Capital 2020

Joel Göransson Scalzotto

Abstract

In this research, the “Smart City-edifice” of Lisbon has been examined through qualitative field work carried out in the city. The concept of the Smart City- edifice has been designed by the author in an attempt to grasp the ambiguous Smart City ambition as an assemblage of (i) specific techniques incorporated into the urban environment (ii) the modes of governance which these techniques allow for, particularly real time data collection & (iii) issues of city branding, placemaking and urban, Smart regeneration. The highlighted empirical material has been produced in collaboration with interlocutors from three different projects, and relate to the three different facets of the Smart City- edifice: A developer of a gamification scheme (e-governance), a sustainable neighbourhood project (Tech-driven sustainability and governance/civic participation) and lastly a creative hub (branding, creativity & regeneration). These facets are being examined in the context of Lisbon, a city which has gone through a re-formulation of urban agendas in the capitalist restructuring of the economy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The post-crisis strategy in Lisbon is interpreted as a sort of

“attraction hysteria” (Anttiroiko, 2014), as much effort has been placed on attracting global capital and tourism, incentivised not least by a liberalized, profitable housing market. This attraction hysteria is understood by the author as producing specific implications for the development of the Smart City- edifice. Main findings include the hinderances that said politics have produced for ambitions of civic participation and other democratic visions of the Smart City. These findings are understood in the light of the Lefebvrian framework of the “right to the city” and critical understandings of the touristified city. The field work itself has been guided by two key research questions, these being: a) How are Smart City narratives being operationalized locally by actors in Lisbon? B) What possible tensions could arise between Smart aims of global urban competitiveness and aims of civic

participation, in the context of Lisbon?

Keywords

Smart City, Lisbon, Urban Regeneration, Attraction Hysteria, City Branding, Civic Participation, E- governance, Production of space, Gentrification, Urban Commodification, Creative city.

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank everybody that has been involved in this research process. I am very grateful to those who have generously given their time, thoughts, and feelings in interviews. I want to give a special thanks to my supervisor Ilda Lourenco Lindell for providing an insightful and critical feedback all throughout the process. Lastly, a big thanks to all the “citadins” of Lisbon.

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1. Introduction

Cities are built upon a myriad of different technologies. Today, even the word technology automatically conjures up images of things that feel inherently “modern”: AI, robotics and drones. But in the true sense of the word - cities have always been dependent upon the development of new techniques. In the broad sense of the term, techniques and technologies denotes any form of use of tools, and the associated skill sets and knowledges. Seen in this light, urban development prerequisites technological development. The raison d’être for the Smart City is therefore not that it brings “technologies to the city” but rather the implications of its associated technological fixes. Though much of the criticism geared towards the Smart City conceptualises it as being caught in a techno-centric circle argument – technologies for the sake of technology for the sake of technology – what sets the Smart City apart is rather the data-collecting possibilities which these technologies allow for. The alluring possibilities of the technique known as the Internet of Things (IoT), means in theory that almost any object or life form in the urban milieu can be a producer of data, data that can be transmitted and

analysed in real time. Such a city is – in theory at least - aware, conscious, and Smart. If the modernity project of the enlightenment epoch was about enlightening, disciplining and

socialising humans then perhaps the equivalent ambition of the 21^st century is to enlighten the cities in which human lives. So the story goes at least in the more grandiose passages of the Smart rhetoric.

The discourse of Sustainability has always been impregnated by the belief that the climate challenge is in large to be tackled with “awareness” (Hulme, 2009; Raivio, 2011). Smart, energy efficient buildings and Smart, enlightened and equally energy efficient Smart Citizens is the way forward if we are to inhabit a habitable world in the future, according to this narrative. Much like the “Creative City” or “Sustainable City” before it, the Smart City has become some an attractive label for cities wanting to alter their visibility. In general, the act of city-branding has become an increasingly frequent practise as cities aim to better compete on the transnational market in efforts to attract global capital (Anttiroiko, 2014). In the course of this inter-city competition, the notion of the “Smart City” has swiftly become the new black as far as urban development goes. However, the label remains rather vague and much like

“sustainable development” it can mean anything and everything (Joss, 2019). In essence, it denotes a set of techniques and managerial practices aimed at rationalising the use of

resources and assets in urban areas. Thanks to technological development, a massive influx of data can be collected from citizens via the use of smartphones, applications and sensors

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placed into ordinary objects. This data then gets used in efforts to streamline urban processes, ranging from transportation, waste-management and crime-detection. In the Smart City- discourse, the Smart City is presented as the urban incarnation of the so-called knowledge- based era of capitalism. Famous Smart Cities such as Singapore or Amsterdam are presented as urban embodiments of our time, reflections of transformations of human ingenuity and economics - the equivalent of what cities such as Manchester was to the early phases of industrial capitalism. This discourse of development is one of two major line of thoughts underpinning the Smart City-rhetoric. The second discursive trait, presented as a main raison d'être, is what I call a discourse of necessity. Because not only is the Smart City presented as the natural next stage of urban development, it is also presented as the urban solution to several global threats including climate change, social demographic ageing and urban security.

The ambiguity of the Smart City-term makes an examination of how it crystallises in a given locality a tricky endeavour. Because even before delving into the research, one hast to establish what one is looking for. I have ended up examining what I call the Smart City- edifice (Göransson Scalzotto, Forthcoming)¹. This term demands a short explanation before continuing. I divide the Smart City-edifice into three major components. The first and most obvious is the technological foundation: most notably the IoT and ICT incorporated into the built environment. Building upon this is the second dimension, the realm of algorithmic governance or e-governance. Lastly, there is the dimension of city branding. This concept has been adapted from the notion of the “sustainability-edifice” – summed up as a tripartite of economic growth, social progress and environmental protection (Schoolman et.al, 2012), underpinned by the assumption that certain techno-managerial practices can sustain and

“save” our current economic and political structure (Swyngedouw & Kaika, 2014). I originally started using the notion of the Smart City-edifice as a way to structure the vague and multifaceted Smart City concept as I was coming to the end of my fieldwork. Thus, this imagined assemblage has been developed on the back of my main findings in an attempt to design a concept that resonated with central themes and patterns. It has also been inspired by puzzling together frameworks from previous research which I have included in the section of previous research. Whilst I think there could be a theoretical potential in the way that this term reduces the ambiguous Smart City down to three recognizable concepts, it is at the end

1 A critical position paper that I have written in collaboration with the Lisbon-branch of the EU-commission founded “ROCK-project” which is to be published later this summer. The paper focuses on the Hub Criativo de Beato which is also examined in this thesis.

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of the day inspired by one local, manifestation of the Smart City (Lisbon), and as such it should be treated.

1.1 Aim & Rationale

This research aims to examine the localization of global “Smart” narratives in Lisbon. It particularly aims to contribute to an understanding of how processes of urban

commodification, most notably on the housing market, has implications for Smart agendas.

Precisely because of the momentum that the Smart City “brand” has gained, and the severity of the crises that it is said to combat, it is important to put the Smart City-edifice under scrutiny. I have examined three different Smart projects in the Portuguese capital Lisbon. The city, which has just been rewarded with the “European Green Capital Award 2020” has witnessed a myriad of Smart projects, (or at least projects that have been labelled as such), during the last decade. In general, the ancient Portuguese capital, the second oldest capital in Europe, has gathered much attention as of late. The speedy recovery after the financial crisis and its efforts to position itself on the world map has gone hand in hand with increased flows of capital and tourism settling in the city. Aside from the green capital award, the city was named “Entrepreneurial Capital” of the year in 2015 and Tourist Capital of the year in 2018.

This increased attention has been aligned with a political and economic restructuring of the city. In 2012, in the midst of the crisis, the European Troika (the European commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) imposed harsh urban austerity- measures as part of their bailout-deal. Amongst them was a series of reforms and market- adjustments of the city’s real estate market. Most famous among them is the Novo Regime do Arrendamento Urbano (New Urban Lease Regime) – coined “the law of evictions” by locals and activists, and the Golden Visas – a government funded scheme that provides EU-

residency Visas and Portuguese residency through investments in the labour- or housing market (Mendes, 2018: 28-30).

The effects of these reforms have been hard felt by the city’s inhabitants. The last decade has seen the exchange of an intensive suburbanization process in favour of a rapid, back-to-the- city movement for capital and tourists alike (Lestegás, 2019; Mendes: 2018). Although it is inevitably the city centre and its historic quarters that have constituted the ground zero for these processes, this “perfect storm” as local activists and academics have referred to it, has also impacted upon the peripheries (Ascencão, 2015). As I hope to present in this thesis, these processes of real-estate speculation, touristification and processes of “worlding” are important

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to understand in order to grasp the complexities of Lisbon as a Smart City and the underlying logics and assumptions on which it is founded.

1.2 Research questions & academic and societal relevance

A noticeable body of work has been produced that criticises the technocentric aspects of the Smart City (Yigitcanlar et al, 2019; Cook & Swyngedouw, 2012; Holland, 2008;). Whilst realizing the merits of said critique, I feel as though it is in large a critique without a rebuttal.

As we will see, even the most ardent Smart City-supporters acknowledges the pitfalls of techno centrism and argue for a turn towards a citizen-centric Smart City. This research aims to add insights as to why citizen participation and other democratic aspects have been hard to align with Smart aspirations. Moreover, this thesis contributes to what Shelton et al (2014) calls the research of “actually existing Smart Cities.” Precisely because the Smart concept remains vague, it is important to analyse its on-the-ground-implementation.

As the, almost painfully overstated, but nonetheless relevant, estimate goes: 50% of the global population will live in cities by the year of 2050 (Kaika & Swyngedouw, 2014). Without opening the can of worms that is the discussions surrounding the dichotomy of the urban &

the rural and the limitations of such a division, any ambition to radically transform the ways in which human beings coexist with our planet needs to have the city as a focal point of attention. Needless to say, the notion of the “sustainable city” has long retained a hegemonic stature. Increasingly so during the last decade, the Sustainable city has started to become replaced by the Smart City as the designated urban salvation in the epoch of the Anthropocene (de Jong, et.al 2013). Or rather; the notion of the Sustainable City is increasingly being

dressed in the cloak of techno-centrism that the Smart-notion brings with it (Holland, 2008).

Because of the acuteness of climate change and the unthreatened position of the

Smart/Sustainable city amongst the urban efforts to combat it; there is a crying need for critical assessments of Smart City adaptations. By examining the process of implementation in Lisbon, the study juxtaposes the Smart City phenomenon – a flagship of the technocentric urban sustainability discourse - against the backdrop of processes of financialization of housing, gentrification and displacement - phenomena that constitute some of the biggest threats to urban social sustainability. Or put differently, it looks at the concept of social sustainability, the often promised but seldom delivered companion to economic and environmental sustainability.

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During my stay in the city I had noticed that the issue of housing was to be found everywhere.

The rugged look of certain neglected neighbourhoods was impossible to ignore, not to

mention the amount of vacant buildings and frequency of air-bnb and hotel-esque apartments.

More than anything people were talking about it: topics of gentrification, rising rents and housing crisis came up time and time again, not as “interesting” round-table discussions but as severe issues that affected people’s lives. It was with this background in my mind that I

started reading about Lisbon as a pilot city for the Sharing City-program. As I read up on how a city with an obviously less than sustainable housing market – was being flooded with urban awards: Entrepreneurial City of the year, Tourist City of the year, Green City of the year…

Simultaneously I started becoming very interested in the narrative of the Smart City itself, its potential, its limitations, and its contradictions. Piecing the two topics together, I was curious about how the localized issues of Lisbon would affect, and react with, the Smart agenda which was now being championed in the city. This curiosity was only further fuelled as several of the Smart projects I looked into had what seemed to be a possible a clash of logics;

on the one hand aiming to bolster local empowerment, civic participation and community democracy whilst simultaneously aiming to “attract” new groups of people, especially young creative, mobile workers. This generated questions: Given that there is processes of

gentrification at play, how are competing aims of attracting new (not seldom more affluent) people with higher purchasing power complementing, or actively counteracting aims of local empowerment and citizen participation, and how are these aims conceptualised and

operationalised within the broader frame of the Smart City-narrative? These questions eventually evolved into my research questions: (a) How are Smart City narratives being operationalized locally by actors in Lisbon? (b)What possible tensions could arise between Smart aims of global, urban competitiveness and aims of civic participation, in the context of Lisbon? In concrete terms, these questions aim to examine how multi-facetted Smart

narratives take on particular meanings in the urban space of Lisbon, and secondly, the possible tensions that are embodied within these localised Smart aims.

1.3 Structure of the Thesis

Besides this first chapter, this thesis is made up by an additional seven chapters, divided into several sub-chapters. The introduction is followed up by (2) Previous research -The Smart City in which I present previous research on the Smart City. Starting with a short historic introduction of the concept, I then proceed to establish some central definitions of this

notoriously ambiguous term. Central themes in the thesis, such as topics of civic participation

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and the connections to previous urban models such as the Creative City are examined. Then, in 2.2 Smart Lisbon I zoom in on the case of Lisbon, starting with a contextual background before presenting the previous research on Smart Projects in the city. Particular attention is payed to how the Smart City-edifice of Lisbon is embedded in processes of urban austerity and post-crisis politics. Although elements from my previous research will be used in the final analysis, I make a distinction between the previous research and more abstract theoretical models. These latter ones are presented in chapter 3 Theoretical frameworks in which I present the Lefebvrian concept of the right to the city and the production of space as well as theories of touristification, most notably John Urry´s concept of the “tourist gaze” and Christopher Lasch´s writings on the mobility of global elites. In chapter 4: Methods &

Methodology I start with a short account of the ontological and epistemological assumptions which have guided my work. Thereafter I go on to present what I have done during my fieldwork, paying particular attention to chosen methods and issues of power, ethics and positionality. In chapter 5 The Smart City-Edifice of Lisbon - My findings I present my empirical findings, focusing on the three projects which I think best represent the different facets of the localized Smart City-edifice. These being, in order, (i) the digital social market of the “Sharing Lisbon” project, which is included to represent efforts of e-governance, (ii) the Hub Criativo do Beato, a creative hub on Lisbon’s eastern shoreline which relates to ambitions of urban regeneration, city branding and creation of creative tech-clusters, and lastly (iii) the Alfama SUSHI - a self-defined Smart project in Lisbon’s gentrified historic city centre which relates to topics of tech-driven sustainability and issues of civic

participation. I end this chapter with a sub-chapter on the issues of housing and how these issues permeates the Smart projects in different ways.

In Chapter 6:Vulnerabilities & Tensions: Critical discussions I tie together theoretical knots with my empirical findings and embed these in the historic background of Lisbon which I account for in the previous research. I try to answer my research question by creating a dialogue between theories and testimonies from the field. In chapter 7 conclusions I wrap up and summarize central themes and try to come with suggestions on possible improvements and themes for future research. Besides this I present a personal vision of an alternative Smart City. Chapter 8 presents the bibliography I have used. Lastly, I have included an appendix presenting a list of central interviewee profiles and an interview guide.

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2. Previous Research – The Smart City

2.1 The Urban Smart Futures of Yesteryear: A short historic introduction Techniques and technologies have made cities cleaner, more efficient and accessible for centuries. From the development of agricultural practices to evolution in metallurgy, technologies have shaped the way we create and make use of our urban milieus. The introduction of the combustion engine (and in extension the car) mitigated and later

eradicated, the big urban anxiety of 19^th century London: the idea that the city was about to drown in horse manure (Groom, 2013). Similarly, the visions of the urban milieus of the future tend to be based upon futurist technologies, either ones that are emerging but yet not deemed mature for implementation or conjured up ones. This tendency really gains

momentum in the post-war era of the 20^th century but has been around for much longer. The 19^th centuries futurist movements envisioned a city in which the automobile, the hydropower and the airplane had combined to create an industrial city which far exceeded the capacities of the human mind (Angelidou, 2015). The techno-centric utopia of the futurists was one that proudly celebrated mankind’s triumph over nature. The climate crisis we currently find ourselves in has generated a technocentric urban utopia that instead presents technical fixes as the mediator between us and our “natural” environment, a mediating saviour designed to restore a long-lost sensitivity with our natural surroundings.

The notion of the Smart City saw its first light during the 1990s (see Batty, 1990; Laterasse, 1992; Albino et al, 2015). The term itself therefore largely precedes the IoT-technique which it is now perhaps most closely associated with. Back then, the Smart-adjective denoted a certain vision of a city whose infrastructure was built upon and alleviated by, at the time, ground-breaking ICT-techniques. However, it was not until the end of the 2000s that the notion started gaining considerable momentum in the realm of urban planning (Angelidou, 2015). It was soon picked up by the big tech companies – IBM and CISCO to name a few.

Without lingering too long on this topic, it is worth noting that the trademark “Smarter Cities”

belongs to IBM since 2011 (Söderström et al., 2014). Already in 2012, the term Smart Cities had surpassed the Sustainable City in terms of usage within academic discourse (De Jong et al., 2013: 36). Since then, the notion has only gained in popularity.

2.2 Smart Cities: Defining the undefined

A good thirty years after its introduction into the urban development discourse – the million- dollar question remains: What is the Smart City really? This question still lacks a definite

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answer. As several authors have noted, this lack of a clear-cut definition has been used by various cities to self-define themselves with the famous buzzword (Caragliu et. al 2011;

Tranos & Gertner, 2012). Some have even suggested that the term has been left intentionally ambiguous and vague (Joss, 2019). Many of the attempts at defining the phenomenon seems to raise more question than answers. For instance, IBM:s definition of the Smart City in a corporate document from 2010 - stating that the Smart City is a “instrumented, interconnected and intelligent city” (Harrison et al., 2010), raises the question: What then, is a instrumented, interconnected and intelligent city? Reviewing the large body of work being written on the Smart City, it seems easier to find accounts, or critiques, of what the Smart City is supposed to be and what it is effectively is not, rather than what the Smart City de facto is.

Part of the reason for this vagueness could perhaps be traced to Angelidou´s assessment of the Smart City as a strategic vision for urban futures rather than a tangible, doable urban model (Angelidou, 2015: 98). This view is shared by Albino et al. (2015) who states that the Smart City should be understood as a strategic direction for urban planners. This strategic direction, as they understand it, is intimately linked with ideas of urban sustainability, thus being more of an abstraction rather than an in-detail framework for a Smart City per se. However, when trying to strip down the Smart City-concept into the lowest common denominator – one inevitably ends up with the technical fixes, more specifically, the “internet of things” (IoT) - the ability to collect data from all sorts of everyday objects through installed sensors (Atzoria et. al. 2017). These techniques in turn, generate the possibility for new forms of governance.

A baseline definition therefore could be that it is as new form of urban governance, constituted by an assemblage of different managerial techniques enabled by certain

technological advancements (Albino et al. 2015; Vanolo, 2014). A central theme is the idea of integrating previously separated urban spheres - no system in the Smart City should be

isolated (Dirks & Keeling, 2009). In terms of practical examples, Smart city implementations can range from street lights that sensors the flow of pedestrian and regulates the amount of light instantaneously, smart parking spots which sensors the presence or absence of cars and then sends a signal to drivers, dust bins that send a signal when filling up thus allowing for more rational and effective waste-collection. Among the more controversial Smart

implementations is the facial recognition-system and other sorts of algorithmic governance (Kumar et al., 2019; Ekenel et al., 2007)

There is an ongoing debate over whether knowledge or technique lies at the core of the concept (Lombardi et.al, 2012). Data in itself, does not equal knowledge – and this is where

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the idea of Bakci et.al (2013:136) goes further in their definition and states that a Smart City should be able to “generate smart ideas in an open environment” which according to the author should be done through the creation of innovative clusters and open data sets built upon broad citizen participation. All in all, there seems to have been a push, more emphasis is placed upon the knowledge generated from technical fixes, rather than the technical fixes per se (UCL, 2012).

As Shelton et al. (2015) puts it, it is important to look beyond the mega-projects and the grandiose rhetoric surrounding the Smart City, and into the “actually existing ones”.

According to the authors, these real-life implementations seldomly have any resemblance with the grandiose, carte blanche urban utopias of the academic discourse. Rather, they are often awkward implementations constituted by already existing “social and spatial

constellations of urban governance and the built environment”. Following Shelton et al lead and moving beyond the official discourse and into the “actually existing Smart Cities”, a myriad of case studies have been carried out in the last decade. Precisely because of the inherent ambiguousness of the term, the differences between actually implemented Smart projects are as broad as the term itself (Goh, 2015). This becomes quite evident when looking at the critique geared at different Smart City-cases. It ranges from Smart Cities being little more than a brand, a substance-less prefix designed to attract attention and capital, but ultimately nothing more than an “urban adjective” (Engelbert et.al 2019) to worried voices that states that the Smart City is too experimental in in its implementations, puzzling together fragments of different urban models, creating a form of “Frankenstein urbanism” (Cugurullo, 2018). This latter critique is very much in line with previous criticisms of certain forms of urban modelling, in which urban models, visions and practices are exported and imported – a practice based upon a “one-size-fits-all” interpretation of urban governance and planning that often fails to consider economic, cultural and socio-political particularities (Ong, 2011).

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2.2.1 Smart Citizen: Who art thou?

Later contributions have tried to include notions of civic participation and there have been various authors who have suggested that the Smart City needs to move from a technocentric vision to a citizen-centric vision (Breuer et. al, 2014). By in large however, this vision very much remains exactly that: a vision. However, when even the big tech-dragons such as IBM and Cisco start emphasizing the importance of moving from a top-down approach to a more including, democratic Smart City vision, it becomes obvious that there has been a paradigm shift within the discourse (Dirks, Gurdgiev & Keeling, 2010). It is hard not to get the sensation that a plethora of writers seem to argue against a strawman consisting of some technocentric bureaucrat that suggests that technologies are all a city needs to flourish in a Smart sense. During my readings, I have barley encountered one single Smart City champion who does not emphasize the need of combining human capital/knowledge with technical fixes. The critical questions should perhaps instead be 1) are there any indications to be found of such a switch in the practical implementations, in the actually existing Smart cities? 2) How can this switch to a citizen-centric approach be undertaken in the most effective way?

Before delving further into the topic, another critical question needs to be posed: Who is this mysterious subject that everybody wants to claim? Shelton & Lodato (2019) use the terms

“the general citizen” vis-à-vis “the absent citizen” to shed light on how the Smart citizen is treated in the Smart discourse. The “general citizen” is not defined so much by a particular characteristics, class, or even territorial links. In fact, the Smart citizen is increasingly linked to the idea of the global citizen (ibid, 43). Instead the general citizens represent those groups who are picked out as representatives, as the Smart citizens who will shape the future.

According to Shelton & Lodato, these selective processes tend to be very arbitrary. Newman and Safransky (2014) have described similar contexts where, under emerging conditions of austerity governance, people who are neither public officials, nor even necessarily connected to the place or city at hand, are increasingly endowed with the authority to guide official decision-making processes. The absent citizen on the other hand represents, as the name suggests, the absence of citizens, the urban subject that is always invoked, always portrayed as a main stakeholder, but seldom included. A main commonality that Shelton and Lodato identified was that, to the extent that citizens were included in processes (naturally all participants are, first and foremost, citizens) was that they were never included in the

capacities of citizens per se. Rather it was always through some sort of instrumental capacity, inhabiting the role of “the expert” in some way or another. This tendency certainly rings true

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with my empirical findings as well, as will be presented in chapter 5. As Shelton and Lodato put it in their concluding remarks, “the actually existing smart citizen might not exist at all”

(2019:48). Though this conclusion is only backed up by two case studies, it is supported by similar findings (see Engelbert. Et al, 2019). As Engelbert et al. points out this need not necessarily be the result of an explicit intention, the emerging discourse of democratic

inclusion and participation being proof of this. Yet the fact remains. The emerging rhetoric on Smart Cities that are leaning away from the technocentric in favour of the citizen-centric still seems to grapple with whom the Smart Citizens are, and how they should be properly

included.

2.2.2 Urban ancestors I - The Creative city and its Creative Class

As we have seen, the characteristics of the Smart Citizen remain all but clear. An urban predecessor of the Smart City – Richard Florida’s “Creative city” –entailed a much clearer view of whom would inhabit this urban model: The creative class. Understanding the Creative city is important for the understanding of the Smart City. As Albino et.al (2015) states,

creating a climate suitable for the creative is essential for the development of the Smart City.

However, before even getting to the Creative City of Florida, a few words are needed on the so called “knowledge-based economy”, which in many ways forms the bases of the argument for the Creative city. The basic idea is that in the 21^st century, economic activities are

decreasingly labour-intensive and increasingly knowledge-intensive (Drucker, 1994). As an emerging tendency, this observation is undoubtedly correct. But - and this is often poorly reflected within the discourses surrounding the creative as well the Smart City - there is a big difference between the emergent and the existing. Just as the proletariat of Marx in the 1850s was emerging but far from dominant, the knowledge economy might be gaining a hegemonic position in terms of production and labour organisation, but it is far from the dominant sphere or form for the vast majority of the worlds workers and economies. The idea that we have entered a post-industrial society deserved to be problematized. Since the beginning of the century when Florida launched his thesis, industrial work has actually increased – in relation to total global employment – from about 20% in 2002 to 23% in 2019 (World Bank Group, 2019). With this being said however, the knowledge-based economy, or whatever we choose to call it, is inevitably on the forefront.

According to Florida, what distinguishes the Creative class more than anything else though, is that they are constantly involved in the creation of “meaningful new forms” (Florida,

2002:68). Thus, Florida regards his creative class as an agent of change, being in the forefront

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of the emergent, being the driver of change. Given this perspective, it only makes sense that any sensible urban development policy should want to have these trendsetting, envelope- pushing creatives on their labour markets. As a way to conceptualise an urban strategy that would successfully attract the creative class, and more importantly their own defining features Florida constructed an alliterating triad called the “three T: s”: Technology, Talent &

Tolerance. Cities need to have a technological infrastructure that can support the innovative work of the talented creatives and the soil that makes the creatives grows is the presence of tolerant bohemians and bohemian culture: art, design, music, progressive sub-cultures that are champions of the rights of ethnic and sexual minorities. These three T: s together is what form the basis for Florida’s “creativity index” measures the potential a given region has for an economic growth fuelled by creative capital.

One nuance will have particular importance for the analysis of my data – Florida describes the creatives as having an almost fragile character – the class is described as having a particular character, which if not treated and nurtured correctly will go unfulfilled, its potential wasted.

This is mitigated through the development of hubs – creative clusters in which these creatives find the safe space they need to create, innovate and flourish. The creative hubs are by very nature often thought of as being driven by private actors, alternatively through public-private partnerships. The adjacent rhetoric synonymizes state driven programs to be lacking the delicate and sensitive touch needed to foster the creative class. The management-strategy has to be one that is flexible, non-rigid and one that stresses the importance of individuality and self-expression.

Deeply connected to Richard Florida’s idea of the creative city is the idea of “creative placemaking” (ibid, 20). In other words, the collective creation of tangible, intangible

symbolic and emotional value in an area through processes of strategically shaping the social and physical characteristics of a territory (Markusen & Gadwa, 2010). Cities actively need to play around with their processes of placemaking, or branding, in order to be able to project a vision that attracts and stimulates the creatives. This leads us to the next subchapter: The Smart City as a form of place-branding.

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2.2.3 Smart on Sale: The Smart City as a brand

In the course of global, inter-city competition, the overarching goal of any city is to stand out, to be more competitive, in order to promote visibility on the global market (Derudder, 2009).

What Anttiroiko (2014) calls the “operational side” of this attraction – bolstering activities that offer attractive incentives for businesses - is often deemed a more risky business than so called “synergistic city marketing” – the promotion of symbolic assets through city profiling.

This city profiling is not a mere practice of visibility, it is about being visible in the most compatible way and thus entails the process of carving out the most unique profile possible.

This is called positioning (Kapferer, 2012:126). Kapferer proceeds by stating that states and cities, and explicitly states and cities in the post-industrial world, are de facto brands –

regardless if they recognize this or not. It is important to make the distinction between images of cities, and “consciously promoted brands” as Anttiroiko (2014) calls them. The images are the symbolisms, tropes and qualities that are associated with a city - be that pizza in Naples, bohemian quarters in Berlin or the stunning views of Rio de Janeiro. The consciously

promoted brands however are the processes in which cities attempt to become analogous with a particular version of urban development. Anttiroiko compares it to the way that the term

“googling” has become synonymous with using web search engines (ibid). The creation of a brand never occurs in a controlled lab-environment, however. Regardless of the intentions of the political entity trying to produce the brand, the conjuring up of a city image will always be done in interaction with the economic and material realities that the given place is facing. As Anttiroiko points out, this therefore makes branding a potentially vulnerable process since all efforts of brand creation can be undone by a say a financial crisis, natural disaster or a

political scandal, or indeed a global pandemic…

Likewise, new creative adjectives seem to be generated on a monthly basis. Be it the Sustainopreneurial city, Eco-systems of start-ups or entrepreneurial ecosystems - an

everlasting stream of smart buzzwords keep cropping up, always explicitly hinting at various degrees of sustainability, modernity and hipness. Building an urban brand, the creation of a place, entails more than adding a cool prefix to your city, however. For all the critique of place branding being an artificial, PR-driven process (which is a fair critique) - these processes are simultaneously connected to real, material processes, albeit the processes of placemaking might not be the best mirrors of these processes. Place in this context is defined as “space enriched by the assignment of meaning” (Pocock & Hudson, 1978, as referred to in Walters, 2011). Placemaking in the Smart process then, is mediated both through the physical

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presence and our online-wiredness – the presence and the tele-presence (Walters, 2011).

Placemaking in this regard is also seen as an antidote to the perceived homogenizing effects of globalization. The art of branding and placemaking are two paradoxical phenomena. On the one hand, they are decisively local processes – confined to a territory, filling it with meaning, meaning that helps in generating local identities. At the same time, they are undoubtedly global processes in more ways than one: The constant refereeing to other places and the act of modelling are widespread placemaking-practices and the very raison d’être is often to make a given locality stand out more in the global arena. Thus, the act of placemaking/branding is the

“art of being global” by placing the local in the form of the global (Ong, 2011). Foth (2017) delivers a critique of these processes which resonates with the strand of critique that has been presented in previous chapters: the lack of civic participation. The act of this sort of global- through-the-local placemaking needs to be a collaborative process, says Foth, and all too often it is instead driven by a top-down, vendor-driven logic.

2.2.4 Urban Ancestors II – The Entrepreneurial City?

Dave Holland (2008) understands the Smart City as being a techno-updated version of the

“entrepreneurial city”. The term, coined by David Harvey (1989), has a two-folded meaning;

on the one hand it denotes an ideological narrative forming part of a city´s global image. It is also associated with a reorientation of urban governance, in which cities take on the role of businesses aiming to bolster local economic growth by attracting capital and promoting business ventures in the knowledge-intensive sphere (Hall & Hubbard, 1996).

Around the start of the decade, a growing body of work was produced, criticizing the Smart City-concept as a mere continuation of former neoliberal urban models (Greenfield, 2013;

Holland, 2008) albeit steeped in a “new” technocentric shape. Thus, much of the critique echoes that of earlier critical voices raised towards the creation of the neoliberal city, focusing on processes of spatial exclusion and displacement, increased marketization, export urbanism, and the excavation of existing forms of urban governance in favour of multinational

technology (Shelton & Lodato, 2019). Because of its close affiliations with big tech-

companies, the notion has also generated critiques stating that the Smart City primarily serves as a way through which companies can alter their visibility in urban milieus. Söderström et.al (2014) present an understanding of the Smart City as a particular sort of management-

storytelling through which companies can alter their visibility and legitimacy in urban spaces.

Söderström et.al also regards the Smart City as being part of a technocentric reductionism, thus echoing the insights of Cook & Swyngedouw (2012) - who claims that techno centrism

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functions as a guising element, covering up underlying patterns of social injustice in the post- political landscape of the sustainability discourse

2.3 Smart Lisbon?

As should be clear to any reader by now, the Smart City-notion is inherently ambiguous.

Before proceeding with an examination of how this concept has unfolded in Lisbon, let us go back to the version of the Smart City that this thesis is trying capture: The Smart City-edifice.

I regard it as an assemblage consisting of 1) technical fixes: IoT, ICT, Smart Meters. 2) A new form of urban governance – Algorithmic nudging and hugging, increased security measures, CCTV, gamification-schemes and 3) A brand: an urban adjective designed and deployed to allure attention. Again, this concept, though similar in its design to other models inspired by actual case studies, has been designed particularly with the concept of Lisbon in mind.

2.3.1 Previous research Lisbon and the Smart City

Lisbon is one of the world’s oldest capitals, which is more than visible in its rugged facade and charming, run-down aesthetics. The striking “oldness” of Lisbon is explained by more than just simply the grinding effect of century upon century, however. There are structural and political explanations to this. During the dictatorship of Salazar² the concept of rental freezing, originally introduced in 1907, was reinforced in an effort to mitigate social protests (Alves & Ramos, 2012). Undoubtedly, this enabled large groups of poorer working-class families to retain their houses, as the restrictions and subsidized housing policies effectively served as sort of state “protection” from market forces. However, the housing policy of the Salazar regime is perhaps better depicted as a form of status quo-politics. Old houses were left to deteriorate and the ability to provide adequate housing was severely tested due to the lack of investments. Though several regeneration-programmes were carried out in the post-Salazar era, large part of the poorer inner-city areas were still in dire need of restoration in the

beginning of the new millennium. When the Portuguese government stroke the 2011-bailout deal with European troika the nation reformed its housing policies as part of an economic adjustment program, allowing for more market-adjusted rents and making it easier for landlords to evict tenants (Mendes, 2017: 26). The fact that large parts of inner-city Lisbon´s housing-stock had been neglected for decades made investment in Lisbon's housing market a very profitable enterprise for foreign investors since apartments could be bought for relatively

2 Salazar (1889-1970) was the leader and front figure of the authoritarian Estado Novo-regime which held power between 1933-1974

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small amounts of money. Since then, rents and housing prices have been raised at a

tremendous rate. These market-reforms, coupled with the massive influx of tourists renting rooms via companies like air-bnb, has generated a very rapid process of gentrification (ibid, 28-35). In certain areas of the historic centre Alfama for instance, tourist-orientated, short- term rentals make up a third of the entire housing stock, and the vast majority are run as de facto hotels (Cocola Gant & Gago, 2019).

2.3.2 Madonna´s, Golden Visas & Urban Leases

Up until the time of the financial crisis, Lisbon´s urban development was to a large degree characterized by a process of suburban expansion (Lestegás, 2019). This suburban expansion was, much like processes in other urban settings, fuelled by an abundant supply of credit. This process came to a halt around 2007, states Lestegás. The renewed and restructured form of urban development after the crisis came instead in the form of inner-city, tourist-driven gentrification, continues Lestegás. The tourism industry saw a massive rise during the last decade, a rise that was driven partly by a very conscience attempt of place branding by the Portuguese tourist authority – “Turismo de Portugal” - which gave half of its budget too Google in order to project a certain, appealing image of the country (Borghi, et. al 2018). The president of the organisation at that time, the liberal politician and entrepreneur João Cotrim de Figueiredo – was one of the key figures involved in bringing the Web Summit, the worlds largest tech-conference, to Lisbon. As we will se further on, this event had a major symbolic role in the development of Lisbon as a Smart City.

As already mentioned, the effect of the financial crisis became deeply felt in 2011/2012. The then governing PSD – Social Democratic Party in name only, but officially recognized as a centre-right party - requested a 78 bn dollar bail out. The resulting austerity politics in the wake of the structural demands by the European troika (IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission) could be summarized as a combination of a liberalized housing market and heavy tax cuts for the tourist sector and related industries (Borghi, et al 2018).

Many efforts to facilitate a move to Portugal and investments on the housing market were made. Among the most notable policies was the “Novo Regime de Arrendamento Urbano” – The New Urban lease regime – which I mention in my introduction. The lease regime made tenants highly vulnerable as the law effectively de-regulated rents and made it easier for landlords to evict tenants. As a result, the number of evictions multiplied in Lisbon’s historic centre (Lestegás et.al, 2017). Another (in)famous policy was the Golden Visa-scheme: a program designed to attract non-Schengen residents. By investing 500 000 in the Portuguese

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real-estate market you can get a residency permit for a whole family. This has led to massive foreign investment on the domestic housing market, not least in Lisbon. Even seven years after the introduction of the reform, real-estate prices were still rising. In the first quarter of 2019, Portugal saw the steepest rise of property prices in all of the Euro Zone (Bloomberg, 2019). An important piece of context is that Portugal remains the poorest countries in Western Europe. The median salary in Lisbon (which is the highest in the country) lies around 1000 euros per month (European Commission, 2019)

The golden-visa permit gets renewed on a two-year basis given that the holder of the permit has spent at least two weeks in the country every two years. Ayelet Shachar (2018)

understands the golden visa as being part of what she calls a process of “marketization of citizenship”. In a time when many (if not almost all) countries in the global North has run a highly restrictive immigration-policy, “high-value” migrants have become an increasingly alluring target market, says Shachar. Citizenship is traded for investment. These citizenships are strictly speaking, not even really “used” if we by use mean living in the country. These are predominantly “global citizens”, hence the reason for the low demands on actual residency, as in the case of the two-week every two year in the Portuguese case. The Portuguese golden visa remains the most popular of its kind in Europe and its results are not hard to see. Efforts to attract tourists, investors and foreign residents alike seemed successful. Madonna, John Malkovich, Michael Fassbender and other celebrities summoned upon the city to buy up property and to enjoy the famous 300-days of sun year “guarantee”. The municipality of Lisbon has not missed the opportunity to capitalize on this – both Fassbender and Madonna can be seen on numerous bus-station and commercial posts around the city.

2.3.4 The culturalization of Smart Lisbon

Several authors have payed attention to the way in which a mix of perceived cultural values and traits get picked a part in order to construct a narrative of why Lisbon is uniquely suited to be the next Smart City, or sustainable city, or tourist city, or tech-city. On the one hand side, Borghi et. al (2018) identify certain cultural traits or benefits such as the weather, the beaches, the surfer lifestyle, the food, the picturesque scenery. These images are not seldom used when invoking the image of Portugal as a European Silicon Valley Valley/California.

The second category of this facet can be found in Ana Teixeiras Pinto´s (2018) poignant description of the more deep lying ideas of traits that belong to some imaged Portuguese national psyche. These include nationalist tropes about the Portuguese being national

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discoverers and explorers (which their colonial history is taken as proof of³), or in more recent history the idea of economic dynamism, to which the “economic miracle” of the post-crisis years being the main manifestation. Both these categories combine to produce a cultural commodity which then can be used as part of a larger assemblage of either Lisbon the tourist city or Lisbon the Smart City. As we will see, both these tendencies were explicitly present in the formulations of my interlocutor in an almost shockingly explicit way.

2.3.5 A decade of Smart Lisbon: Changing agendas – from open data to … data?

Before Lisbon became a hotbed for tech-savvy Smart, start-up projects, Portugal as a nation witnessed one of the more ambitious and bespoken Smart City projects ever undertaken. The Plan-it Valley project, as it was called, was to become one of the few Smart Cities to be “built from scratch” (Carvalho, 2018; Madakam & Ramaswamy, 2015). The city, which was

planned to be built outside of Porto, the second largest city, failed to materialize due to insufficient funding, and the debt crisis which was crippling the domestic (and large part of the global) economy. According to Carvalho & Vale (2019) , the Plan IT-valley project embodied many of the standard critiques towards Smart Cities: I.e. it was guided by a top- down approach, founded on power imbalances, to dependant on algorithmic governance etc, heavily swayed in the favour of businesses – in short it left much to wish for in terms of democracy (ibid, 2). Far humbler and more democratically compatible projects would be rolled out in the Portuguese capital in the years following the anti-climax of the Plan IT- valley. Many of these projects were not necessarily self-defined as Smart City projects.

Instead, the emphasis was placed upon open data sets and agendas of civic participation and transparency. The authors trace the historic roots of this open data-push to two main social movements or tendencies, the first one being “Freedom of Information” (FOI), summarized by the authors as “transparency and the right to access government-related, decision-making information” (ibid, 219). The second movement is born out of the “common knowledge”- movement, a movement or stream of thought with a more self-defined ideo-political basis than the FOI, advocating “open publishing with respect to licensing, copyrights and

intellectual property” (ibid). Serious attempts of implementing these sort of open data projects started happening around 2011 in the Portuguese capital. However, much like many other urban strategies in Lisbon, the open data-set ambition was to be re-thought and re-packaged after the heaviest blow of the financial crisis of 2012.

3 For an adjacent discussion about the tendency to treat Portuguese colonialism as “milder” and kinder than the British, German or Spanish counterparts – see Vala et. al (2008) and their analysis of “Lusotropicalism”

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In the years to come, the open data agenda became intertwined with the overarching economic agenda. The office of economy and innovation started administrating the open data project and increasingly, the goal became to position Lisbon as a Smart start-up city. There was no official break with the open data agenda per say, yet the priority of this agenda started to diminish, states the authors (ibid, 221). More than anything, this was due to the fact that the prioritization of a vendor driven, start-up logic, seldom matched the tactics of radical open data projects. In 2016, another event cemented this turn towards a more business oriented Smart City. Web Summit, the world’s largest tech-event and conference, decided to move their annual summit from Dublin to Lisbon. As we will see, the introduction of this

conference has had an immense impact on the Smart strategies of Lisbon, not least because of the implications for the hospitality and start-up industry (Domingues & Nunes, 2018).

So according to Carvalho & Vale, Lisbon has arrived at a point at which the Smart agenda has lost some of its original aims, and that increased emphasis has been placed upon Smart-up urbanism and quick start-up growth. They summarize these changes as a turn from “open data to just data”. We have also seen how the urban regeneration and general post-crisis politics of Lisbon’s municipality has been guided by a strong focus on housing-market liberalization and touristification. So how do all these different strategies and pre-requisites blend together to create what is the Lisbon Smart agenda? Another Carvalho (2017) defines the aim of Lisbon´s Smart City-efforts in a summary that echoes many of the points put forward by Carvalho &

Vale. As the author states, the municipality has worked with a couple of key incentives in order to promote a transformation towards becoming a Smart “start-up city” The first key sector is real estate. Lisbon provides plenty of “real estate opportunities”, states the author (ibid, 12). More precisely, these opportunities translate to “urban rehabilitation, “residential properties” and an attractive central business district location. Moreover, the attractive fiscal incentives are held forward, mentioning both the new urban lease regime and the golden visa amongst several other tax benefits. The real-estate opportunities, alongside cheap labour- prices, the attractive weather and certain cultural attraction provide an attractive physical space for Smart developers, Carvalho concludes.

2.4 Summary of previous research

As I hope to have made clear by now, there is no quint-essential, primordial Smart City out there. It is a concept that takes on different meaning in different contexts. A few key features re-appear in different case studies, the one of those that also resonate with the specific elements of Lisbon’s Smart City - mainly the emphasis on Start-Up urbanism, open data

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ambitions, city branding - are of particular interest to this thesis. The Smart agendas, and the ways in which they have changed during the last decade need to be understood in the light of the urban politics after the financial crisis. The Smart City-discourse has taken a turn towards

“citizen-centrism”, rejecting the often-criticised notion of techno centrism. Questions as to how these citizens should be involved in participatory processes seem to lack easy answers.

Previous researchers have also struggled with defining the unknown, yet often invoked, Smart citizen - a term which is just as embedded in ambiguity as the Smart City term itself. This topic will be examined closer as I analyse the defined aims of citizen participation in the scope of the Smart projects.

The previous research on Smart Lisbon hints towards a possible clash of logics between democratic, open data-set ambitions, and the vendor-driven logic of Start-up urbanism. This generates certain question. Reforms of housing markets, including explicit mentioning’s of the new urban lease regime which has played a very active role in multiplying the amount of evictions, are mentioned as key incentives for the development of a Smart, Sustainable city.

How compatible is this with aims of civic participation and other practices of local governance? Could these key Smart incentives even be actively combatting aims of

strengthening local democracies? Before trying to answer these questions, I will present the theoretical framework used to conceptualise them. More specifically I will look at possible ways of thinking at the creation of space in the Smart City, the culturalization of said space, and the effects of actively producing a certain form of space.

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3. Theoretical Frameworks

3.1 The Touristification of Democracy

As we have seen, the Smart City-edifice of Lisbon is to an extent a process driven by city branding. Moreover, this city branding is in turn based upon certain cultural imaginaries that are invoked to instil a sense of realness and tangibility into the otherwise abstract and loose concept of branding. In this chapter I will go through theoretical models that can help to shine light on these processes of culturalization and branding, by delving into theories of

touristification. I then connect these to Lefebvre’s idea about the production of space before finishing off with a brief synopsis of theories of the entrepreneurial city.

Whilst the monoculture of tourism certainly has created new avenues for revenue, and increasingly so in the sharing economy, its impact on the housing market has been vast (Sequera & Nofre, 2018). Several examples of this have been given already in this thesis, not least in the form of air-bnb-esque, short-term-rentals. In the public discourse, the anxieties connected to tourism are often summed up through the lament of the loss of “authenticity”

and local uniqueness (Zukin, 2010), a topic which I will return to further on in this chapter.

Another, more abstract, way to approach this topic can be found in the work of the late, American historian and cultural critic Cristopher Lasch. In his book the “The Revolt of Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” (1995), Lasch writes about the rise of a new global elite whose very existence constitutes a threat to democratic processes. The reason for which being the phenomenon of unconditional mobility (or the lack thereof). More than ever, mobility is associated with success, states Lasch. Unconditional mobility is a privilege of the privileged, a statement which few could argue against. Ironically, the fact that today’s elites are more global than ever has simultaneously made them more isolated and solitary, argues Lasch.

Obviously, they are not isolated from democracy in the sense of decision-making processes, on the contrary - their influence on powerful institutions is as big as ever. But if we with democracy mean the issues, grittiness, and obstacles of everyday life – and the protests these issues give birth to – then the global elite is truly isolated. Why? Because they can be, says Lasch. Their mobility elevates them above these locally situated, everyday issues. Much like the logic of the spatial fix (Harvey, 2006) - you nullify spatial issues by moving things, or people in this context, around.

As Christopher Lachs puts it, the “global well-offers” – a term which is somewhat ambiguous and seems to entail both the wealthy middle class of the global North as well as the ruling

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elites - always inevitably inhibits the role of the tourist. Lasch means this not in a literal way:

they might very well live in a city for an extended amount of time, make friends, fall in love, work, consume and so on. But they live it through a bubble. For the ones who are just

temporarily living in a place always have the possibility to go “home” or indeed to proceed their tourist lives in another location. They are unlikely to care about impingements upon local democratic rights. They are even more unlikely to care about the future of the city, the future does not touch them, for they live in the moment. As Sequera & Nofre explain, there is a paradox inherent here. Much like Lasch, they identify anti-democratic tendencies in the touristified city. However, they also see how the process of touristification in many Southern European cities has led to a re-vitalization of protest movements, a most vivid democratic embodiment. As I will show in my findings and finalized discussion, both of these tendencies manifested themselves during my fieldwork.

3.2 The Tourist gaze

“You wanna live like common people

You wanna see whatever common people see”

Pulp – Common People (1995)

Lasch’s theory provides us with a way of thinking about the way in which the “Tourist”⁴ relates to his/her (momentary) surroundings and how this sort of relational approach could impact the democratic practices of a given city. A helpful way of thinking as this might be, this theory alone could easily end up with a too static and one-eyed focus on one actor, the tourist. But what if the “enchantment” (or curse) of the tourist could be passed on to local actors? What if the role of the tourist could be understood, not as a single actor projecting his/her worldview onto the surrounding world, but as a part of a wider machinery? Through the readings of sociologists John Urry’s (2011) writings on the tourist gaze one finds one way to think about these processes. The Tourist gaze is always in search of the “authentic”, not seldomly projected onto tangible cultural heritage. However, the gaze is not exclusive to the tourist, the foreign visitor. Instead, Urry explains how this gaze gets reproduced in the eyes of the locals. The locals “have to” embody the role of the Tourist, they have to take on their gaze in order to reap the financial benefits that the process of touristification provides. This gaze renders the local’s environment into an alienated world, a world that needs to be

4 Henceforth, I will refer to the “Tourist” with a capital T when discussing the theoretical embodiment of John Urry’s theory, as to differentiate it from tourists in the ordinary sense of the word.

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commodified. To put it in economic terms, the use value of the urban (or rural) surrounding gets nullified in favour of the exchange value. Living the city, becomes all about selling the city.

There are of course other ways to think about the tourist gaze. Some authors, like Nursanty (2019) claims that the Tourist gaze should be re-appropriated and used as a tool. By taking on the Tourist gaze, locals are able to identify the authentic. This in turn will create for a stronger sense of place and will give locals a better position to benefit of the authenticity-seeking flows of tourists. What this authenticity is constituted by is beyond the scope of her examination. It is just believed that the authentic is something real that is floating out there, and that if this abstract, floating air of authenticity could be translated and made understandable for tourists it would benefit all, creating a unifying sense of place for tourists and locals alike. Urry and Jordi & Sequera would perhaps ask Nursanty if the authenticity which she takes for granted has not already been processed through a filter of commodification. Because authenticity does not get created in a vacuum. The “authentic” is often associated with working class-districts and/or cultural traits considered to be progressive. Yet these processes of “authentication”

take time, they only get formulated in hindsight. The subversive and dissident of yesterday becomes todays “authentic”. The underclass of the here and now is dangerous, dirty and lacking in morality – the dangerous of yesterday: charming, authentic and forgiven. To put it in dramatic terms – an area does not get labelled “authentic” until it is too late to reverse it.

I would add to this that it would be highly essentialist to assume that the Tourist gaze only gets reproduced to “locals” via contagion – if one is allowed such an analogy in these times – with tourists. To start with, the local too easily gets equated with the “ethnic”. You could easily see how people from the same nationality, from the same city even, could inhabit the role of the Tourist. The Tourist needs not necessarily be a foreigner in the strict definition of the word. Rather, the Tourist represents a role that is always observing, but that does not partake, someone that consumes rather than produces. Therefore, this idea could be applied as much to an upper-class, Portuguese person who “tourists” in an “authentic” working class, environment, as the foreign entrepreneurs, digital nomads, Erasmus-students and tourists.

So, there are several opposing tendencies. On the one hand side we can think of the

touristification process as a call for increased antagonism and polemic between groups. On the other side it could lead to a touristification of the mind, the process in which the locals gaze becomes the tourists gaze. According to the perspective of Nursanty, the tourist gaze is highly welcome, and locals should be encouraged to inhabit the role of the tourist. A strong