Claudia Stellini

Living apart together? Mobile professionals and long-term residents in Lisbon’s city centre

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By Franz Buhr, Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon

In the last ten years, not only have tourist arrivals to Lisbon increased exponentially, but the city has also become a hotspot for other kinds of transient populations. Digital nomads, ‘expats’, lifestyle migrants, and other transnationally mobile professionals are increasingly present in the city’s social landscape. What are the impacts of these new temporary residents in the city’s dynamics?

Let us go for a tour around the neighbourhoods of Santos and São Bento in Lisbon. You will find centuries-old hilly streets, the tram tracks, tile façades, and… Nordic coffee shops, hip cocktail bars, and brunch eateries! Not long ago, these shops were either abandoned, derelict, or housed small family businesses such as traditional Portuguese bakeries or Cape Verdean restaurants. Now, these two neighbourhoods are probably the epicentre of a new kind of commercial dynamics attracting tourists and locals, but particularly appealing to digital nomads, ‘expats’, and other foreign residents whose purchase power is (more often than not) well above the Portuguese average.

During the most severe months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there were virtually no tourists around, some of these specialty coffee shops, artisanal bakeries, and patisseries survived on the basis of their foreign-resident clientele. In one of our SMARTDEST interviews, the owner of a specialty coffee shop in the area argued that 95% of his customers were of foreign origin. “Lots of Germans, French, Americans… They come to Portugal but keep working for their countries and have a lot more economic capacity than those being paid Portuguese-level salaries” he stated.

Once considered ‘crossing points’ to the more touristic areas of the city, Santos and São Bento are now attracting their own visitors. The SMARTDEST team in Lisbon asked local residents if they also visited, bought, or ate at these new gourmet cafés and restaurants. Our preliminary results point to what one resident called ‘parallel worlds’: on the one side, traditional forms of commerce frequented by the local elderly population; on the other, new gourmet restaurants and trendy shops where one finds tourists, but mainly high-income foreign residents. Although some of these transient populations find short-term rentals within these same neighbourhoods, their consumption geographies seem to rarely intersect or interact with those of long-term residents.

Another research participant, mother of three children and living in the area for 25 years, said that “the ambiance feels very different now, because buildings have been renovated, trash is always collected, gardens look beautiful (…), and it’s nice to have that shop selling beautifully-made croissants, but they are super expensive and we won’t buy croissants every day. It’s all made for people in transit (de passagem)”.

Can these two ‘parallel worlds’ interact with each other? Do long-term residents feel excluded in some way? Are traditional forms of commerce and retail doomed to disappear? These are some of the critical questions to be discussed collectively at the future CityLab organised by the SMARTDEST project with local stakeholders and residents.

Claudia Stellini

Opportunities and Concerns in Hosting World University Games: the case of Turin 2025

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By Samantha Cenere and Loris Servillo from Politecnico di Torino

Big sporting events have been always considered important city branding strategies and opportunities to launch major urban requalification projects. The Universiadi constitutes a peculiar kind of event that merges these objectives with the specific goal to position a city on the global map of university students’ destination.

Big events represent unique occasions for those cities that aim at revitalising their economies and launching important requalification projects. Indeed, these events are considered able to promote the image of a city and attract visitors, trigger regeneration, accelerate the implementation of ongoing projects, and provide the financial support needed to construct new infrastructures. Albeit these events present a great variety in terms of size, typology, and impact, sporting events are usually considered the most fruitful ones for cities aiming to capitalise on both the organisation of the event and its legacies to implement their urban agendas. Olympic Games constitute indeed the prototypical example of mega events.

Despite their relatively small scale if compared to the Olympics, so-called Universiadi are a type of sporting events that cities compete to host. Invented in 1959, the Universiadi are the university students Olympic Games, an event that aims at supporting the encounter between Higher Education and sport.

Turin (one of SMARTDEST cases study) has recently won the bid to host the Winter Universiade 2025, thus replicating the success already obtained in 2007. This news was welcomed with great enthusiasm by a city that during the last 20 years has based a relevant part of its growth strategy on the imaginary of a ‘university city’.

As for other big events, hosting the Universiade will allow to attract high flows of people from abroad (both athletes and visitors) and generate positive impacts both on the local economy and in terms of urban development. According to the plans and the promises made by the institutions that took part in the implementation of the bid – namely, the two main Higher Education institutions of the city, the City, the local agency for university sports (CUS), and the regional agency deputy for the right to university education (EDISU) –, the Winter Universiade will bring to Turin around 3,000 athletes and attract around 10,000 visitors. Indeed, as explained by the President of CUS, local encouragement to the sporting culture and high-level sport facilities in particular represent crucial assets for an urban Higher Education system that aims at becoming increasingly attractive for international students. According to him, the latter have to be considered like tourists by a post-industrial city in search for a new identity.

But the most relevant and lasting effect is represented by the investments made on the construction of student accommodation facilities, in line with the capacity of other big and mega events to act as a means of realising relevant infrastructural change. The event will provide the city with almost 1,800 bed places, thanks to the creation of four athletes villages that, once the event will be closed, will be converted into student residences.

However, as for other big events, the Universiade raises various concerns by those segments of the local population that view as problematic those urban growth strategies that pivot on the attraction of mobile populations rather than on the provision of services to residents. Besides the criticism to the use of public fundings to host the event (40 million euros esteemed, of which 28 from the Government), the main concern regards the locations chosen to become athletes’ villages and then student residences. Indeed, according to some local opposition groups, the opening of these facilities in locations such as the former Maria Adelaide Hospital and a green public area in the neighbourhood Parella would result into the loss of public services for residents.