Gentrification without gentrifiers? Tourism and Real Estate Investment in Lisbon

Tourism gentrification, first described by Gotham (2005), has become an expanding phenomenon in many cities during recent years. This is connected to the general expansion of tourism as one of the world‟s biggest industries, but real estate investment, utilizing tourism to extract rent, importantly contributes to the phenomenon. Lisbon is a perfect example for this interaction of touristic and financial flows. This article, based on in-depth interviews and on analysis of official documents, newspaper articles, and statistics, reveal a complex picture of the interaction of long-term pre-conditions (the widespread abandonment and degradation of Lisbon‟s central neighbourhoods), new public policies (in housing as well as finance) at different levels, introduced in the context of austerity and, finally, global flows of investment into real estate as much as tourism. All this finally causes the rapid transformation of Lisbon's historical centre: from a physically degraded area with few and largely poor inhabitants to an extremely popular destination for tourism and real estate investments, leading to renovation and revitalisation, provoking the displacement of the area‟s original inhabitants, and producing neighbourhoods without a consistent stable population, as the “gentry” – in the most traditional definition of the term – does not exist.