Envisioning contemporary transformation of Lisbon from its metropolitan-regional processes and models.

Abstract

Lisbon’s new dynamics of urban transformation are generally framed by socially recognizable concerns, such as housing, mobility, public space and heritage, but oblivious to the structural role of metropolitan-regional spatial reorganization. In the context of metropolitan epistemologies, although Lisbon’s functional and relational spaces were never socially and politically recognized as legitimate scales of urbanism, strategy and governance, metropolitan-regional scales have been constructed according to specific urban models and processes rooted in the metropolitan paradigm of centre hegemony and distinction from peripheries. In this paper we’ll argue that a metropolitan-regional vision, reorganization of urban space and territory is intrinsic to Lisbon’s new urban dynamics. And that metropolitan-regional scales of decision and urban policies are - pre-condition and structure – to territorialisation of urban competitiveness and rescaling processes.