Public policies on urban rehabilitation and their effects on gentrification in Lisbon Luís Mendes1 Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning of University of Lisbon (Portugal)
One of the polemical issues involved in the gentrification process of inner city areas lies in its immediate association with the urban rehabilitation process. If it is a forgone conclusion that the re-appropriation of a former dwelling space that has sometimes deteriorated into a state of serious urban disrepair necessarily implies the prior recovery of the built-up area, it is no less true that gentrification should not be seen as the automatic consequence of urban rehabilitation, conservation or renovation policies, nor indeed of any other policy providing incentives to private investment aimed at rehabilitating standing housing. A strategic factor causing the new middle classes to settle in a quarter of Lisbon called Bairro Alto which is the object of our study, has been the financial investment, even if insufficient, made in urban rehabilitation within the various programmes designed to encourage the up-grading of buildings and providing suitable conditions for attracting private capital in order to rehabilitate urban areas. We shall be focussing our discussion on the hypothesis that the urban rehabilitation policies pursued in the last few decades of the 20th century in Lisbon’s historical centre may have facilitated the gentrification process. Nevertheless, they may also be interpreted as merely satisfying the necessary conditions and in themselves, were not enough to spark off this socio-spatial process. Um dos pontos de polémica em torno do processo de gentrificação das áreas centrais da cidade reside na associação imediata do processo à reabilitação urbana. Se é certo que a re-apropriação de um espaço de habitat antigo e por vezes em estado de degradação urbanística acentuada implica, necessariamente, a presença de um processo prévio de reabilitação do edificado, não é menos certo que a gentrificação, não pode ser vista como consequência automática de políticas de reabilitação, conservação ou renovação urbana, ou de qualquer política de incentivo ao investimento privado no sentido da reabilitação de edifícios de habitação. Se bem que insuficientes, os apoios financeiros à reabilitação urbana enquadrados nos diversos programas ao visarem estimular a requalificação de edifícios e criar condições favoráveis à atracção de capitais privados para a requalificação das áreas de reabilitação urbana, constituem um factor estratégico para a fixação das novas classes médias no Bairro Alto, o nosso caso de estudo. Toda a discussão assentará na hipótese de que as políticas de reabilitação urbana levadas a cabo nos últimos decénios do século XX no centro histórico de Lisboa poderão facilitar o processo de gentrificação, no entanto são apenas condições necessárias, não sendo por si só suficientes para induzir tal processo socio-espacial. Keywords: Gentrification, Public Policies on Urban Rehabilitation, Bairro Alto, Lisbon, Portugal. Palavras-chave: Gentrificação, Políticas Públicas de Reabilitação Urbana, Bairro Alto, Lisboa, Portugal.
1
Centro de Estudos Geográficos, Faculdade de Letras, Alameda da Universidade, 1600-214 Lisboa, Telef: (+351) 21 792 00 00, Fax: (+351) 21 796 00 63,
[email protected]
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1. INTRODUCTION One of the polemical issues involved in the gentrification process of inner city areas lies in its immediate association with the urban rehabilitation process. If it is a forgone conclusion that the re-appropriation of a former dwelling space that has sometimes deteriorated into a state of serious urban disrepair necessarily implies the prior recovery of the built-up area, it is no less true that gentrification should not be seen as the automatic consequence of urban rehabilitation, conservation or renovation policies, nor indeed of any other policy providing incentives to private investment aimed at rehabilitating standing housing. Rather, we will argue inversely that gentrification should be contextualised by taking into account deep-seated economic changes that have happened not only in the urban environments of advanced-capitalist Western cities since the end of the 1960s but also in the changes wrought by this economic restructuring which affected the professional structure and the city’s social fabric where production and manufacturing jobs declined and rapid growth happened within the qualified tertiary sector. A strategic factor causing the new middle classes to settle in a quarter of Lisbon called Bairro Alto which is the object of our study, has been the financial investment, even if insufficient, made in urban rehabilitation within the various programmes designed to encourage the upgrading of buildings and provide suitable conditions for attracting private capital in order to rehabilitate urban areas. We shall be focussing our discussion on the hypothesis that the urban rehabilitation policies pursued in the last few decades of the 20th century in Lisbon’s historical centre may have facilitated the gentrification process. Nevertheless, they may also be interpreted as merely satisfying the necessary conditions and in themselves, have not been enough to spark off this socio-spatial process.
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2. BRIEF CONSIDERATIONS ON THE CONCEPTUAL DEFINITION OF GENTRIFICATION During the 1970s and 1980s in the Anglo-Saxonic world, trends began to emerge which, if they failed to be an outright inversion of suburbanisation, at least they showed signs of countering it. Empirical studies started suggesting that social actors who were distinctly different from the usual resident were now returning to the oldest downtown neighbourhoods. In fact, some European and North-American observers have noted that ever since the beginning of the 1970s, a small but significant (owing to its growing importance) number of young families from middle to high-income groups, had started moving to the old central neighbourhoods which had taken measures to rehabilitate their housing offer. As is well-documented, the term “gentrification” 2, was first coined by Ruth GLASS, in 1964, to designate middle class mobility in taking up residence in the working-class neighbourhoods of London3. The author explained: 2
The term “gentrification” derives from the English root word “gentry”, which in Portuguese may be translated literally as “lesser nobility” or the “lower aristocracy”. In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2010): gentry is defined as: a) upper or ruling class : aristocracy b): a class whose members are entitled to bear a coat of arms though not of noble rank ; esp: the landed proprietors having such status; gentrification n (1964) : the process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle-class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces earlier, usually poorer, residents; gentrify vb, -fied -fying vt (1972) : to attempt or accomplish the gentrification of; vi: to become gentrified; gentrifier. In the 2005 Portuguese version of Yves LACOSTE’S De la géopolitique aux paysages : Dictionnaire de la géographie (2003), the definition is not very different from the explanation which other authors have agreed upon: “Expressão relativamente recente de origem anglo-saxónica que designa um fenómeno de transformação urbana: a substituição da população modesta de um bairro popular por novos habitantes com rendimentos mais elevados, a favor de operações de renovação” (“Relatively recent expression of Anglo-Saxon origin which describes the phenomenon of urban change: replacing the modest population of a working-class neighbourhood with new residents from a higher income bracket, favouring renovation work”. The Portuguese translator of the original definition in French proposed the term “afidalgamento urbano” (“urban nobilisation”). Articles in French continue to use the French rendering and refer to the term as if it were describing a process of “embourgeoisement”. In Portugal, owing to the fact that there is still a dearth of studies about the phenomenon, one of the first problems facing Portuguese geographers is a faithful translation of the term. Therefore, based on the recommendation that it was inadvisable to use the English word “gentrification” in Portuguese-language texts, the term “nobilitação urbana” was adopted as suggested by Teresa BARATA SALGUEIRO. However, in the Portuguese version of this article, I have used a literal translation of the English word, “gentrificação”, to facilitate understanding. 3
S. ZUKIN, “Gentrification: culture and capital in the urban core“, Annual Review of Sociology, 13, 1987, pp.129-147. AGIR - Revista Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Ano 1, Vol. 1, n.º 5, nov 2013
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«One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle-classes – upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages – two rooms up and two down – have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. Larger Victorian houses, downgraded in an earlier or recent period – which were used as lodging houses or were otherwise in multiple occupation – have been upgraded once again... Once this process of “gentrification” starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed»4. From then on, the concept of gentrification started appearing fairly often in urban studies above all in those written by English-speaking authors as from the 1970s. More recently, as from the mid-1980s, the concept has attracted the attention of the social scientists. Several definitions have been suggested throughout the four decades that have elapsed since Ruth GLASS’S coinage although they are all close to what she put forward. The following definitions are two such examples: «Gentrification is a term that has come to refer to the movement of affluent, usually young, middle-class residents into run-down inner-city areas. The effect is that these areas become socially, economically and environmentally upgraded»5. «Gentrification is a process of socio-spatial change where the rehabilitation of residential property in a working-class neighbourhood by relatively affluent incomers leads to the displacement of former residents unable to afford the increased costs of housing that accompany regeneration»6. 4
R. GLASS, London: Aspects of Change, London, Centre for the Urban Studies and MacGibbon and Kee, 1964. mentioned by SMITH (1996a: 33). 5 T. HALL, Urban Geography, London, Routledge, 1998, p.108. 6 M. PACIONE, Urban Geography. A Global Perspective, London, Routledge, 2001, p.212. AGIR - Revista Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Ano 1, Vol. 1, n.º 5, nov 2013
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For the last 40 years then, the concept has come to describe a new social re-composition (and replacement) process witnessed in the urban space and closely connected to activity to rehabilitate housing in the old city neighbourhoods by receiving government or private investment.
3. BRIEF SURVEY OF THE URBAN REHABILITATION PROGRAMMES IN PORTUGAL DURING THE LAST FEW DECADES OF THE 20TH CENTURY: CONSTRAINT
AGAINST
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GENTRIFICATION OF BAIRRO ALTO? In the last 30 years, Lisbon has lost more than 240,000 inhabitants. Together with the significant aging of the resident population, this loss has caused an increase in the number of people over the age of 64, and a reduction in the number of people under 15 years of age. This serious demographic change has exerted quite an influence on standing heritage. Today, it has been estimated that there are about 40,000 empty derelict homes which means about 14% of the city’s housing. It has been inevitable that buildings have deteriorated. In 2001, 61% of the buildings in Lisbon needed repair work done on them and 5% were seriously rundown. It was in this setting that the first measures to rehabilitate the country’s urban neighbourhood took place in the second half of the 1970s7. Measures taken in the field of Urban Rehabilitation in Portugal have grown considerably in important over the last 30 years, revealing that measure have been vital for regenerating the historical centres. Up to the 1970s, restoring built heritage had been limited to national monuments or other buildings of great historical value as a result of
7
T. BARATA SALGUEIRO, Lisboa, Periferia e Centralidades, Oeiras, Celta Editora, 2001.
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the nationalist-leaning campaigns destined mainly to validate the ultra-conservative ideology of the New State regime8. The first programme that made provisions for funding rehabilitation work on buildings was set up in 1976, and called the Programme for Recovering Deteriorated Real Estate (PRID - Programa de Recuperação de Imóveis Degradados). Its aim was to provide aid by means of conceding subsidised loans to local government but also to private entities, so that conservation, repair and improvement work could be made to both state-owned and private housing. Ten years later, in 1985, the Urban Rehabilitation Programme (PRU - Programa de Reabilitação Urbana) was established which supplied local government with technical and financial support. It was responsible for setting up Local Technical Offices (GTL Gabinete Técnico Local) which were directly answerable to the municipal council and managed the whole rehabilitation process, not only overseeing the restoration and recovery work on the buildings but also supervising wider urban areas that happened to fall under their jurisdiction. Under the auspices of the PRU, 36 Local Technical Offices were set up throughout the country. Their mission was to draw up rehabilitation projects in the urban neighbourhoods situated in the historical inner cities, recovering their buildings, managing rehabilitation funds and welfare going to the occupants affected and extending specialised technical expertise to local government that was supplied by multidisciplinary teams9. The Urban Rehabilitation Programme was the driving force behind the urban rehabilitation of the Bairro Alto neighbourhood because recovery work on the neighbourhood’s buildings was started when a Local Technical Office went into operation in the quarter itself. Hitherto, it had been dependent on Municipal Department 8
A. GONÇALVES, O Recreio e o Lazer na Reabilitação Urbana. Almada Velha, Lisbon, Economic Studies and Prospectives Office, Ministry of the Economy, Institute for Funding and Supporting Tourism, 2002. V. MATIAS FERREIRA, Fascínio da Cidade. Memória e Projecto da Urbanidade, Lisbon, Centre for Territorial Studies, Higher Institute of Labour Sciences and the Enterprise (ISCTE) and Ler Devagar, 2004. 9 J. APPLETON et al., Manual de Apoio à Reabilitação dos Edifícios do Bairro Alto, Lisbon Municipal Council, 1995. J. GONÇALVES, Reabilitação Urbana: Oportunidades Económicas, Emprego e Competências, Lisbon, Espaço e Desenvolvimento, 2006. AGIR - Revista Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Ano 1, Vol. 1, n.º 5, nov 2013
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of Works. The Bairro Alto Technical Office was installed in 1989, similar to other local offices that had been set up some years before in other historical quarters of the city with the same aims of seeking to provide an answer to urban rehabilitation problems. The 1990 declaration put forward by the Lisbon Municipal Council and dealing with the Critical Bairro Alto/Bica Urban Recovery and Re-conversion Area (Área Crítica de Recuperação e Reconversão Urbanística do Bairro Alto/Bica) was to extend the area of intervention (to 52 hectares) and include the parishes of Santa Catarina and a part of São Paulo and reinforce the technical-administrative competences of the Local Technical Office. Basically the Office’s duties were as follows: drawing up rehabilitation projects pertaining to common spaces and up-grading buildings, while promoting and monitoring the ensuing building work; informing and providing support to home owners and occupants in order to encourage them to repair their buildings, helping them to obtain funding; issuing statements of opinion with regard to building licences for work carried out in the Office’s area of jurisdiction. “The Office will seek to answer the area’s particular problems, […] while attending to Bairro Alto's physical rehabilitation; its historical and social recovery is also planned so as to respect the memory of its tradition and promote the urban space’s quality whether in terms of its present residents or its future residents […]. This will be done by providing the technical articulation of solutions and encouraging the residents in the quarter to take an active social role [...]»10. The rationale underpinning the dialogue and the support given the residential population as regards improving lodgings in the neighbourhood’s rundown buildings is very explicit not only in the discourses but also in the Technical Office’s concrete practices. The area of intervention involves different social groups that are largely characterised by their residential status, their advanced age-groups and their low educational level although their profiles indicate deep roots in the community produced by varying degrees of close daily relationships where primary social relations, as well as relationships based on proximity and neighbourliness predominate. The Technical 10
V. MATIAS FERREIRA; M. CALADO, Freguesia de Santa Catarina (Bairro Alto), Lisbon, Contexto Editora, 1992. p.54 (the words in italics are our emphasis). AGIR - Revista Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Ano 1, Vol. 1, n.º 5, nov 2013
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Office’s activity has therefore always been guided by the possibility of keeping its resident population and by persuading the younger age-groups to stay. To a large extent it has worked to create awareness and provide the population with social assistance11. In order to carry out the rehabilitation work it was necessary to remove or temporarily re-house people occupying the buildings about to be renovated. Such measures were necessary if the rehabilitation process involving restoration work on buildings, mainly if they were situated in the critical areas earmarked for urban recovery and conversion, was to be successful. It meant that the local authorities were obliged to make rules and regulations that would steer the process. As a result, Proposal no. 456/87: REALOJAR (RE-HOUSE) was passed by the Lisbon Municipal Assembly in 1988 in which, more than twenty years ago, it undertook not to proceed with any measures to relocate any of the residents permanently without first having met their previously defined conditions covering various subjects and obtaining their approval about: the kind of temporary accommodation they would be given; transporting and storing their goods and possessions; a study analysing the possible repercussions that re-housing would cause on the occupant’s income - here allowances would have to be made mainly in the financial area, to attenuate eventual negative effects; safeguarding the resettled person’s health particularly in the case of the older residents; defining solutions in terms of what sort of permanent housing to adopt, in keeping with and accepted by the occupant in question. Similar conditions were also applied where temporary housing was concerned. All the residents listed for temporarily vacating their homes were only required to move out if it was found that re-housing was the only possible solution for the rehabilitation work to go ahead. The principled stand repeatedly upheld by the local authorities was always to defend as best they were able, the right of the Bairro Alto population to stay in its normal place of abode, hence preserving its social ties and its active form of community self-help built upon strong neighbourhood links that were responsible for the quarter’s balanced social space12.
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LISBON MUNICIPAL COUNCIL, Reabilitação Urbana nos Núcleos Históricos, Lisbon, Urban Rehabilitation Department, Lisbon Municipal Council, 1993. 12 Cf. APPLETON et al., 1995. AGIR - Revista Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Ano 1, Vol. 1, n.º 5, nov 2013
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After not even five years had elapsed since the PRU had been set up, due to the fact that the two previous programmes had not managed to achieve sufficiently satisfactory results mainly where the stock of houses for renting was concerned, another programme came into being, the RECRIA – The Special Shared System for Restoring Rented RealEstate (Regime Especial de Comparticipação na Recuperação de Imóveis Arrendados). The system provided conditions for funding conservation work and improvements made on run-down dilapidated homes and buildings by means of conceding financial incentives on the part of the State and the municipalities. In 1996, 10 years after the RECRIA programme had been set up, two further real-estate rehabilitation programmes were launched. The REHABITA programme – System supplying Aid to Housing Restoration in the Old Urban Areas (Regime de Apoio à Recuperação Habitacional em Áreas Urbanas Antigas), which in fact was an extension of the RECRIA Programme. Here, local authorities received funding in order to recover the old urban neighbourhoods that had critical areas earmarked for urban rehabilitation and conversion and already had detailed plans drawn up or approved urban regulations. Funding was obtained from the Central Government after the Lisbon Municipal Councils had sent in an application. Also launched in the same year, 1996, was the RECRIPH Programme - The Special Shared-Funding System for Restoring Horizontal Property in Urban Buildings (Regime Especial de Comparticipação e Financiamento na Recuperação de Prédios Urbanos em Regime de Propriedade Horizontal). This programme had the aim of providing funds and non-repayable grants for conservation work and improvements on old buildings so as to recover horizontal property. In 2001, the SOLARH Programme – the Solidarity and Support Programme for Restoration and Housing (Programa de Solidariedade e Apoio à Recuperação e Habitação) – came in being. It provided special funding in the form of interest-free loans awarded by the National Housing Institute to lower-income families wanting to carry out conservation work on their homes. The measure not only sought to provide eligible house-owners with the necessary funds to restore the barest conditions of their homes, but it also wanted to stimulate an increase in the supply of moderately-priced housing for rent that would be within the reach of tenants in the lower income bracket. AGIR - Revista Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Ano 1, Vol. 1, n.º 5, nov 2013
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4.
TAX
INCENTIVES
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REHABILITATION
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EXTRAORDINARY SYSTEM OF AID TO URBAN REHABILITATION (20082012): WHAT EFFECTS ON PRODUCING GENTRIFICATION The most recent law about promoting urban rehabilitation materialised in the form of Law 104, of 7 May 2004 which set up the Exceptional Legal System for the Urban Rehabilitation of Historical Zones and Critical Urban Recovery and Re-conversion Areas (Regime Jurídico Excepcional de Reabilitação Urbana de Zonas Históricas e de Áreas Críticas de Recuperação e Reconversão Urbanística). The new system gave local government the chance to form Urban Rehabilitation Companies (SRU - Sociedades de Reabilitação Urbana) with their own executive power and administrative policymaking capacity (for example, deciding on expropriations and licensing). The Urban Rehabilitation Companies are responsible for attracting investment and actively involve all stake-holders (the residents, local government, owners, investors) in order to set up a true nation-wide rehabilitation market. Relying on the excuse that the State and local government do not have the financial wherewithal to pay for effective urban rehabilitation work in Portugal, supposedly because they are unable to drum up enough support for this very important process which is also somewhat slow-moving, they have now turned to private investment for urban restoration. Public-private partnerships are being formed that attract private capital and rely on imaginative ways of engineering funding by resorting to mechanisms (as if they were real-estate investment funds) allowing them to finance projects destined to up-grade the urban fabric that supposedly leads to “re-peopling” the inner cities. However, in order to achieve a goal of this nature, it is vital for any investment to be profitable and this may be ensured by creating an economic, financial and regulatory framework that is likely to attract and potentiate private investment. A goodwill sign was given when the 2007 Budget Law reduced the value-added tax (VAT) from 21% to 5% applicable to contractors working on urban upgrading and regeneration, therefore including this solution in the same bracket as other urban rehabilitation systems such as AGIR - Revista Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Ano 1, Vol. 1, n.º 5, nov 2013
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the RECRIA and REHABITA programmes, which hence opened the way for the Urban Rehabilitation Companies to attract private investment. The guiding principle of this exceptional system was therefore to create economic incentives that would attract private promoters and involve then in the urban rehabilitation process. The same philosophy is understood where tax benefits going to urban rehabilitation are concerned. They come within the framework of the Extraordinary System of Aid to Urban Rehabilitation (2008-2012) 13, set up with the intention of encouraging building rehabilitation and establishing favourable conditions for attracting private capital interested in upgrading urban areas in need of restoration. Such tax benefits have played a strategic role in getting the new middle classes to settle in the Bairro Alto neighbourhood. The sphere in which this new system has been applied is clear: urban building needing restoring and complying with at least one of the following conditions: a) urban buildings for leasing and able to up-date rents in stages according to the terms laid down in the New Urban Renting System; and b) urban buildings located in urban rehabilitation areas. Theses areas come under the Extraordinary System as physically demarcated areas which are characterised by the deteriorated or obsolete state of the their buildings, urban infra-structures, social facilities, vacant areas and public spaces. It falls to the Municipal Assembly acting upon the Municipal Council’s advice, to determine what urban areas should undergo rehabilitation once the Housing Institute and Urban Rehabilitation have issued a statement of opinion. Irrespective of their locality, the urban buildings earmarked for restoration where work will have started between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2010, and will have finished before 31 December 2012, are exempt from paying the Municipal Tax on Fixed Assets for a period of five years, dating from the year in which the restoration work is finished. This exemption may be extended for a further three years. A reference framework which has been in operation since 2004, was established within this sphere so as urban rehabilitation contracts could be drawn up between the municipality or the Urban Rehabilitation Company that was expressly set up for the 13
Article 82 of Law No.-A/2007, passed on 31 December 2007, establishing the Extraordinary System of Aid for Urban Rehabilitation. AGIR - Revista Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Ano 1, Vol. 1, n.º 5, nov 2013
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purpose, and the private investors. The framework gives both parties almost full leeway to strike whatever bargains they see fit provided they are adjusted to the terms under which the private investor commences work on urban rehabilitation. One of the projects carried out by a well known Lisbon-based Urban Rehabilitation Company, the Lisbon Public Urbanisation Company (EPUL – Empresa Pública de Urbanização de Lisboa) falls within this field. The Programme called “Repovoar Lisboa” (Re-people Lisbon) was aimed at the paradigmatic case of the São Paulo Parish (located south of the Bairro Alto neighbourhood). Despite the fact that it is one of the largest parishes in Lisbon in terms of its area and is situated in the heart of Lisbon enjoying a long water-front, it has a population of less that 1500 inhabitants. Owing to such paradoxes, São Paulo has been chosen for the Re-people Lisbon pilot scheme. By restoring its built heritage, it is hoped that it will help to enhance the locality, renew its urban fabric and create a neighbourhood centre that will see the rebirth of a desire to live in this historical setting. The EPUL has already bought out several buildings in the area by applying the funds given it by the Lisbon Municipal Council especially for the purpose, and it will promote the neighbourhood’s respective upgrading that has the goal of placing many dozens of new homes on the market mostly aimed at the younger generation. Partnerships with private real-estate owners are also under consideration as they will invest in valorising the venture (where the building will be assessed by an external, unbiased and independent evaluator), while the EPUL will be responsible for promoting and managing the rehabilitation work itself. Furthermore, the EPUL will include other buildings in this Programme that are scattered around the city and either belong to the Company itself or to third parties associated with the EPUL, hence making it possible to place more than three dozen additional new homes on the market. Urban rehabilitation has been one of local government’s priority lines of action over the last few years. By attracting new residents and encouraging the population to settle in the historical quarters of city, specific new social and economic dynamics have been set
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in motion that have generated development in the oldest areas of downtown Lisbon14. Coming under the various measures to be taken for the city and falling within the framework of the Lisbon Strategic Plan15, it is a forgone conclusion that the city will never be an attractive place to live and work in if it is unable to solve its serious housing problem that has acted as a handicap so far. Therefore, during the 1990s, local government’s commitment to upgrade housing in the city as a whole, although in the downtown neighbourhoods more in particular, has been decisive for redressing the socio-urban balance. Without referring to the most recent 2004 Exceptional System for the Urban Rehabilitation of Historical Zones and Critical Urban Recovery and Re-conversion Areas, all the urban rehabilitation programmes launched by the Government since the mid-1970s, have led to rehabilitating and upgrading existing buildings in the historical city centre of Lisbon by respecting collective public interests. It is similar to what has been going on in the historical centres of other Portuguese cities, as shown by José AGUIAR16. In describing the essential traits of experience gained in preserving the urban heritage of Guimarães, the author stressed the fact that “urban rehabilitation is for the people and by the people”, as against the segregation produced by eventual cases of gentrification. But conservation also means closely respecting identity values and the authenticity of heritage, preserving the referential qualities that form a part of the historical city’s architecture, extending such qualities into spaces that are undergoing an unchecked process of development and change, and making sure that they continue to live on vitally in the long term (in the city as a monument, in the structure of its morphology and its original features), and in preserving its already well-established
14
J. MATEUS et al., Baixa Pombalina: Bases para uma Intervenção de Salvaguarda, Lisbon, Lisbon Municipal Department responsible for Urban Licensing, Urban Renewal, Urban Planning, Strategic Planning and Green Spaces, 2005. 15 Lisbon Municipal Council, Plano Estratégico de Lisboa, Lisboa, Directorate of the Lisbon Municipal Council Strategic Plan, 1992. 16 J. AGUIAR, “A experiência de reabilitação urbana do GTL de Guimarães: estratégia, método e algumas questões disciplinares”, in Dossier da Candidatura de Guimarães a Património Mundial - 2000: http://mestrado-reabilitacao.fa.utl.pt/disciplinas/jaguiar/jaguiarcandidaturaguimaraes2000. pdf (accessed on 24 February 2008). AGIR - Revista Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Ano 1, Vol. 1, n.º 5, nov 2013
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formal qualities (its erudite and vernacular architecture which has gone into building the historical centre over time). Indeed, the sense associated with the term gentrification as an immediate, direct cause of urban rehabilitation – where such gentrification is perceived to be an automatic consequence of public rehabilitation and conservation policies, or incentives to private investment interested in upgrading urban buildings (and housing more in particular) – together with two further senses, influenced the first decade dedicated to studying this phenomenon. For a while, gentrification was also associated with a “back to the city movement” implying that significant house-moving activity was already going on from the periphery to the centre. Lastly, academics have also pin-pointed the phenomenon as being a social replacement process in terms of re-appropriating the working-class habitat by the bourgeoisie, hence leading to a “embourgeoisement” of the inner city and its age-old historical areas in particular . This fact has led to the re-arrangement of the city’s social geography where the so-called downtown areas have witnessed the replacement of one social group by another of higher social status. This last sense has gained increasing validity in studies about the phenomenon carried out over the past few years. At this point, it is seems pertinent to resuscitate a theory put forward more than 25 years ago by Jean RÉMY17 about the prior nature, if not the autonomy, of the gentrification process where urban rehabilitation is concerned. In other words, there was already a demand for central spaces displaying particular socio-spatial characteristics prior to the supply, and much before public or private investors produced such housing. Precisely because the gentrification phenomenon seems to be anchored in more global economic and social dynamics, however recent the concern has been to launch public activity seeking to “beautify” the city’s downtown spaces in accordance with their aesthetic traditions, it is not completely foreign to the upgrading process.
17
J. REMY, “Retour aux quartiers anciens: recherches sociologiques“, Recherches Sociologiques, 14(3), 1983, pp.297-319. AGIR - Revista Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Ano 1, Vol. 1, n.º 5, nov 2013
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5. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS In restricted terms, the urban rehabilitation process may be defined as an action leading to the significant improvement of the state of housing or a building, where the restoration of the built environment is less extreme than renovation as it consists of rearranging what is already standing and not replacing it with new buildings18. Sometimes the owner (occupant or tenent) decides to go ahead with rehabilitation work him/herself. Nevertheless – as pointed out in the numerous urban studies articles dedicated to this phenomenon – restoration work only really became more frequent as from the end of the 1970s when public procedures determined what the boundaries were in specific cases needing intervention and the means that were to be used. Whatever the case, the aim of rehabilitation work has always been to grant or restore a better social image and greater economic value to housing, buildings and the overall neighbourhood19. Rehabilitation activity is not only the outcome of intervention in the oldest parts of the inner city but also in other urban spaces enjoying a good environmental potential and often a certain memory and historical significance. It may result from exclusively private initiatives aimed at rehabilitating buildings in a particular area, but very often it coincides with public measures to rehabilitate the public space, making funds available to private enterprises that restore building façades or improve roofing. In most of the situations in the historical parts of the downtown Lisbon, as we have already seen, property is private so that the municipality acts as an interface between the State and the private owners or occupants, contributing towards the cost of rehabilitation work by means of non-repayable grants so that the best ways of ensuring the preservation of the buildings is found. But we can only speak about a rehabilitation policy in terms of Government aid, which is scarce and manifestly insufficient. In other cases, where the 18
F. CHOAY, P. MERLIN, Dictionnaire de l’Urbanisme et de l’Aménagement, Paris, PUF, 1988. DGOTDU, Vocabulário de Termos e Conceitos do Ordenamento do Território, Lisbon, GeneralDirectorate of Physical Planning and Urban Development, 2005. 19 A. BOURDIN, “Restauration rehabilitation: l’ordre symbolique de l’espace neo-bourgeois“, Espaces et Societes, 30/31, 1979, pp.15-35. A. BOURDIN, “Réhabilitation des vieux quartiers et nouveaux modes de vie“, Recherches Sociologiques, 11(3), 1980, pp.259-275. A. BOURDIN, “Comment analyser la transformation de l’espace urbain? L’exemple de la réhabilitation de l’habitat“, Espaces et Societes, 52/53, 1989, pp.85-105.
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property belongs to the municipality, the city council has an added responsibility because it is the “owner of the work”, whether this entails improving municipal neighbourhoods and other scattered properties, or upgrading facilities whose uses have changed and are symbols of identification and reference to be upheld. In the historical neighbourhoods, owing to the many differences existing among them, different technical approaches, material and rules have been called for on the one hand, which are at variance with those used in brand new buildings. On the other hand, rehabilitation has required a multidisciplinary approach on the part of the municipality (engineers, architects, geographers, economists, historians, lawyers, social assistants, sociologists, etc.). They have worked in an integrated way ensuring different competences. Rehabilitation work such as this has to be in partnership with the Parish Councils and other local working-class associations, and relations have to be established at an official level with the residents and trades people who need to validate the choices made. Shared management is vital and it prevents public and collective interests from being undervalued throughout the process. From the social point of view, in certain cases urban rehabilitation may lead to a change in the population, owing to the fact that the former residents who very often come from the less-privileged strata of society find themselves gradually being replaced by people coming from the upper-middle and upper classes who are able to pay for this kind of restored housing. As a result, in this specific case, the process helps towards consolidating the gentrification of the neighbourhood which may be defined as the city’s “social filtering” process. A course of action involving social re-composition is therefore triggered off in the housing market and clearly affects run-down housing in the traditionally working-class areas in a very concrete way. When thinking about the social re-composition (and replacement) of such spaces and their transformation into middle and upper-middle class neighbourhoods, and because “social substitution” is a recognised process, one cannot help but refer to the way in which the resulting sociospatial segregation has been reinforced, thus accentuating the social division of the urban space. Such is not the case of Bairro Alto, however, where the gentrification is still at a primary stage (the first stage in a total of four according to CLAY’s 1979 model AGIR - Revista Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Ano 1, Vol. 1, n.º 5, nov 2013
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of gentrification stages20). It is merely sporadic given the characteristic physical nature of the quarter. But it is also similar to what is happening in other historical neighbourhoods in downtown Lisbon, as well as in the historical centres of other Portuguese cities. Indeed, as we have sought to show in this article, all the urban rehabilitation programmes launched by the Government ever since the mid-1970s, have tackled urban rehabilitation and the conservation of already built heritage in the historical centre of the city of Lisbon, in agreement with the original residents living in inner-city neighbourhoods, as against the segregation produced by eventual cases of gentrification. The direct association of gentrification on urban rehabilitation deserves to be discussed in more depth above all where the Portuguese case is concerned as it is affected by a tightly strait-jacketed housing market and by successive legal packages that have been accumulating ever since the mid-20th century, and have served to stabilise the market for rented housing, thus effectively curbing the gentrification phenomenon. In particularly benefiting families coming from the lower socio-economic brackets and favouring the on-going presence of the original population, or in other words, the people who were already living in these old neighbourhoods, successive laws about protecting and rehabilitating housing have acted as considerable constraints against the advances made by gentrification. Instead, they have limited the kind of social replacement that is associated with evicting the most under-privileged socio-economic groups who otherwise would have run the risk of being ousted by the gentrifiers, the new residents belonging to a new upwardly-mobile upper-middle class21 filtering up. Private or public urban rehabilitation activities are merely one of the aspects in the socio-spatial processes that compete with each other for real-estate upgrading in the 20
P.CLAY, Neighborhood Renewal: Middle-Class Resettlement and Incumbent Upgrading in American Neighborhoods, Massachusetts, D.C. Health, Lexington, 1979. 21 For a better understanding of the developments behind the concept of the “new middle classes” and their role in gentrification, the study undertaken by BUTLER (1997) e LEY (1994, 1996) is recommended. T. BUTLER, Gentrification and the Middle Classes, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1997. D. LEY, “Gentrification and the politics of the new middle class”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 12(1), 1994, pp.53-74. D. LEY, The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996. AGIR - Revista Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Ano 1, Vol. 1, n.º 5, nov 2013
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inner cities. Whether they are undertaken “spontaneously” or officially, improvement work carried out on housing does not make any sense unless seen in the light of the population’s mobility, residential strategies and social, economic and cultural changes that lead to the enhancement of particular urban spaces and more in particular, the old neighbourhoods in the historical centres. Public work aimed at improving housing certainly shows signs of a shift in Government policies and in local associations in terms of urbanism and housing. However, this shift is inscribed within a more general historical context that is characterised by stakeholders’ renewed interest in the inner city, glorifying values such as "heritage", "historical-value" and the "quality of life". It has also been influenced by a slow-down in the rate of new building, thus calling for renewed investment to consolidate standing urbanism. The socio-spatial process of gentrification will therefore make its appearance as a result not of the social and economic rationales of industrialised society, but rather as the spatial manifestation of a new kind of society that is emerging as a product of deepseated economic changes in the system of capitalist accumulation. It will influence the re-composition of the social and cultural texture of urban spaces in what is currently known as the post-industrial society with its relatively clearly-traced outlines in the most highly developed, advanced capitalist countries22. The social restructuring going on in Bairro Alto only becomes legible in a satisfactory way when it is deciphered within the wider framework of social change that at the same time, explains the re-valuation which downtown areas have been subject to in terms of (re)investment in housing aimed at the upper-income brackets. For their part, in demonstrating new, more cosmopolitan styles of life23 where an array of different, highquality services are within their reach, the people in this socio-economic bracket
22
N. SMITH, “Gentrification, the frontier, and the restructuring of urban space”, in N. SMITH; P. WILLIAMS (ed.), Gentrification of the City, London, Allen & Unwin, 1986, pp.15-34. N. SMITH, The New Urban Frontier. Gentrification and the Revanchist City, London, Routledge, 1996a. N. SMITH, “Gentrification, the frontier, and the restructuring of urban space”, in S. FAINSTEIN; S. CAMPBELL (ed.), Readings in Urban Theory, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996b, pp.260-277. 23
P. PELLEGRINO, “Styles de vie et modes d’habiter“, Espaces et Societes, 73, 1994, pp.9-12.
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embody important new demands for new real-estate products that have come about owing to the changes in the way space is produced.
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