I am pleased to share our latest article, “Música ao vivo e transformação urbana em Lisboa: entre resistência cultural e turistificação”
Co-authored with Chiara de Dominicis and Marco Roque de Freitas, this paper explores how live music in Lisbon has become a key site for understanding the tensions between urban transformation, touristification, and cultural resistance.
Lisbon is increasingly projected as an attractive global destination, a city of light, heritage, and “authentic” experiences. This carefully curated image circulates through tourism campaigns, social media, and cultural narratives that present the city as a harmonious blend of tradition and modernity. Yet behind this representation, a more complex process is unfolding. Urban space is being reshaped into a stylized and controlled environment designed for consumption, where everyday life, cultural practices, and social relations are progressively reorganized around tourism
These dynamics are not new, but they have intensified significantly over the past decade. Following the 2008 financial crisis, policies encouraging foreign investment and the expansion of short-term rentals have accelerated processes of gentrification and touristification. These transformations extend far beyond housing and public space. They reach deeply into the cultural fabric of the city, redefining the conditions under which artistic practices can emerge, survive, and be recognized.
In this context, live music cannot be understood as mere entertainment. It constitutes a complex social ecosystem composed of artists, audiences, venues, infrastructures, and repertoires. These elements interact within what might be described as urban “scenes”, shaped both by internal dynamics and by external pressures such as cultural policy, regulation, and access to space
What we observe in Lisbon is a growing tension between different logics. On the one hand, new venues and curated cultural spaces emerge, often located in central areas and attracting heterogeneous audiences, including tourists in search of “authentic” experiences. On the other, community-based practices and locally rooted scenes struggle to maintain their presence in a rapidly changing urban environment.
This tension reveals an important shift. The search for authenticity, far from being external to touristification, becomes one of its driving forces. As visitors seek spaces perceived as genuine or alternative, these same spaces are progressively incorporated into circuits of consumption, leading to processes of commodification and exclusion
At the same time, not all musical practices are equally visible or valued. Official narratives that celebrate “traditional culture” often marginalize the musical expressions of migrant communities, despite their active presence in the city’s everyday life. These practices, which unfold both during the day and at night, challenge dominant representations of Lisbon and reveal a much more plural and dynamic cultural landscape.
Live music, in this sense, becomes a site of negotiation. It is a space where different temporalities, identities, and forms of belonging intersect. It is also a space where resistance can emerge, not necessarily as explicit opposition, but as the persistence of practices that refuse to be fully absorbed into the logic of the city as spectacle.
From the perspective of cultural resilience, these practices point toward alternative ways of inhabiting the city. They are sustained not only by artists, but also by audiences, whose presence, listening, and participation actively shape the meaning of performances. To attend a concert, to linger in a venue, to engage with a musical scene, is also to take part in the production of urban life.
This is why live music matters. It is not simply about culture or leisure. It is about who has the right to the city, under what conditions, and with what possibilities for expression and encounter.
In this sense, the future of Lisbon’s cultural life will depend on the ability to move beyond the narrow frameworks of touristification and commodification, and to recognize the value of live music as a space of social, cultural, and political significance.
Manuel Garcia-Ruiz 