**4. Discussion**

It was a crisis that influenced such a small nation globally to discover new cultures and trade routes in the early modern age. The Eurozone crisis 2008 launched Lisbon into a renewed adventure into the realm of creative industries and entrepreneurship. The bailout in 2015, and policies avoiding former austerity measures intensified public and private investment. The well-known hospitality and security offered by the country captured incredible tourism development, raising difficult issues such as, on the one hand, providing capital to invest in the city's rehabilitation, notably in heritage conservation and public space redesign and, on the other, touristification in central districts leading to loss of inhabitants (see Figure 4 and Table 2).

The review of governance and urban planning documents, crisscrossing with spatial and statistics analysis, allows us to observe that the location of creative industries is mainly connected to the historical centre and the urban rehabilitation areas, clustering with the social innovation-led new working spaces. (See Tables 1 and 3, Figure 5).

**Table 3.** Urban rehabilitation plans and social innovation projects promoted by the Lisbon City Council by date and New Working Spaces Type. Sources: Adapted from different official websites of the Lisbon City Council (CML) and the COST CA18214 typology.



**Figure 5.** Hot spots analysis applied to urban detail plan polygons—impact of creative hubs and creative economy with a role in urban rehabilitation per urban detail plan in the historical centre territorial unit. Sources: Adapted from the Lisbon City Council (CML) official open-source dataset (see Back Matter). Basemap source as embedded in figure: Instituto geográfico Nacional, Esri, HERE, Garmin, METI/NASA, UGS.

However, the City of Lisbon made a considerable financial and political investment in developing an innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem (startups, accelerators, incubators, even unicorns) that would put Lisbon on the international panorama, attracting many young entrepreneurs and creative professionals to the Web Summit since 2016.

The digital economy seems to be located in areas where offices are more significant than the smaller and more scattered "arts and crafts" creative economies in traditional neighbourhoods (See Figure 3).

Urban rehabilitation plans anchor social innovation to new working spaces settled in the available buildings, taking advantage of opportunities offered by outdated or ruined pre-existent structures and the possibility of applying funding to instruments such as the Municipal Participatory Budget (OP/Orçamento Participativo), EU funding mechanisms such as ESFR Funds Creative Europe, H2020 (now Horizon Europe) and EU Interreg, or the Social Innovation Fund [33]. The Social Innovation Fund (FIS) is managed by the Portuguese Development Bank (Banco de Fomento Português, 2020) [34,35]. The Fund aligns with the Agenda 2030 SDG-Sustainable Development Goals and falls under the umbrella of the policy mechanism Portugal Social Innovation (Portugal Inovação Social) with the support of the European Social Fund [33].

Affordable housing for younger families, green strategies, public space design (e.g., introducing soft mobility and increasing pedestrian and cycle lanes) and innovation in buildings that become landmarks allow us to pursue one of the strategic measures of the city by fostering a network of spaces for collaborative work and incubation through incentives for urban rehabilitation.

Measures are also in place to promote the concentration of cultural and creative activities in historic neighbourhoods and spaces with obsolete uses. These actions are vital for urban rehabilitation and the economic and social dynamisation of the areas of this study.

The proximity of the events, the inevitable impacts of COVID-19 and the yet to be discovered strategic reorientation by the new municipal executive team, after Local Elections in September 2021, prevent further discussion.

#### **5. Conclusions**

Coming to the end of the article, one may well formulate the question implicit in the study's design: Is urban rehabilitation a location factor of NWS and a promoter of social innovation? An unrealistic optimal answer would be positive; however, we can conclude the following:
