**2. Materials and Methods**

From an architectural and urbanistic point of view, ethnographic research methods often imply site observations and analysis, especially when seeking to go beyond a morphological approach. This process is phenomenological at its core [25–28].

In urbanism with an architectural and social background, the aesthetic options are erudite, stereotyped, or vernacular. This is what happens in research projects or problem solving-oriented urban design and planning studios and workshops.

In this study, we consider the following: (1) urban practices in Bairro Alto; (2) Urban Design Studios in Mouraria, Marvila, Bairro Alto, as well as international workshops under the aegis of the ISOCARP/Young Planning Professionals; and (3) research spanning the past 20 years addressing the urban transformation of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. These contribute to our ethnographic perceptions of the places and examples referred to in the study, notably within the historical centre and eastern/oriental territorial units as expressed in the cartographical results. These activities involved local authorities, communities, field trips, observations, and the review of various documents (historical, cartographic, and/or urban planning).

In the conceptualisation of the article, these experiences lay the foundations for how the city of Lisbon was approached. We used (1) literature, especially the contributions from the research network COST CA18214 (The Geography of New Working Spaces and

the Impact on the Periphery) (see 1. Introduction; The Background); (2) a systematic review of the Lisbon City Council official documents regarding governance and urban planning, such as the analysis of municipal strategy and urban planning documents and interviews with urban planning stakeholders (see 3. Results; 3.1. Governance and Urban Planning in Lisbon: A review) (see (3) spatial analysis and geocoded datasets, official and open source (3. Results; 3.2. Where do the City Vision and the Local Plans Meet?), highlighting the territorial expression of NWS within the Urban Rehabilitation Area of Lisbon (see Figure 1), Administrative and Territorial Units of Management, the current Status of the Urban Development and Detail Plans in Lisbon (see Figures 2 and 3, Table 1), and the concomitancy of the NWS promoted as drivers of social innovation in Detail Urban Rehabilitation plans, the levels of ageing and vulnerability and the concentration of creative industries (see Figure 4 and Table 2).

**Figure 1.** Lisbon rehabilitation area: Creative hubs with a role in urban rehabilitation, creative and digital economy overlap with the urban rehabilitation area, Lisbon City Council. 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.

**Figure 2.** Macro territorial unit boundaries: Creative hubs with a role in urban rehabilitation overlap with the historical centre and eastern/oriental territorial units, Lisbon City Council. 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.

**Figure 3.** Urban development plans and urban detail plans under various enforcement status: Creative hubs with a role in urban rehabilitation overlap with macro-territorial unit boundaries, by the Lisbon City Council. 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.

**Table 1.** City Government strategy and urban planning: Review of major options of plan and the municipal master plan and local urban rehabilitation plan applied to the case study (selection of the relevant material to the study). Sources: Adapted from different official documents and websites of the Lisbon City Council (CML).


**Table 2.** Population Variation, Census 2011–2021. Portugal NUTS II, Lisbon Metropolitan Area, Lisbon Municipality (preliminary results, July 2021) Source: INE/Statistics Portugal, INE/Statistics Portugal, Preliminary data, Census 2021, available at https://censos.ine.pt/m accessed 29 September 2021.


<sup>1</sup> Only the districts where the creative hubs headed by the municipality are included. In 2013, administrative reform led to the merging of several old parishes into larger districts.

**Figure 4.** Vulnerability and ageing indexes: Creative hubs in urban rehabilitation, creative and digital economy, overlap bivariate (INE/Statistics Portugal, Census 2011, available at www.ine.pt, 29 September 2021) 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.

#### **3. Results**

#### *3.1. Governance and Urban Planning in Lisbon: A Review*

The ties between urban rehabilitation, social innovation, and new working spaces were explored in two fundamental governance documents: the Major Planning Options of the City of Lisbon 2020–2023 (GOP—Grandes Opções do Plano para a Cidade de Lisboa 2020–2023) and the Municipal Master Plan (PDM—Plano Director Municipal) [29,30].

From the urban planning viewpoint, addressing innovation in Lisbon, notably social innovation, requires a comprehensive review of the core strategic and planning documents that address the government of Lisbon at different levels of planning and across sectors of governance. In its institutional organics, the review encompasses the intersectional nature of core areas of the council architecture: (i) urbanism (including urban planning and public space design), (ii) economic innovation, and (iii) entrepreneurship.

The Major Planning Options of the City of Lisbon encompasses all areas under the remit of the Municipality of Lisbon and presents the entire strategic vision of Lisbon. The main axes of development include specific goals and measures, including the global budget [28].

Of the five axes of development of the city, three directly address innovation and urban rehabilitation—(i) Axis A: To improve quality of life and the environment; (ii) Axis C: To strengthen the economy, notably by developing innovation networks and promoting partnerships, investment, and trade agreements; (iii) Axis D: Lisbon as a global city fostering the network of spaces for collaborative work and incubation through incentives for urban rehabilitation [30–32] (See Table 1).

The Master Plan for Lisbon (PDM/Plano Director Municipal) provides the territorial expression of the local development strategy, i.e., the major planning options for the city of Lisbon, considering national and regional programmes [30,33,34].

At the governance and strategic municipal level, sectoral areas such as the "economy, innovation, creative industries, and culture", "urban, heritage, and rehabilitation", and "urbanism" (the latter operationalised through different technical departments that include "urban planning" and "public space") share goals defined by the Major Planning Options of the City of Lisbon Axes.

#### *3.2. Where Do the City Vision and the Local Plans Meet?*

Locally diagnosing, defining a programme, and designing an intervention that responds both to global objectives for the city and a particular neighbourhood deals with a range of current issues directly linked to places and people. At this point, urban planning processes open the door to the need for public participation, especially at the local level, i.e., where the different stakeholders of the city meet the local population [30].

These places and related communities hold certain particularities that technical and deep work about those areas must deal with, notably when they hold heritage value and social frailties, as has become common in the inner fringes of European historical centres, especially if gentrification is to be contained by employing urban rehabilitation.

The Master Plan for Lisbon is the planning document that is meant to find direct threads between the strategy (at the Major Planning Options of the City of Lisbon) and the urban rehabilitation detail plans (see Figure 3).

Lisbon municipality is entirely urban land. Even the larger green areas, such as Monsanto Forest Park, are considered urban. In the 1990s, urban sprawl became a problem and the urban fabric and the built environment became subject to maintenance and reconversion where possible to avoid depopulation and decay in the centre. Most of the municipal area of Lisbon is classified as an urban rehabilitation area (see Figure 1), including most of the area that is characterised by urban occupation. In this respect, urban rehabilitation profiles follow the character of the neighbourhoods and are applicable both to highly regarded areas and less qualified places.

The municipality underwent administrative reform at the national level that merged several tiny old parishes into larger districts with more competencies. Onto this statistical web were lain urban management territorial macro units (see Figure 2), within which the historical centre unit and the eastern/oriental unit were singled out for urban regeneration, the centre for its old fabric, which is extremely difficult to adapt to modern ways of life for the public, heritage value, and topography conditions, and the eastern unit for its former industrial character mixed with pre-existing rural estates, monasteries and palaces that offer riverfront potentialities under current work.

The population differs from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, as the bivariate between the vulnerability index and the ageing index shows (see Figure 4): (1) Mouraria, Baixa, and Bairro alto are peripheral fringes, socially speaking, where an ageing population is marked by poverty, low incomes, and social exclusion in the centre [31]; (2) In Beato, the

indexes seem to be lower. However, that may result in a dilution of the population density in a larger area, where the urban settlements are post-modern and in large urban units far from the traditional fabric of the centre (except for the waterfront road).

Thus, the social innovation projects sought to mitigate this situation through the implementation of new working spaces (Creation Hubs) as social–spatial drivers of urban rehabilitation in Mouraria, Baixa, Bairro Alto, and Beato. Despite maintaining its position as one of the most populated municipalities in Portugal and the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA), the preliminary Census 2021 results for Lisbon, and specifically in the districts in question shows a clear drop in population (see Figure 4), confirming prior results coming from Census 2011.

The historical centre unit bears the historical neighbourhoods acknowledged as being of historical interest: Mouraria, Baixa and Bairro Alto, each of which is the recipient of a specific urban rehabilitation detail plan and corresponding creative hub as a social innovation driver [31,32] (see Table 2). All these places are central, exceptionally well connected regarding public transportation, and very appealing regarding urban livelihood. Several archeologic layers also condition them, some going back to the Phoenicians and Romans. One can say that this is the heart of the city.

The eastern/oriental unit, marked by the harbour and railway infrastructure and industrial sites, some of them already reconverted or rehabilitated, is the oriental route, part of a nostalgic Lisbon of old ruins, and exquisite palaces. With the development of Parque das Nações into an extremely powerful metropolitan centrality, it gained a new opportunity as a mid-way point between Baixa and the former Expo'98 area (see Table 2) in the area of Beato [31].
