**1. Introduction**

Tourism in historical cities often leads to gentrification processes [1]—a phenomenon that affects places and the life of local low-income inhabitants due to the valorization of space and the consequent increase in their costs of life, leading to dissatisfaction with their places [2] and ultimately their displacement (Lees et al., 2016). Tourism-related gentrification, or tourist-led gentrification, refers to the socio-spatial transformations that occur due to the intense appropriation of a place for tourism purposes, in which there is a physical and socioeconomic restructuring of the urban environment [3].

In Lisbon, Portugal, tourism has deeply changed the city's age distribution. Between 2001 and 2011, Lisbon experienced an average of population rejuvenation, with an increase of the group between 25 and 39 years of +5% in contrast with the total population decrease of −3% and further population decrease in Alfama, during the same period, of −21%, except for the group between 25 and 39 years, whose share rose 12% [4].

Although it is not certain that by 2011 Alfama had already undergone a gentrification process, its population was quite elderly by then. In 2001, the Ageing Index—namely, the number of people aged 65 and over per 100 people under 15 years old—in Alfama was

**Citation:** Madeira, A.; Palrão, T.; Mendes, A.S.; López-Morales, E. Perceptions about Tourism and Tourists in Historic Neighborhoods: The Case of Alfama. *Sustainability* **2021**, *13*, 8357. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/su13158357

Academic Editor: Pierfrancesco De Paola

Received: 25 June 2021 Accepted: 22 July 2021 Published: 27 July 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

315. Additionally, in the parish of Santa Maria Maior, where Alfama is located, the Ageing Index was 286, above Lisbon's index of 186. By 2001, low-income and low-educational levels were predominant in Alfama, as the neighborhood's houses and buildings were also degraded [5]. For the following two decades, there was a progressive de-population in Alfama, explained by the natural death of the senior residents, the outmigration of residents, and the general decrease of immigrations experienced in Portugal, different to the strong population growth due to immigration during the first half of the 20th century in other countries.

However, recently, Alfama, the so-called 'oldest neighborhood in Europe', has been rediscovered not only as a place to visit, but also as a place where accommodation can be found for tourists. This new context has drastically changed the social panorama of Alfama [6]. For most authors, the main problem in Alfama is the growing supply of shortterm rental accommodation [4,7,8]. The second related problem is the extended presence of tourists that seemingly undermines the sense of community based on social relationships, which long-term residents consider essential to reproduce their quality of life and which may lead them to leave the neighborhood, even if not for purely economic reasons [9], there is a cultural nerve that somehow aggressive tourist development hurts, a comparable nostalgia found by Fullilove [10] in black neighborhoods in the US threatened by state-led urban renewal.

The aim of this article is to describe and analyze the perception of a sample of Alfama's long-term residents regarding the positive and negative impacts of tourism in their everyday experience in the neighborhood and compare these two apparently opposed perspectives. We observe the contradiction people have between acknowledging the material benefits gentrification has brought to their neighborhood and grieving for the loss of the community. We conducted structured interviews and collected data that helps us to increase the understanding of the perceived changes that have been occurring due to the growth in tourism demand in this area, and the contradictive narratives these changes generate. Finally, as an empirical contribution to theoretical debates on gentrification, we not only concur with Atkinson and Bridge's [11] idea that contrasting both the acceptanceand rejection-sides of gentrification is theoretically valid, but also, we conjecture whether the temporalities of gentrification affect the residents who remain, particularly after intensive processes of outmigration have already occurred and vacuumed a neighborhood. We therefore claim that gentrification needs to be understood in a temporal evolutionary way, as the perceptions of Alfama's original residents seem otherwise inexplicable. The research questions are: What do Alfama residents think about the increase in tourist activity in this neighborhood? Can gentrification have a positive side?

#### **2. Literature Review**

Glass [12] introduced the idea of gentrification based on her observations of the mass middle-class incursion in London's neighborhoods, which led to the displacement of the working class and original inhabitants, altering the whole social character of the neighborhood. More than half a century later, we attempt to understand if this negative perception of gentrification is unanimous among contemporary scholars; however, it can be stated that gentrification is both a process of spatial change and a process of social change [7].

Short-term residents have the power to impose spatial changes in a neighborhood, in a current, more travelling global society than the 1960s', as affluent European, North American and Asian middle-classes massively consume new places and experiences, so this activity reflects residents' values and norms and induces residents' pride in their neighborhoods [13].

A rapid tourist development can sometimes mean a non-sustained growth lacking measures and regulations and originating dissatisfaction in destination local inhabitants. The touristification of historic neighborhoods in cities of Central America and the Caribbean, Middle East, Southern Europe, as in many other places, has a determining factor: the

approval of a broad legal framework for the conversion of these neighborhoods into urban theme parks of a touristic nature and the rapid purchase of many properties for short-term renting purposes [14]. Short-term rentals through Airbnb have accelerated the growth of low-priced real estate sets and, as a consequence, European and American global cities have undergone a long-term process of replacing the working and lower-middle classes, thus depriving them of the opportunities and amenities that these cities offer [15–17].

Gentrification can be understood as a process where a population of lower socioeconomic status is replaced by a population of higher socio-economic status. The process is invariably accompanied by speculation, but also by reinvestment and improvements in the built environment, always because of the logic inherent to the way the market operates in a capitalist city [18]. Gentrification cannot be reduced to a concept based on capitalist development, being a process that results from substantially different urban dynamics that incorporate distinct ideological and ontological assumptions in a socio-spatial way [19].

This connection makes sense within the framework of theories of planetary gentrification because the social injustices it spawns have a global pattern [18]. According to <sup>L</sup>ópez-Morales [20–22] the increasing number of cases of state-led gentrification in the world shows how the phenomenon is growing in scale and scope under state power and gentrification is also a much richer narrative than simply discussing it locally as if it was detached from global economic and cultural flows and waves. Already in the early 2000s, Hackworth and Smith [23], claimed that gentrification changed due to economic and political restructuring and made state intervention over gentrification quite decisive. We concur with Smith [24] that gentrification has gone global by the hand of the blueprints of neoliberal urban governance [25] that nevertheless not always end up the same way.

Aalbers [26] calls a fifth-wave gentrification as the urban materialization of finance-led capitalism as a complement to the also leading role of the state and comprises corporate landlords and real estate as an asset class. However, a salient feature of fifth-wave gentrification is investment by transnational wealth elites and middle classes, platform capitalism and touristification, global mortgage debt, lack of housing affordability, the role of the state and the subsumption of alternatives.

Global tourist-led gentrification transforms popular neighborhoods into places of consumption and tourism, and expanding the recreational and leisure function to tourist accommodation or short-term rental can exacerbate tendencies of displacement and residential segregation. Neighborhoods can be drained of their original population, blocking lower socio-economic level people to access habitation, and putting at risk the social sustainability of the historic center [27]. A place is considered sociocultural sustainable, in sociocultural terms, taking into account the level of support and satisfaction of local needs, namely: meaningful sets, sense of belonging, sense of place, and memories, as well as the feeling of a physical environment [28].

However, gentrification should have a plural sense. Local places' trajectories or sociospatial relations are reflected in the debates on gentrification, but the shape of gentrification may differ from one place to another [29]. In a few words, neoliberal gentrification reflects the variegated complexity and somehow unexpected outcomes of actually existing neoliberalism [30], as local gentrification is the global economy's spatial form [31]. Policyled gentrification processes can result from land valuation policies, projects designed to promote the opening of economic opportunities to produce higher-income housing, or even the direct application of social relocation policies in originally low-income residential areas or public spaces [22]. The real meaning of sustainable growth comes from the fact that most residents should benefit from the anticipated prosperity and the improved environment [32]. Sustainable development must consider strategic planning for heritage protection, the definition of community building structures and tools that respect urban memory and the social needs of the inhabitants [33]. As we see, the majority of Alfama's residents did not enjoyed the areas' improved as they earlier moved away.

In Portugal, by 2012, a New Urban Rental Regime policy was incepted, negatively affecting the rental market and boosting residential displacement rates and given rise

to other forms of tourist accommodation and to new luxury real estate projects [16]. In 2019, Alfama was Lisbon's neighborhood with the highest number of Airbnb apartments working. At the time, Alfama had around 3300 permanent inhabitants and 35% of the existing properties were exclusively for tourist accommodation [4]. Tourist accommodation units coexisting with long-term or permanent residents is considered among the main cause of gentrification and involuntary displacement [34]. International investments and tourism have redefined the urban culture of the city, promoting a gentrification process that has resulted, in the past, in the relegation of old residents to the suburbs or other cities [33].

Holgersen [35] states that the middle class has become both the cause and the result of gentrification by being its storyline, its main actor, its beneficiary, and the end point. We believe that fifth-wave gentrification now might be fracturing the middle-class concept in two halves; one is the low and lower-local middle class old time residents, the other are the travelling middle class mainly from the richest regions of the world representing short-time rental platform capitalism's users and investors [4]. Gentrification in a geography like Alfama, brings the class-dispute on local space into a global level.

Gago and Cocola-Gant [7] argue that the development and success of platforms such as Airbnb, as well as tourism promotion carried out by public institutions, have created additional incentives to the financing process, with a special focus on short-term accommodation. Sequera and Nofre [4] have analyzed the transformations and negative impacts affected by gentrification and the quality of life of the community, mentioning that Alfama, has been transformed by tourism, both by local and transnational real estate investors, through touristification and airbnbization processes, transforming the whole neighborhood into an open-air hotel.

Few authors advocate some positive impacts of tourism on the perception of communities' residents. Although cultural tourism plays an important role in economic development, tourism's success can be a double-edged sword, because it causes a strong impact exposing the quality of life of residents to both benefits and costs [36]. For this study, current resident's responses in Alfama shows they constantly evaluate the positive and negative sides of neighborhood change, and consider its economic, symbolic, and psychological components [10,37,38]. Many studies confirm that residents who can benefit from a tourism activity tend to support its development [39–41]. The liberalization of the rental law, the incentives for the expansion of cultural facilities in the center of Lisbon, municipal investments in mobility, and the rehabilitation projects for specific areas, in combination with the growing number of tourists, have created the necessary conditions for the area to be considered attractive to private investors, overcoming the gap caused by years of abandonment [42]. The urban regeneration of these cultural neighborhoods has also brought social benefits, since the space used by tourists is the center of life for remaining residents, and improvement in their quality of life help solve several problems of the local community [43]. On the other hand, many grieve for the diminished sense of community among neighbors.

#### **3. Materials and Methods**

#### *3.1. Data and Single Case Study-Approach*

Our information was obtained from 50 informal interviews not allowing conclusions based on statistical representativeness, being an exploratory study, whose results should be interpreted with caution and related to Alfama exclusively. The interviews were conducted from February to April 2020, and the sociodemographic characterization of the sample was made according to age, nationality, occupation, and educational qualification, among residents living inside Alfama's boundaries (Figure 1). The interviews were conducted by one of the authors on residents approached in the neighborhood, and in addition to the socio-demographic characteristics, the questions asked are described in the results analysis.

**Figure 1.** Lisbon and Alfama. Source: Lisboa interativa. Available online https://bityli.com/S4fvz (accessed on 24 April 2021).

This research uses a qualitative descriptive, non-comparative, single case study design under recommendation by Harding et al. [44] and Yin [45]. We define the neighborhood area and its inhabitants as our 'rare case' [44] and we do not claim statistical representativeness, as we accept a low degree of freedom. In order to triangulate the information, additionally, we made four in-depth interviews with representatives of the most relevant stakeholders in Alfama, including a representative of the Parish Council of Santa Maria Maior, a representative of the Heritage and People's Association of Alfama, a representative of the Alfama Merchants' Association and a representative of the Cultural Centre Magalh<sup>ã</sup>es Lima. The interviews with these local organizations included the same non-demographic questions applied to residents.

#### *3.2. Concept Analysis*

We conducted content analysis following Bardin's [46] consecutive steps of: preanalysis of the interviews, exploration of the answers, processing of results and, finally, inferences and interpretation of findings. The summative approach to qualitative content analysis should begin with an analysis of word frequencies to identify patterns, complemented by an analysis of their use in the context of the responses [47].

We mapped concepts of information through a simultaneously quantitative and qualitative analysis that allowed us to transform large amounts of information according to semantic patterns, and group them via related concepts [48,49].

The identification of key concepts was performed using Leximancer software, version LexiPortal V4.5. This software automatically develops concept-maps representing the main concepts within the text and how the themes are related, using an approach named summarized content analysis. This analysis considers the frequencies that precede the interpretation [50,51]. Leximancer was used to analyze all respondents' answers to each of the four questions, separately. It is a lexical software that maps conceptual information from large amounts of text by grouping themes according to the relationships between them [49,52]. This software starts by generating a thesaurus that, after an iterative process through a machine learning algorithm, allows reaching the optimal thesaurus that will result in a collection of themes based on the examination of these words in the context of the text and on their frequency in the text blocks. Leximancer has shown several important advantages for text data analysis, since large amounts of text can be analyzed quickly in a quantitative way, generating well-defined themes, and the machine learning eliminates much of the need to revise thesauri as the domain vocabulary evolves [53,54].

Themes are mapped in descending order of color temperature according to their importance: the most important theme appears in red, followed by orange, successively to more cold colors such as blue and green according to the color wheel. The concept map shows the themes covering the concepts that are most frequent in the text and those that are connected to more concepts on the map [54]. Concepts are formed based on the most frequently occurring words. Concepts that occur frequently concurrently in the same coding blocks are closer together on the map. The circles gather clusters of concepts and are named by the most prominent concept in the group (we chose to represent only these concepts that name the themes). Thus, the map visually represents the strength of association between concepts and a conceptual view of the semantic structure of data.

#### *3.3. Local Population and Neighborhood*

From the socio-demographic point of view we find that the ages of the interviewees vary between 18 and 85, with the average age being 50 and 50% of the interviewees being 50 or under. It is a bimodal sample with one of the modes in the 25 to 35 year old class and the other mode situated in the 55 to 65 year old class clearly showing two different social groups of residents, but that currently coexist in Alfama. Only 2% of respondents are foreigners (Brazilian and Spanish), and the sample is evenly distributed between the two genders (48% of respondents are female; 52% are male). Regarding occupation, 32% of the sample are public employees, 20% are retired, 18% are traders and 8% have jobs related to catering. Other reported occupations include dressmakers, musicians, actresses, barbers, economists, security guards and students. As for academic qualifications, 48% have only basic education, 40 have secondary education and 12% have higher education.

Alfama, in terms of territorial units for statistical purposes is included in LAU1 (Local Administrative Unit) Lisbon (Figure 1) and in two LAU2, namely, Santa Maria Maior and São Vicente, concentrating its largest area in Santa Maria Maior. According to the Communication and Image Office of the Parish Council of Santa Maria Maior, in 2020, it was estimated that the resident population of Alfama was, approximately 2500 inhabitants and about 1965 registered voters. Our interviewees are residents of Alfama's case-study area, namely, within the yellow area shown in Figure 1.

Lisbon experienced a severe population decrease fundamentally between 1981 and 1991 ( −18%) and between 1991 and 2001 ( −15%) [5]. However, from the 2000s onwards, Lisbon has seen a repopulation of some of its neighborhoods due to the arrival of young adults (liberal professionals, intellectuals, and scientists), tourists, travelers, and university students, in the revitalization processes of the historic neighborhoods in the center of the capital, such as Alfama, Baixa, Bairro Alto, Mouraria and Cais do Sodré being part of a process of population replacement and urban land revalorization known as gentrification [12–16].
