Mouraria is a neighborhood located at Lisbon’s inner city which in the last decades has been a setting of growing ethnic, religious, cultural and class diversity driven by a multiplicity of migrant trajectories. Such developments configure a superdiverse space where ethnicity is no longer the tenet of group differentiation. In this paper we look into Mouraria’s renewal project in view to describe local governance mechanisms and policies to accommodate such diversity, shaping ur ban space accordingly by exploring this urbanscape as a cultural and economic asset, specifically its “diversity advantage” in the context of urban renewal and the return to the center. We argue that three social dynamics play a role in this process:the culturalization of urban planning intertwine with, gentrification, and the ethnicized of cultural productions play a role in this process rendering a scenescape - a space that differentiates the city because of the cultural consumptions - deeply influenced by cosmopolitan cultural imaginaries.

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cosmopolitan,culture,urban planning,gentrification,space