Deriving from increasing global mobilities and insufficient related urban public policies, touristification and gentrification currently pose major challenges for Southern European cities. Rising and unsustainable housing prices, together with the transformation of neighbourhoods into sites of tourist consumption, are reshaping how dwellers experience their everyday places. Recent critical psychosocial research on people–place relations has highlighted the need to examine how these urban transformation processes, by disrupting shared place meanings and situated social networks, lead to physical but also symbolic forms of displacement. In this ongoing research, we focus on a touristified neighbourhood in Lisbon’s historical centre – Mouraria – associated to diverse representations over time, from popular and traditional to multicultural and cosmopolitan. Our aim is to critically explore how representations of Mouraria spatially unfold and are (re)produced by different actors over time, with a focus on how they relate with past and present mobilities. We perform a Thematic Analysis of media materials and official documents, such as urban regeneration plans, to assemble a Mouraria Archive, from the end of the Portuguese dictatorship to the present day. We argue that this historical and spatial approach allows for an understanding of how Mouraria has been symbolically and materially territorialised over time. In turn, it contributes to discuss how past representations of the neighbourhood evolve into present ones and are appropriated by actors holding uneven social power within contexts of urban change. Overall, this study provides insights for research on people-place relations and to inform socially just and sustainable urban policies.

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