The importance of creative activities in urban revitalisation and regeneration processes, as well as their role in territorial development, is well documented, with particular relevance for specific milieus and ambiances which enhance creativity and cultural liveliness, mostly in the historical or functional centres of urban areas. However, the peripheries of metropolitan areas have been quite neglected in these studies. In the planning point-of-view, most cases relate to top-down approaches, linked to wide urban regeneration plans, quite rarely challenging structural transformations from a community-based planning perspective. This paper, framed within a broader research project - ARTSBANK , investigating the “Margem Sul” area, the South Bank of Tagus River – focuses specifically on Barreiro. This peripheral city, formerly one of the main industrial centers of the metropolitan area, is currently marked by an interesting agglomeration of alternative art spaces and a set of endogenous-based creative dynamics, which show interesting signs of territorial revitalization based on art and cultural activities. Contrary to many examples throughout the world, we are in presence of bottom-up dynamics and community-based movements, quite differently from what is now verified in the center of Lisbon metropolis. These dynamics challenge planning procedures, requiring the managing of a diversity of practices and interests, and new forms of articulation between governance levels, in order to enhance the results of collective action and negotiate new spaces for action amongst longstanding stablished planning practices. This analyses is based on the systematic monitoring of recent evolution of several creative locally-embedded projects - on one hand the endogenous creative fabric (e.g. HEY! PACHUCO; OUT.RA; ADAO;…) and on the other hand the process of its growing openness and visibility to other actors (e.g Vhils, PADA, Ephemera;…). In parallel, the analysis draws also upon two urban artistic interventions developed by the authors in 2016 (“Scene from the margin”) and 2018 (“Space to dwell”) mobilized as source of co-production of knowledge with the local communities, about these dynamics and Barreiro’s cultural life. From both these methodological processes is possible to systematize interesting results on Barreiro’s creative milieu and its role in Lisbon’s metropolitan cultural scenes, highlighting the importance of the endogenous potential and of path dependency in nurturing sustainable long-term dynamics, from a local development point of view.

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