The use of participatory approaches in the qualification of complex peri-urban territories tends to be increasingly recurrent; it involves multiple agents and is held to be a condition for success. The present paper aims to contribute to the conceptual discussion of this approach through a critical and diachronic reflection on this notion in the perspective of the Right to the City, and on an experiment concerning Vertente Sul, a peri-urban territory in the Odivelas municipality in Metropolitan Area of Lisbon. It incorporates five neighbourhoods demarcated as Urban Areas of Illegal Genesis, under Law no. 91/95, which provides that the owners of plots bear the chief responsibility for their reconversion. Given the constraints of the Municipal Master Plan concerning legal regularisation, the existing land characteristics and its use, local and municipal actors decided to draw up two urban instruments to be carried out by two different teams: an Urban Plan aiming at reconversion of the territory, and a Territorial Action Programme promoting its immediate upgrading. For a year, another team, including the authors of this paper, developed a set of actions aiming to inform and to involve the population in the discussion of these two instruments and on the future of Vertente Sul. The present paper reflects on the participatory approaches implemented, on their limitations and virtues, in fostering democratic interaction between different agents, and active participation in the territory’s transformation, as well as in achieving the intended goals of qualification of the territory.

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• Artes - Humanidades