This article examines how cultural diversity is incorporated in processes of urban renewal, of creating images of the city, and of gentrification, paying attention to the subjects and strategies of local governance. The article adopts the concept of diversity regimes to compare two cities in Portugal: Lisbon and Porto. The comparison of two territories in the actions of the city councils, parish councils and other entities reveals diverse local contexts as well as substantially different positions and intervention models. These result from differences in the number of migrants, in institutional settings, and in the ways in which the discourse of diversity does or does not incorporate narratives of territorial development and images of the city. Contrary to other studies, the two cases studied here demonstrate the multiplicity of strategies employed to accommodate immigration and cultural diversity in local political action, but where city policy caters in both cases for migrant integration. We argue that what is relevant is the new urban governance models where the language of diversity and the symbolic arrangements to which it gives rise do not constitute a migration policy, but rather a set of representation techniques for creating urban imaginaries.

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diversity,urban governance,regimes,immigrants,urban imaginaries.