In Southern Europe, considerable geographic expansion of the tourist industry has occurred in historic centres and other urban areas. These have been, or are being, restructured to meet the needs of visitors and investors. Lisbon, Portugal’s capital city, and Porto, the country’s second city, have both been impacted by social, economic and political dynamics tied to the tourism gentrification process. Among other factors, this is due to a peak in Portugal’s international projection as a tourist destination. In this article, we follow Gotham’s challenge regarding the turn of cities to tourism as a means of economic development. We do so by focusing on the sociocultural impacts of tourism gentrification on two groups whose transformative capacity of the urban has been identified: immigrant entrepreneurs and gentrifiers. We argue that tourism gentrification produces ambiguous effects on the two key social actors, reflecting ambiguities between the motivations and agential places of both traders and gentrifiers. By analysing both the discourses of immigrant business people and gentrifiers, we show how they are framed simultaneously as opportunity and risk, and how this perception enables their concrete practices and strategies to be grasped.

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tourism gentrification,immigrant entrepreneurs,gentrifiers,urban renewal,Lisbon,Porto