URN:NBN:fi:tsv-oa8231
DOI: 10.11143/8231
“Vintage Nightlife”: Gentrifying Lisbon downtown
JORDI NOFRE
Nofre, Jordi (2013). “Vintage Nightlife”: Gentrifying Lisbon downtown. Fennia
191: 2, pp. 106–121. ISSN 1798-5617.
Over last two decades, culture has played a very important role in large-scale
urban transformations. In that sense, nightlife promotion has become one of the
most important strategies for urban regeneration in post-industrial cities. This
paper explores the newly emerged vintage-style nightlife in the former harbour
quarter of Cais do Sodré (Lisbon downtown). To do this, I focus on a recently
renewed hostel building called Pensão Amor – formerly frequented by sailors
and prostitutes, and today considered the coolest nightlife venue in the Portu-
guese Capital. After presenting an updated state of the art exploration of gentri-
fication and nightlife, I argue in the second part of my paper that Pensão Amor
is currently playing a key role in the gentrification of the urban nightscape in the
Cais do Sodré neighbourhood, where its traditional nightlife is today being sup-
planted by a vintage-style nightlife. Furthermore, I argue that the consumption
of this recently promoted vintage nightlife as a new form of social distinction
can be also seen as the (re)production strategy of a socially and morally sani-
tized nightlife which marginalizes everyone who is seen as inappropriate, or in
other words, socially perilous to the city branding of Lisbon.
Keywords: vintage style, nightlife, social distinction, gentrification, Cais do
Sodré Lisbon
Jordi Nofre, Faculty of Social & Human Sciences, New University of Lisbon, Ave-
nida de Berna, 26-C 1069-061 Lisbon, Portugal. E-mail: jnofre@fcsh.unl.pt
Introduction: the rise of the 'ludic' city
Over the past three decades, many worldwide cit-
ies have reshaped their spaces, mainly through
culturally-led strategies for urban regeneration.
New forms of social organization, leisure, and cul-
tural consumption, among other factors, have re-
cently led to the conversion of many downtowns
into urban themed parks (Lefebvre 1968; Hanni-
gan 1998; Baptista 2005). The inner city thus be-
comes a theatre of consumption that is socially
and politically controlled (Ritzer 1993, 1998,
2010) formed by hubs of corporative leisure,
which plays a key role in the city branding pro-
cess. These new means of consumption – or, in the
terms of George Ritzer (2010), these new cathe-
drals of consumption – have favoured the emer-
gence of leisure as an organizer of contemporary
social practices in the greatest post-Fordist cities,
as it prevails in family, professional, and civic life
(Baptista 2005). Fiesta, fun, and relaxation are
therefore synonymous with success in the every-
day life of our post-Fordist “ludic cities” (Baptista
2005). This new kind of leisure aims at promoting
citizens as leisure producers, consumers of cul-
tural products, and consumers of leisure spaces
(Lefebvre 1968).
More than 30 years later, the document entitled
Culture, The Engine of the 21st Century European
Cities (approved by the Eurocities Committee in
September 2001) took into account what Henri
Lefebvre then had already pointed out about the
consolidation of culture as one of the key strate-
gies of large-scale urban transformations, which
aim at converting citizens into consumers and
creators of culture. In that sense, nightlife promo-
tion plays a significant role in several processes of
culture-led urban renovation and gentrification in
today’s European cities (Chatterton & Hollands
2003; Nofre & Martin 2009; Hael 2011). At the
same time, gentrification has become a key pro-
cess of urban and social transformation in reshap-
FENNIA 191: 2 (2013) 107“Vintage Nightlife”: Gentrifying Lisbon downtown
ing contemporary worldwide cities over the last
decades. This is the case of Lisbon and Cais do
Sodré, one of its former harbour quarters. So in
focusing on this case study, this paper will explore
how the conversion of an abandoned hostel
(called Pensão Amor), formerly frequented by mar-
ginal prostitutes and sailors over the last century,
has been playing a key role in the gentrification of
Cais do Sodré through the newly-promoted vin-
tage style where the old, the decadent, and the
sordid have been re-signified to become part of a
newly-created urban nightscape of social distinc-
tion.
This paper presents the first results of a 2-year
ethnographic fieldwork study of nightlife and ur-
ban change in post-industrial Lisbon. The presence
of many urban processes like nightlife-based gen-
trification together with outlawed activities like
drugs dealing, prostitution, and laundering money
through drinks consumption and entrance fees de-
mands the use of methodological eclecticism
(Hannerz 1980; Wynne & O'Connor 1998) to ex-
plore the Cais do Sodré’s urban nightscape (Fig. 1).
Hence, after conducting a 15-month participant
observation, 32 people were interviewed in loco.
The subjects of such informal interviews com-
prised four bouncers, three policemen, and 25
customers (the venue’s owners rejected being in-
terviewed).1 Most of interviews were manually
registered in a small field notebook. The following
list characterizes the informants used in this paper:
• Informant 1: male, 29 years, PhD Student, Lis-
bon; interview carried out on 28 January 2012,
at about 2:00 a.m. inside Pensão Amor and
manually registered.
• Informant 2: male, 37 years, security staff mem-
ber, Lisbon; interview carried out on 15 Febru-
ary 2012, at about 0:30 a.m (his statements
were registered in situ for obvious reasons of
safety).
• Informant 3: female, 23 years, undergraduate
student, Barreiro (Lisbon metropolitan area); in-
terview carried out on 14 March 2012, at 10:00
a.m. at her Faculty building.
• Informant 4: male, 24 years, undergraduate stu-
dent, Lisbon; interview carried out on 14 March
2012, at 10:00 a.m. at his Faculty building.
• Informant 5: male, 34 years, software develop-
er, Lisbon; interview carried out inside Pensão
Amor, on 12 November 2011, at about 2:15
a.m.
• Informant 6: female, 38 years, real-estate in-
vestor, Lisbon; interview carried out inside
Pensão Amor, on 12 November 2011, at about
2:15 a.m.
• Informant 7: male, 30 years, postdoctoral re-
search fellow, foreigner (Spaniard); interview
carried out inside Pensão Amor, on 12 No-
vember 2011, at about 2:15 a.m.
• Informant 8: male, 50 years (approx.), police,
Lisbon; interview carried out on 6 June 2012,
at about 2:30 a.m.
Together with the ethnographic fieldwork, a first
cartography of Lisbon’s nightlife was carried out –
but not included in this text – to better contextualize
the role that Cais do Sodré has in the nightlife sys-
tem of the Portuguese capital. Therefore, this paper
does not pretend to discuss what the interviewed
people told, but it carries out a first approach to the
gentrification of Cais do Sodré and the rise of a “dis-
tinguished” urban nightscape in downtown Lisbon
based on the promotion of newly-created “vintage-
style” nightlife.
This paper uses as its starting point the definitions
of “vintage” and “gentrification” appearing in the
online version of the American Heritage Dictionary,
which defines the second of these terms as the res-
toration of deteriorated urban property, especially
in working-class neighbourhoods carried out by the
middle and upper classes. At first glance, one might
distinguish that which is abandoned, derelict, old,
or simply vintage. In that sense, the Oxford Ad-
vanced American Dictionary refers to the term “vin-
tage” as something typical of a period in the past
and of high quality. Having in mind such linguistic
distinctions and focusing on the case study of Cais
do Sodré, the text below will attempt to show how
a new cool nightscape – which is today playing a
key role in gentrifying Cais do Sodré – can be seen
as the result of promoting a vintage-style nightlife
that is synonymous with a consumption space of
social distinction, as has been previously pointed
out.
When it comes to ethical issues, this research has
involved tracking the localization and observation
of people, and the personal data of interviewees has
been manually recorded in a fieldwork notebook.
Interviewees were informed about the purpose and
the scientific nature of this research and were asked
to give oral consent to use their narratives. Because
interviewees have not had the right to check and
emend the final transcription before the storage pro-
cess, or the right to evidence parts of their narra-
tives, their non-identified status has been strictly
maintained, and the complete transcriptions of in-
terviews have been stored in a database only acces-
sible to the author of this manuscript. Finally, no
participants in this research were underaged.
108 FENNIA 191: 2 (2013)Jordi Nofre
Fig. 1. Localization of
Cais do Sodré (Lisbon
downtown).
Source: Nofre (c) 2013.
FENNIA 191: 2 (2013) 109“Vintage Nightlife”: Gentrifying Lisbon downtown
Studying gentrification as cultural
consumption and social distinction
Although the term “gentrification” can be origi-
nally found in Memoirs and Proceedings of the
Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society writ-
ten in 1888 (Atkinson & Bridge 2008), it acquired
a contemporary meaning when the British sociolo-
gist Ruth Glass (1964) used it in her book London:
Aspects of Change. According to Glass, Islington’s
population of a low economic class was being re-
placed by new upper class individuals coming
from other wealthier London suburbs. Over the
decade of the 1970s and early 1980s, some of the
first empirical works on gentrification were pub-
lished. Some considered it to be a positive re-
sponse to the degradation of downtowns (Ley
1986), while others theorized about gentrification
as a process linked to public and private strategies
on housing (Hamnett 1973; Williams 1976). In
fact, the Institute of British Geographers inaugu-
rated its Transactions by paying special attention to
gentrification, which demonstrates the importance
that it had gained during the 1970s. In parallel,
other scholars have argued that gentrification has
to do with the existence of urban inequalities as a
consequence of the processes of urban regenera-
tion (Smith 1979a, 1979b; Berry 1980; Ley 1980).
From the beginning of the 1980s, gentrification
began to affect many areas of cities, not only in Brit-
ain, but also around the world. Neil Smith (1979b),
in his study on gentrification of the Society Hill bor-
ough in Philadelphia, pointed out that gentrification
had become fundamental in the restructuring of ur-
ban space because this particularly depended on
the volume of productive capital returning to the
gentrified central area. Such an explanation of gen-
trification must be considered as the basis of the
so-called rent-gap theory, further developed in
many papers published by Neil Smith himself and
by many other authors. After Smith’s paper, another
two economists’ theories emerged: Hamnett and
Randolph’s (1984, 1986) value-gap explanation,
and the consumption-side explanation of gentrifica-
tion. This latter focused on the key role that con-
sumption and culture played in the process of gen-
trification in the New York neighbourhood of Soho
(Zukin 1982). By taking culture and consumption
into account as key categories for the geographical
analysis of gentrification, some scholars have sug-
gested new approaches to answering the “hows”,
“whos”, and “whys” of gentrification. In that sense,
Sharon Zukin (1982) mixed both the production-
and consumption-side models of explanation. In
the due course of time, her work has become a new
epistemological paradigm for studying recent pro-
cesses of gentrification in worldwide cities.
During the 1990s, many authors have underlined
the rapid (re)production of gentrification around the
world. However, some have suggested the exist-
ence of two kinds of gentrification; on the one
hand, “US gentrification”, and on the other hand,
“European gentrification” (Musterd & van Weesep
1991; Lees 1994; Lees & Bondi 1995). In their study
based on the inner London borough of Islington and
on Park Slope, which is a part of the Brooklyn bor-
ough of New York City, Lees and Bondi (1995) not-
ed that in the case of European cities the greatest
urban areas were redeveloped due to the interven-
tionist role of the State. However, in the case of the
US cities, the role of the State was quasi-noninter-
ventionist. However, there could be a wide discus-
sion about this, taking into account the recent cases
of gentrification in uptown Brooklyn (New York)
and French Quarter in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Although globalization has led to the homogeniza-
tion of processes of gentrification in worldwide
capitalist cities (especially after the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the communist bloc), many authors con-
tinue to agree that gentrification expresses a process
of class change in a previously degraded area (Smith
1996; Butler 2007). In fact, many authors consider
that gentrification is best explained if it is consid-
ered as the social and spatial manifestation of the
transition from an industrial to a post-industrial
economy (Butler 1997; Ley 1997; Lees 2000; Ham-
nett 2003).
During recent years, many authors have under-
lined the relationship between residential market
regeneration, housing policies, and gentrification in
several cities around the world. Such diffusion of
gentrification around the world is related to globali-
zation, since (neoliberal) urban governments adopt
gentrification as the unique strategy for urban re-
generation (Atkinson & Bridge 2008). Actually to-
day's processes of gentrification are densely con-
nected to the circuits of global capital and cultural
circulation (Smith 2002). More specifically, this in-
cludes the promotion of a “distinguished” nightlife,
not only as a form of cultural or leisure consump-
tion, but also as a strategy for the social sanitization
of the inner city. This new form of nightlife adopts
re-signified elements of the local nightscape.
The term “social sanitization” is rarely used in so-
cial and human sciences, although some authors
110 FENNIA 191: 2 (2013)Jordi Nofre
from the field of medieval studies, social and cul-
tural history, criminology, and more recently from
the field of urban policy have analysed how social
sanitization has been executed by several different
institutional bodies (Weatherly 1926; Stearns 1936,
and more recently, Miraftab 2007; Vangby & Jensen
2009; Welch 2009). The improvement of punish-
ment, the imprisonment of deviants, or even the
social sanitization in regenerating a degraded urban
area are some examples of this rare, scarce use of
the term “social sanitization” among today's schol-
ars. In fact, its roots come from the Chicago's Crim-
inology School of the first decades of the twentieth
century, whose research efforts were mainly fo-
cused on how local institutions punished (young)
deviant individuals – such as the Chicago's Street-
Corner Boys (Thrasher 1926; Whyte 1943) – to
clean the industrial city. However, more than eighty
years later, a new gentrification–sanitizing strategy
is once again being carried out by the Chicago City
Council in order to support one of the strategies of
the capital to restructure its Spanish-speaking neigh-
bourhoods (Wilson & Grammenos 2005). Here, so-
cial sanitization has to do with that idea of “civiliz-
ing a society”, as Ulysses G. Weatherly (1926) ex-
plored in the case of the role of American experts in
post-revolutionary Haiti. Therefore, social sanitiza-
tion and the fact of civilizing a community or neigh-
bourhood involves its moral sanitation – in the
terms of Ernest R. Groves (1916). So the relationship
between gentrification, and social and moral saniti-
zation – that is to say, the promotion of new (Chris-
tian, bourgeois) values and behavioural ways –
should not be disassociated from the institutionally-
supported promotion of the (young) neoliberal
worker (Walker & Finchman 2011).
Coming back to our case study, here social sani-
tization is conceived in the same sense that John
Galtung (1958) suggested in his The Social Func-
tions of a Prison, where the author argued that so-
cial sanitization had to do with the attempt carried
out by institutions to decrease to zero the visibility
of selected types of deviants. If we consider here the
criminalization of “being young” (Castells 2012;
Nofre & Feixa 2013) as part of the recent instaura-
tion of the Neoliberal Penal State (Wacquant 2008)
in post-industrial countries, the definition provided
by Galtung acquires great timeliness in these last
decades of “zero-tolerance politics” that feature the
neoliberal city (Garnier 2010). Furthermore, I have
implicitly used the Galtung's definition in some
previous publications about nightlife, urban trans-
formations, and social contestations in Euro-Medi-
terranean cities such as Lisbon, Barcelona, and Sa-
rajevo (Nofre & Martín 2009; Nofre 2011; Nofre &
Feixa 2013).
This paper intends to explore how social sanitiza-
tion works in the case of the Cais do Sodré neigb-
hourhood by focusing on the role of the former
prostitution hostel Pensão Amor. In this process, the
original early twentieth decoration of Pensão Amor
plays a key role in the rise of most distinguished
nightlife space in today's Lisbon, where internation-
al DJs play what we could call as de-territorialized
world music, which is “global and deterritorialized
music which although coming from a specific
place, ends up ‘speaking to all’ as it reaches the
sphere of global culture” (De La Barre 2010: 140).
Here the question which arises, therefore, is: Could
this kind of “globalized nightlife” be considered to
be a kind of the so-called “globalized gentrifica-
tion” (Maeckelbergh 2012)?
Promoting nightlife as strategy of
gentrification
Culture and consumption have become key issues
in explaining how gentrification has evolved in cit-
ies worldwide over the last four decades. Howev-
er, few studies have paid attention to the emer-
gence of a distinguished nightlife – or clubbing, in
the terms of Sara Thornton (1995) – as a conse-
quence of gentrification and the emergence of a
distinction-based lifestyle of new middle classes in
global cities (Savage & Butler 1995; Butler 1997;
Wynne & O’Connor 1998; Chatterton & Hollands
2003). One such work is the study by David Ley
(2003) on the role of artists as agents who contrib-
ute to the gentrifying of former working-class
neighbourhoods in some Canadian cities, such as
Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. But beyond
gentrification, Sharon Zukin (2009) suggests focus-
ing our attention on how the authentic city is be-
ing (re)produced every day. As Zukin argues,
“these forces of redevelopment have smoothed the
uneven layers of grit and glamour, swept away
traces of contentious history, cast doubt on the
idea that poor people have a right to live and work
here too – all that had made the city authentic”
(Zukin 2009: xi).
Having in mind the rise of the authentic city sug-
gested by Sharon Zukin, the aestheticization of the
everyday life of our postindustrial cities appear to
be a key process in exploring the relationship be-
FENNIA 191: 2 (2013) 111“Vintage Nightlife”: Gentrifying Lisbon downtown
tween a distinguished and socially sanitized night-
life, and gentrification (Nofre & Martin 2009; Nofre
2011). In fact, the spatial approach to the study of
nightlife has gained importance over the last dec-
ade, with its emphasis on the close relationship be-
tween the strategy of city-securitization led by the
inner city’s elites and the promotion of a gentrified
nightlife. In that sense, Paul Chatterton and Robert
Hollands (2003) released a very influential book, in
which they explored the continuities and changes
of corporate control in the entertainment and night-
life economies, as well as the process of the brand-
ing and theming of nightlife. They paid special at-
tention to the emergence of segmented, sanitized,
and gentrified consumer markets. In addition, the
authors also explored the economic processes gov-
erning the nightlife structure in Western European
cities by focusing on the interaction between youth,
central nightlife, marginal nightlife, music tastes,
lifestyles, and dress codes (Chatterton & Hollands
2003). As they argued, gentrification and nightlife
are associated with some of these issues, which
strongly contribute to the elitization of the social
space of the city. However, such a process of night-
life elitization usually involves some spatial dis-
placements of traditional, working-class night-time
leisure activities (Chatterton & Hollands 2003). In-
deed, many authors have recently explored how
nightlife gentrification involves a certain spatial
marginalization of working-class night-time leisure
activities in today’s Western cities. In some cases,
such as Barcelona (Catalonia), this marginalization
of old forms of nightlife responds to well-estab-
lished strategies for the social sanitation and moral
sanitation of its working-class suburbs (Nofre 2011).
However, is all the old actually displaced or even
marginalized in the nightlife of post-industrial cities
such as Lisbon? But before I continue, I will present
some geographical notes on Cais do Sodre and Lis-
bon.
Brief geographical notes on Lisbon and
Cais do Sodré
The urban history of the former Cais do Sodré
neighbourhood is closely linked to the urban
growth of Lisbon waterfront, which has occurred
since the sixteenth century (Fig. 2). During the
reign of the Portuguese king Manuel I (1495–1521)
new waterfront spaces were created to expand its
harbour premises, such as the Santos quarter and
Cata-que-Farás (today’s Cais-do-Sodré neighbour-
hood). These formerly muddy terrains were rapidly
landfilled to build warehouses for commercial and
port activities, which received loads transported
by small boats coming from the big ships anchored
about half a mile away from the riverside (Durão
2012).
In the second half of the twentieth century, the
so-called Old Cais de Sodré gave way to the New
Cais (França 2013). What over many decades was a
neighbourhood that overindulged in food and
drinks, peep shows, fado music, drunken sailors,
some gun violence, drug trafficking, and prostitu-
tion, began to change in the mid-1970s when some
traditional bars and native-run groceries were con-
verted into small-sized discotheques (such as Jamai-
ca Discotheque, Europa Bar, Texas Bar, and Viking).
Moreover, numerous bars, then named after some
world port cities (Philadelphia, Shangri-La, Tokyo,
Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Liverpool, Oslo, etc.) also
opened.
The neighbourhood of Cais do Sodré was then
deeply rooted in its origins as a harbour environ-
ment, which featured its own urban morphology, its
everyday life, and its appropriation by native-born
storekeepers, local and foreigner traders, sailors,
prostitutes, and so on, up until today. The popular
revolution that occurred on 25 April 1974 – the
stepping down of Salazar’s fascist regime – brought
about the initial “democratization” of Lisbon’s
nightlife. Hence, Cais do Sodré was re-appropriated
by the young middle classes, university students,
bohemians, intellectuals, and local journalists once
democracy was restored. Today these social groups
have become key agents in promoting the new cool
nightscape that has recently emerged in Cais do
Sodré.
However, nothing of the past continues to exist
today. As pointed out by the BBC’s journalist Kerry
Christiani: “Cais do Sodré had upstaged Bairro Alto
as Lisbon's most happening nightlife district” (Chris-
tiani 2012). Over recent years, some urban changes
have taken place in Cais do Sodré. Its deprivation
developed through the twentieth century in terms of
building degradation over time and the rise of criti-
cal health risks associated with the consumption of
alcohol, drugs, and marginal prostitution; but it
found a first solution in the late 1970s through the
promotion of a bohemian nightlife among univer-
sity students, liberal professionals such as journal-
ists, writers, singers and musicians, and young poli-
ticians, among others. In fact, they felt free of the
consuming city after the stepping down of Salazar's
112 FENNIA 191: 2 (2013)Jordi Nofre
fascist regime (1933–1974). However, in the 1990s
this bohemian nightlife in Cais do Sodré was rapidly
replaced by a new one, which was much more ori-
ented to global mass tourism. Till two years ago,
tourists, young local people, and Erasmus students
had been consuming an urban nightscape in which
drugs, marginal prostitution, police, and some few
high purchasing power customers had coexisted.
In 2010 the City Council approved support for
new private initiatives to transform Cais do Sodré
into a new hub of cultural production and con-
sumption especially oriented to the new middle
classes (Florida 2000) and local upper-middle class-
es, as Section 6 accurately depicts. It meant to sup-
port gentrification in the former harbour quarter of
Cais do Sodré. However, what has been comment-
ed on to date about gentrification, rent-gap, and
value-gap theories may not be helpful for highlight-
ing how this area of the Portuguese capital is cur-
rently being gentrified through a new socially sani-
tized nightlife based on the newly-emerged vintage-
style decoration of nightlife venues.
Fig. 2. A sight of the Lisbon water-
front in 1903 (top), and a partial sight
of Cais do Sodré in 1900 (bottom).
Source: SkyScraperCity 2013.2
FENNIA 191: 2 (2013) 113“Vintage Nightlife”: Gentrifying Lisbon downtown
Consuming “the vintage” as a new
form of social distinction
In several South-European cities like Lisbon, the
consumption of vintage fashion seems to have re-
emerged as sign of class-based distinction. In the
case of the Portuguese capital, this process is
closely linked to the recent rise of the local pin-up
movement as a new form of youthful hedonism.
For example, two recently-opened stores of pin-up
and vintage furniture, art, goods, clothes, and
memorabilia located in the gentrified neighbour-
hood of Bairro Alto (Mendes 2006) – namely Bad
Luck (closed in Autumn 2010) and Ás de Espadas
– have been satisfying this demand for youthful he-
donistic consumption (Veenhoven 2003; Goss
2004; Baptista 2005; Migone 2007). In fact, Le
Cool Magazine Lisboa labelled Ás de Espadas (Fig.
3) as one of the best fashion boutiques in Lisbon
(Rosa 2010).
On the other hand, the recent re-inauguration of
the 1940s-styled Hotel Flórida in one of the wealth-
iest area of Lisbon (Duque de Palmela Street) is not
a mere coincidence. Many night-time parties and
performances have recently favoured the re-emer-
gence of both the pin-up and vintage movements as
an alternative to mainstream nightlife promotion in
the Portuguese capital. In this alternative (and dis-
tinctive) movement, the Cais do Sodré Cabaret As-
sociation plays a key role:
“CAIS SODRÉ CABARET! aims to celebrate the
times when gentlemen wore hats and ladies wore
gloves...a celebration of style and glamour of an-
other epoch. In Portugal, during the 20s and 30s,
there were many clubs and cafes that held writers,
artists and intellectuals’ meetings… . We aim to
recreate a retro-atmosphere associated with bohe-
mian night life celebration where party and pleas-
ure are priority: music, dancing, drinking and
smoking, but also sordid and decadent atmos-
phere of Cais do Sodré. It was on its dark and dirty
alleys, street corners and sidewalks, illuminated
by neon light announcing bars with revered city
names, where hooker ladies and their pimps, po-
licemen, dockers and all kinds of clients hungry
for emotions walked on by, where sailors brought
in the first American rock 'n' roll records. All these
spirits are invoked in the party!” (Cais do Sodré
Cabaret, General Information – Facebook Ac-
count, 2012).
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the
Cais do Sodré neighbourhood was characterized by
a sordid atmosphere. Today, such sordidness has
been re-signified into a vintage atmosphere associ-
Fig. 3. Vintage design and consumption of distinction in the “Ás de Espadas” store, Lisbon. Source: Loja Ás de Espadas © 2012.
114 FENNIA 191: 2 (2013)Jordi Nofre
ated with a socially sanitized bohemian nightlife
which is mainly oriented towards the local new
middle classes. The next section shows how such a
re-signified, distinguished vintage-like atmosphere
has elitized a formerly decadent working-class ur-
ban nightscape. In doing this, this paper aims to ob-
serve how vintage style is socially recognizable and
highly valued because of its commitment to a spe-
cific distinguished authenticity, which is largely in-
herited from the one that originated in the early
twentieth-century European bohemia. What we
could call a bohemianized distinction therefore
seeks to be radically differentiated from the mass
(and vulgar) leisure consumption. It thus becomes a
mechanism for social distinction and the accumula-
tion of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1979). In short,
José Luís Borges’ argument about the task of hu-
manity in turning memory into beauty has become
a simulated reality, where the memory of deca-
dence and sordidness seems to have been turned
into a vintage-styled good for distinctive consump-
tion.
Cais do Sodré: Gentrifying a decadent
nightscape in downtown Lisbon
The democratization of Lisbon’s nightlife after the
Salazar’s fascist regime has also involved a spatial
displacement of marginal prostitution. Today, this
process has been reinforced, as reported by jour-
nalist Clara Silva (2011):
“In Pensão Amor, there are still beds, cabinets,
chairs and mirrors of the times when the building
housed prostitution. In fact, they then run four
hostels which rented rooms per hour to prostitutes
and sailors arrived from various parts of the world
who had docked for some days at Cais do Sodré.
Nowadays rooms can also be rented daily, weekly
or monthly, but just to companies – which have
nothing to do with prostitution.”
In fact, the small bridge of Rua do Alecrim di-
vides the nightlife area of Cais do Sodré into two
parts (Fig. 4). In its western area three newly-
opened, vintage-styled venues (Pensão Amor, Bar
da Velha Senhora, and Sol e Pesca) offer a nightlife
almost exclusively for the local and global new up-
per-middle classes. However, some of the young
lower-middle classes (mostly local university stu-
dents) also frequent these venues to avoid the sor-
didness that exists in the eastern side (Informant 1),
where small-sized traditional discotheques that
opened in the beginning of the 1970s (Jamaica, Vi-
king, Europa Bar, Oslo Bar, Liverpool Bar, Copenha-
gen Bar, and Tokyo) continue to offer Cais do Sodré’s
traditional nightlife: cheap beer, cut-rate liquors,
aged prostitutes, drugs traffic (hashish and cocaine),
the same classic hits from the 1970s sounding every
night, the original indoor design, and so on.
However, this decadent atmosphere is re-signi-
fied by some (white) upper-middle class adults,
many of whom work in the fields of cinema, jour-
nalism, and TV serials (Informant 2). For some of
them, it just means remembering those nights spent
there when they were younger; for others, it signi-
fies a degraded nightlife full of drug dealers, aged
prostitution, Erasmus and local students, sordid-
ness, and so on; all of which have been existing, but
these adult riders of the night never interacted with
them. They experience a nightlife flooded with con-
trolled emotions in a safe atmosphere guaranteed
by the venue’s security staff as well as by a signifi-
cant number of secret police agents (Informant 8).
Needlessly, nightlife has been a great battlefield
in socially sanitizing – even gentrifying – the neigh-
bourhoods of several cities worldwide, as has been
previously argued. However, the case of the Cais do
Sodre neighbourhood in downtown Lisbon is of
great interest in better understanding the hidden
strategies carried out by local institutions. One ex-
ample of this would be the pedestrianization of Rua
Nova de Carvalho. In a wide sense, such an inter-
vention in a public space should not result in a great
public discussion. However, in the late autumn of
2011 the City Council decided to pedestrianize Rua
Nova de Carvalho, thus satisfying the demands of
venue owners in contrast to the protests of lifelong
neighbours who are organized in the association
Nós Lisboetas (Sobral 2012). In fact, the neighbours
argued that the pedestrianization of Rua Nova de
Carvalho responded to the strategy of the City
Council of keeping and promoting nightlife as a rel-
evant income source for the city. Moreover, some
informants interviewed in this research agreed by
pointing out that the City Council decided to paint
in pink Rua Nova de Carvalho Street, the main
street in the nightlife cluster of Cais do Sodré, to
promote some kind of distinguished nightlife. When
further asked about some convenient arrangement
between the City Council and the elitist Pensão
Amor Hostel, most informants considered that it
seems there is an institutionally supported strategy
of creating a new distinguished nightscape in the
Cais do Sodré neighbourhood. It would not be risky
to take such statements seriously, as the City Coun-
FENNIA 191: 2 (2013) 115“Vintage Nightlife”: Gentrifying Lisbon downtown
cil recently approved (on 24 April 2013) the urban
regeneration plan of Cais do Sodré's waterfront
side. In fact, the term “gentrification” did not appear
when nightlife consumers were informally inter-
viewed in loco. But, although such a term seems to
be consciously avoided by much of the local media
from Lisbon, some publications have echoed such a
regeneration of the nightscape of Cais do Sodré, as
reported by Clara Silva (2011):
“The bar that once attracted American sailors has
given rise to the Music Box, one of the trendiest
nightclubs in the capital which opened three years
ago. DJ battles, concerts and electronic music often
attract a young, fashionable clientele and displaced
prostitutes… . Texas Bar just left a neon cactus, aban-
doned in the dark wall of the rear of the Music Box.”
However, the reconversion of Cais do Sodré can-
not be completely understood without having in
mind the role that the newly-opened Pensão Amor
Hostel plays in socially elitizing the urban night-
scape of this neighbourhood of downtown Lisbon.
Pensão Amor occupies an old five-story building:
the walls are painted in red, and there are chande-
liers and lamps with trinkets, old pictures of semi-
naked slightly shy ladies in erotic poses, and wood-
en nineteenth century styled chairs all lending a
vintage-style atmosphere to the whole building. Its
first floor is a multifunctional space where exhibi-
tions, lectures, and book launches often take place,
and it also has a small space to stand up while
drinking a cocktail and listening to the DJ session.
Fig. 4. Cais do Sodré, today.
Source:
(Image 1, modified by the author).
116 FENNIA 191: 2 (2013)Jordi Nofre
On the rest of the floors, rooms have been reno-
vated to host creative artistic initiatives, including
the management office of the Queer Lisbon Festi-
val (Jerónimo 2011). Besides, there is a cabaret-
styled room decorated with antique chairs, where
clientele can read, talk, and drink distinguishably
(see Fig. 5) in a socially sanitized space. (White)
bouncers carry out the sanitation of the venue by
applying discriminatory criteria based on ethnici-
ty, class, and body appearance. In other words,
blacks who migrated from the former Portuguese
colonies, gypsies, and anyone who does not ap-
pear to belong to the native born middle-upper
classes is prohibited from entering the Pensão
Amor Hostel.3 The social sanitization carried out
by the Pensão Amor’s bouncers has strong implica-
tions for policing Cais do Sodré’s nightlife as well
as for how security in public spaces is being privat-
ized; in other words, the way privatization and
sanitation in public spaces are today gaining im-
portance is an implication of that ecology of fear
featured in the nightlife of most of the Western cit-
ies (Chatterton & Hollands 2003).
The BBC-Travel Channel recently reported Pen-
são Amor as “once a brothel, [it] had been reborn
as an art space with a bordello-chic bar” (Chris-
tiani 2012). The fact of labelling Pensão Amor as a
bordello-chic bar reinforces the hypothesis that
this venue is the most important agent in gentrify-
ing nightlife in Cais do Sodré. Furthermore, the use
of the term “bordello-chic” suggests some changes
in the meaning of the term “bohemia.” Such
changes refer to two dimensions of the term itself;
that is, its spatial and behavioural dimension. First,
Pensão Amor offers an indoor design space remi-
niscent of the bohemian nightclubs of the most
culturally active world cities during the decades of
the 1920s and 1930s such as, for example, Chi-
cago, Paris, and New York. However, most of the
changes in the meaning of the term “bohemia” re-
fer to its behavioural dimension, and involve a
new sanitized vision about what bohemia means.
As argued by the Portuguese journalist Sancha
Trindade, “… with warm colours, hanging mirrors,
an old piano and flooded with sexy photos of sev-
eral decades ago, the seductive atmosphere al-
Fig. 5. Inside Pensão Amor: a detail of the first floor (top), and a performance by the Pensão Amor’s clientele who are quietly
talking (3). Source Images (1, 3 & 4): Pensão Amor © 2012. Source Image (2) (top right): Jordi Nofre © 2012.
FENNIA 191: 2 (2013) 117“Vintage Nightlife”: Gentrifying Lisbon downtown
ready confirms the future success of Pensão” (Trin-
dade 2011). In that sense, Pensão Amor offers a
socially sanitized menu of night-time elegance,
predictable pleasure, and controlled fantasy for its
clientele (Fig. 6).
However, if bohemianism, luxury consumption,
new sexual and drugs experimentation, as well as
youth culture and social informality have appeared
as the most recognized social values during the
interwar period in the twentieth century, then to-
day’s meaning of bohemia has been socially sani-
tized. Explicit desires for sexual experimentation
shown through dress codes have become a taboo,
while dress experimentation is also prohibited. On
the other hand, the fact of explicitly belonging to
any working-class youth subculture4 makes it very
difficult to access Pensão Amor, which contrasts
with the members of any (white) middle-class sub-
culture, such as hipsters (Informants 3 & 4). More-
over, individual behaviours such as exultation, ex-
plicit happiness, laughing loudly, drink quickly, or
sensual dancing are seen as inappropriate: “Many
African and Brazilian dances often imply body ex-
posure, and physical contact. It is awful” (Inform-
ants 5, 6, 7).
On the other hand, social informality that once
featured at bohemian venues, where writers, jour-
nalists, and artists usually gathered, has given way
to predictable, scripted de-politicized conversa-
tions. In the transformation of the bohemian into
the vintage, glasses of wine, cocktails, and ciga-
rettes still continue to decorate tables even after
several decades, while political conversation has
been eradicated. The vintage nightlife has been
de-politicized, socially sanitized, and morally
controlled. As argued by Mikas, “Many people
join prostitutes and bars when they think of Cais
do Sodré. We aim to take this popular knowledge
that goes from the burlesque to the carbaret and to
safely retain the aesthetic nature of the indoor
space without it being irreverent” (Mikas 2011,
cited in Silva 2011).
Final remarks
Mikas, together with Nuno, Ricardo, and João
Nuno are the owners of Bar da Velha Senhora (Sil-
va 2011), the other vintage-style nightclub located
just on the ground floor of the Pensão Amor’s
building. At the opening of Pensão Amor, they had
counted on the financial and logistical support of
Mainside, a real estate company which also par-
ticipated in the opening of the LX Factory – a cul-
Fig. 6. Some vintage-style flyers of Pensão Amor. Source: Pensão Amor © 2012.
118 FENNIA 191: 2 (2013)Jordi Nofre
tural production cluster recently opened in Alcân-
tara, one of the harbour neighbourhoods of the
Lisbon waterfront side such as Cais do Sodré – as
well as in the inauguration of the LX Boutique Ho-
tel in Rua de Alecrim, in front of Pensao Amor it-
self.
The fact that real-estate company Mainside
owns Pensão Amor, Bar da Velha Senhora, LX Bou-
tique Hotel, and LX Factory may reinforce the idea
of the beginning of the process of gentrification in
the Cais do Sodré neighbourhood, which is mainly
characterized at the moment by elite night-time
leisure activities. The Pensão Amor Hostel and its
popularity among the local upper-middle classes
demonstrates the resilience and flexibility of local
small-scale nightlife, and its importance in gentri-
fying and socially sanitizing downtown Lisbon. In
that sense, this paper has presented the first results
of a 2-year ethnographic fieldwork study of urban
changes and nightlife promotion in Lisbon by de-
scribing the case of a newly emerged vintage-style
nightlife in the former harbour quarter of Cais do
Sodré (downtown Lisbon).
This paper has shown how such recently-
emerged nightlife is currently playing a key role in
gentrifying the nightscape of this urban area,
where the traditional nightlife is today being sup-
planted by vintage-style nightlife. To exemplify
such a transformation, this paper has prioritized a
significant place, the Pensão Amor Hostel, which
plays a key role in remaking a socially sanitized
and morally controlled new nightscape, marginal-
izing everyone who is seen to be inappropriate,
socially perilous, and unfit in the process of the
city branding of Lisbon: the authentic bohemia in
Cais do Sodré continues to smell of salt and sweat,
wine and sex.
Many authors have explored the different forms
that gentrification has recently adopted around the
world, by labelling it as post-industrial gentrifica-
tion, new urban colonialism, and so on. The adjec-
tive 'post-industrial' does not matter here, but gen-
trification itself is a process of social sanitization
and a violation of the right to the city as well. In
studying the nightlife of Cais do Sodré, this paper
has not pretended to analyse how its gentrification
has occurred, but it has explored how customers
consume its vintage-style aesthetics as a new form
of social distinction, and how such consumption
appears to be a mechanism for sanitizing Cais do
Sodré’s nightlife. There are many common aspects
of the way gentrification operates across the entire
world; however, the social and cultural peculiari-
ties of places involve gentrification adopting differ-
ent aesthetics according to local distinctiveness.
Maybe we scholars should take into account again
what Loretta Lees (2000) suggested regarding gen-
trification as the cure-all for inner-city ills that can
verify the dullest natured politicians and techni-
cians governing our cities. In short, here we would
support what Max Haivens (2010) stated: “The fi-
nancial crisis as a crisis of imagination”.
Today’s financial and real-estate crisis has pro-
voked a situation where gentrification seems to be
much more fragmented than a few years ago
(Mendes 2011). Great urban transformations in
downtown areas have given way to marginal gen-
trification that only takes place in some restricted
parts of the city (Rose 1984; Mendes 2011). This
does not mean that gentrification is on its last legs.
As this paper has shown, in the case of the Pensão
Amor Hostel, some selected buildings have be-
come agents of this newly-emerged marginal gen-
trification. We scholars should continue to explore
how it is re-bordering urban inequalities in our
post-industrial cities, where a sanitized nightlife is
going to play a key role for a long time.
NOTES
1 For two main reasons, not all of the participants have
been quoted in this text. The first reason is obvious, as the
editorial board of this journal limits the text length, and not
all can be fitted in this paper. The second reason is that the
research I present here will be part of a three-paper series
on Lisbon's nightlife to be published in the near future.
2 Please, note that these pictures, which are part of the
Historical Archive Fund of Lisbon have been downloaded
from the forum “SkyScraperCity”, one of the most impor-
tant online forums on urban issues, because of restricted
access to the Portuguese National Library of Torre do Pom-
bo in 2010 and 2011 due to remodeling works. Source
(top image): . Source (bottom image):
(both accessed on 4 January
2013).
3 Nightlife segregation in Lisbon may also be seen as a re-
flection of urban segregation in the Portuguese capital.
Black lower-class immigrants who have arrived from for-
mer Portuguese colonies are housed in poor housing con-
ditions in segregated neighbourhoods (Baptista 2011).
Hence, everyday segmented social practices include
night-time leisure activities.
4 This paper does not intend to discuss the tension between
youth subcultures, youth nightlife, and middle-class life-
style, although some studies may consider that it is central
to many cases where nightlife is promoted in the gentrifica-
tion of areas.
FENNIA 191: 2 (2013) 119“Vintage Nightlife”: Gentrifying Lisbon downtown
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been supported by the Fundação para
a Ciência e a Tecnologia de Portugal (FCT-SFRH/
BPD/63178/2009) and the Centro de Estudos de So-
ciologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (CesNova).
I would like to also thank Professor Marc Oliva (IG-
OT-UL) by his support in doing fieldwork as well as
his ideas, reflections, discussions and “particular”
points of view about nightlife.
REFERENCES
Atkinson R & Brigde G (eds) 2008. Gentrification in a
Global Context: a new urban coionialism. Rout-
ledge, New York.
Baptista L 2005. Territórios Lúdicos (e o que se torna
lúdico um território): Ensaiando um ponto de par-
tida. Fórum Sociológico 13–14: 47–58.
Baptista L (ed) 2011. A construção da metrópole: seg-
regação urbana e intervenção pública em Lisboa
(1950–2011). Final Project Report. Lisboa, CesNo-
va, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities,
New University of Lisbon.
Berry BJL 1980. Forces reshaping the settlement sys-
tem. In Bryce H (ed). Cities and Firms. Lexington
Books, Lexington.
Bourdieu P 1979. La distinction. Éditions de Minuit,
París.
Butler T 1997. Gentrification and the middle classes.
Ashgate, Aldershot.
Butler T 2007. For gentrification? Environment and Plan-
ning A 39: 1, 162–181. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/
a38472.
Castells M 2012. Networks of outrage and hope. So-
cial movements in the internet age. Polity Press,
New York.
Chatterton P & Hollands R 2003. Urban nightscapes:
youth cultures, pleasure spaces and corporate
power. Routledge, New York.
Christiani K 2012. The rebirth of Lisbon’s Cais do
Sodré. BBC-Travel Channel. 8.3.2013.
De La Barre J 2010. Music, city, ethnicity: exploring
musical scenes in Lisbon. Migrações – Special Is-
sue Music and Migration 7: 39–156.
Durão VCM 2012. Reclaimed land: an urban analysis
– The landfills in Lisbon´s downtown and river-
front. Journal of Integrated Coastal Zone Manage-
ment 12: 1, 17−30.
Eurocities 2001. Culture: The engine of the 21st Cen-
tury European cities. European Commission, Brus-
sels.
Florida R 2000. The rise of the creative class: and
how it’s transforming work, leisure, community
and everyday life. Basic Books, New York.
França JA 2013. Lisboa – historia física e moral. Livros
Horizonte, Lisboa.
Galtung J 1958. The social functions of a prison. So-
cial Problems 6: 2, 127–140.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/sp.1958.6.2.03a00050.
Garnier JP 2010. Une violence éminentmment con-
temporaine. Essais sur la ville, la petite bourgeoisie
intellectuelle & l’effacement des classes popu-
laires. Contre-Feux Agone, París.
Glass R 1964. London: Aspects of Change. Centre for
Urban Studies and MacGibbon and Knee, Lon-
don.
Goss J 2004. Geography and consumption – I. Pro-
gress in Human Geography 28: 3, 369–380. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1191/0309132504ph486pr.
Groves ER 1916. Moral Sanitation. New York, Asso-
ciation Press.
Hael L 2011. Dilemmas of the nightlife fix: post-in-
dustrialization and the gentrification of nightlife in
New York City. Urban Studies 48: 6, 3449–3465.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0042098011400772.
Haivens M 2010. The financial crisis as a crisis of
imagination. Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal
of Marxist Theory & Practice 17.
Hamnett C 1973. Improvement grants as an indicator
of gentrification in Inner London. Area 5, 252–61.
Hamnett C 2003. Gentrification and the middle-class
remaking of inner London 1961–2001. Urban
Studies 40: 12, 2401–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.108
0/0042098032000136138.
Hamnett C & Randolph B 1984. The role of landlord
disinvestment in housing market transformation:
an analysis of the flat break-up market in central
London. Transactions of the Institute of British Ge-
ographers 9, 259–79.
Hamnett C & Randolph B 1986. Tenurial transforma-
tion and the flat break-up market in London: the
British condo experience. In Smith N & Williams
P (eds.). Gentrification of the city, 121–152. Allen
and Unwin, Boston.
Hannerz U 1980. Exploring the City. Towards an Ur-
ban Anthropology. Columbia University Press,
New York.
Hannigan J 1998. Fantasy city: pleasure and profit in
the postmodern metropolis. Routledge, New York.
Jerónimo A 2011. Cais do Sodré é sexy! Pensão Amor,
Bar da Velha Senhora e O Povo: A troika de bares
que veio arrasar a noite Lisboeta, Ruadebaixo 76.
26.3.2012.
Lees L 1994. Gentrification in London and New York:
an Atlantic gap? Housing Studies 9: 2, 127–32.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02673039408720783.
Lees L 2000. A reappraisal of gentrification: Towards
a ‘geography of gentrification. Progress in Human
Geography 24: 3, 389–408.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/030913200701540483.
Lees L & Bondi L 1995. De/gentrification and eco-
nomic recession: the case of New York city. Urban
Geography 16, 234–53.
http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.16.3.234.
120 FENNIA 191: 2 (2013)Jordi Nofre
Lefebvre H 1968. Le Droit à la Ville. Anthropos, Paris.
Ley D 1980. Liberal ideology and the postindustrial
city. Annals of the Association of American Ge-
ographers 70, 238–58.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1980.tb01310.x.
Ley D 1986. Alternative explanations for inner-city
gentrification. Annals of the Association of Ameri-
can Geographers 76, 512–35.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1986.tb00134.x.
Ley D 1997. The new middle class and the remaking
of the central city. University Press, Oxford.
Ley D 2003. Artists, aestheticisation and the field of
gentrification. Urban Studies 40: 12, 2527–2544.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0042098032000136192.
Maeckelbergh M 2012. Mobilizing to stay put: housing
struggles in New York City. International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 36: 4, 653–673.http://
dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01120.x.
Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society 1888.
Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Liter-
ary & Philosophical Society.
Mendes L 2006. A nobilitação urbana do Bairro Alto:
Análise de um processo de recomposição sócio-
espacial. Finisterra 41, 57–82.
Mendes L 2011. Cidade pós-moderna, gentrificação
e produção social do espaço fragmentado. Cader-
nos Metrópole 26, 473–495.
Migone A 2007. Hedonistic consumerism: patterns of
consumption in contemporary capitalism. Review
of Radical Politics Economics 39: 2, 173–200.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0486613407302482.
Miraftab F 2007. Decentralization and entrepenurial
planning. In Beard VA, Miraftab F & Silver C (eds.).
Planning and decentralization: contested spaces
for public actions in the global south, 21–35,
Routledge, New York.
Musterd S & Van Weesep J 1991. European gentrification
or gentrification in Europe. In Van Weesep J & Mus-
terd S (eds.). Urban housing for the better-off: gentrifi-
cation in Europe, 11–16. Stedelijke Netweken, Utre-
cht.
Nofre J 2011. Youth policies, social sanitation, and
contested suburban nightscapes. In Perrone C,
Manella G & Tripodi L (eds). Research in Urban
Sociology 11. Emerald Group Publishing. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1108/S1047-0042(2011)0000011015.
Nofre J & Feixa C 2013. Policies of inclusion? Some
thoughts on the ‘Los Indignados’ movement, the
emerging of the neoliberal penal state and the
criminalization of ‘being young’ in Southern Eu-
rope. In Rethinking Urban Inclusion, _Cescon-
texto_/Debates 2. University of Coimbra Press,
Coimbra (Portugal). 5.5.2012.
Nofre J & Martin J 2009. Ocio nocturno, gentrifi-
cación y distinción social en el centro histórico de
Sarajevo [Nightlife, gentrification, and social dis-
tinction in downtown Sarajevo]. Anales de Geo-
grafía de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid
29: 1, 91–110.
Ritzer G 1993. The McDonaldization of society. Pine
Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Ritzer G 1998. The McDonaldization thesis: explora-
tions and extensions. Sage, London.
Ritzer G 2010. Enchanting a disenchanted world:
continuity and change in the cathedrals of con-
sumption. Sage, New York.
Rosa L 2010. Loja Vintage: Ás de Espadas. Le Cool
Magazine Lisboa, October 2010. 12.4.2012.
Rose D 1984. Rethinking gentrification: beyond the
uneven development of Marxist urban theory. En-
vironment and Planning D: Society and Space 2:
1, 47–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d020047.
Savage M & Butler T 1995. Social change and the
middle classes. Routledge, London.
Silva C 2011. Cais do Sodré. Os novos inquilinos
chegam à Pensão Amor e ao Bar da Velha Senhora
[Cais do Sodré. New dwellers arriving at Pensão
Amor and Bar da Velha Senhora]. ionline, 10 No-
vember 2011.
Smith N 1979a. Toward a theory of gentrification: a
back to the city movement by capital not people.
Journal of the American Planning Association 45,
538–548.
http.//dx.doi.org/10.1080/01944367908977002.
Smith N 1979b. Gentrification and capital: practice
and ideology in Society Hill. Antipode, A Radical
Journal of Geography 3: 2, 24–35. http://dx.doi.
org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1985.tb00346.x.
Smith N 1996. The new urban frontier: gentrification
and the revanchist city. Routledge, New York.
Smith N 2002. New globalism, new urbanism: gentri-
fication as global urban strategy. Antipode 34: 3,
4 2 7 – 4 5 0 . h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 1 1 1 / 1 4 6 7 -
8330.00249.
Sobral C 2012. O Cais do Sodré mudou e os mora-
dores não estão a gostar. Público, 7 April 2012.
Stearms AW 1936. The evolution of punishment.
Journal of Criminal Laws and Criminology 27: 2,
219–230.
Thornton S 1995. Club cultures: music, media and
subcultural capital. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Thrasher FM 1926. The gang: a study of 1313 gangs
in Chicago. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Trindade S 2011. Hoje, beijo-te Lisboa [Today, I kiss
you, Lisbon]. Vogue Magazine, 17 November
2011.
Vangby B & Jensen OB 2009. From slum clearance to
urban policy: discourses and doctrines in Dannish
inner city redevelopment. Housing, Theory & So-
ciety 19: 1, 3–13.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/140360902317417895.
Veenhoven R 2003. Hedonism and Happiness. Jour-
nal of Happiness Studies 4, 437–457. http://dx.doi.
org/10.1023/B:JOHS.0000005719.56211.fd.
Wacquant L 2008. The militarization of urban mar-
ginality: lessons from the Brazilian Metropolis.
International Political Sociology 2, 56–74. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2008.00037.x.
FENNIA 191: 2 (2013) 121“Vintage Nightlife”: Gentrifying Lisbon downtown
Walker C & Fincham B 2011.Techniques of Identity Gov-
ernance and Resistance: Formulating the Neoliberal
Worker in Work and the Mental Health Crisis in Brit-
ain. John Wiley & Sons, Cichester.
Weatherly UG 1926. Haiti: an experiment in pragma-
tism. American Journal of Sociology 32: 3, 353–366.
Welch M 2009. Punishment in America: social control
and the ironies of imprisonment. Sage, Thousand
Oaks, CA.
Whyte WF 1943. The street corner society. University of
Chicago Press, Chicago.
Williams P 1976. The role of institutions in the inner Lon-
don housing market: the case of Islington. Transac-
tions of the Institute of British Geographers 1, 72–82.
Wilson D & Grammenos D 2005. Gentrification,
discourse, and the body: Chicago's Humboldt
Park. Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 23:2, 295–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/
d0203.
Wynne D & O’Connor J 1998. Consumption and the
postmodern city. Urban Studies 35: 5–6, 841–
64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0042098984583.
Zukin S 1982. Loft living: culture and capital in ur-
ban change. Rutgers University Press, New Jer-
sey.
Zukin S 2009. Naked city: the death and life of au-
thentic urban places. Oxford, New York.