The heightening scale of urban tourism and the fast-growing number of “floating” city users raise new challenges to understand contemporary urban change – namely for internationally open, heritage-rich medium-sized cities. Discussing the case of Porto at a time when the contested notion of gentrification infuses local politics, we highlight the transnational drivers of this process in Portugal´s second city. While acknowledging perils and benefits, we argue that more than simply leaving a footprint to be solved with taxation, internationally-driven gentrification may endanger city diversity and identity, raising implications for urban policy and for our understanding of local development as a whole.

City centres are spaces where different economic and cultural values converge as a consequence of their current uses and functions. In the case of Porto (Portugal), more than 20 years after being declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO (in 1996), tourism has had remarkable effects on its physical, social and economic features. Therefore, Porto—and in particular its city centre—is taken in this article as the object of study. The interest of this space lies in the fact that it has been rapidly transformed from a devalued old area into the centre of an important urban tourism destination on a European level. Based on the spatial and temporal analysis of a set of indicators related to tourism, housing and economic activity, we identify the main threats that this “culture-led regeneration”—much supported by tourism—could have on the cultural values of Porto. Our results show that this process is promoting an excessive use of space by tourism and an overexploitation of cultural values. We conclude with some policy recommendations to support strategies capable of keeping cultural values alive, which we consider sustainable compromises between heritage and modernization.

Urban tourism growth, favoured by short term rental platforms like Airbnb, is changing the cities dramatically. All over Europe local governments have been facing unbridled growth of the so-called sharing economy and developed different regulatory approaches: full prohibition; laissez-faire; and different sorts of limitations. We take Porto as a case-study, considering the exponential growth of tourism, Airbnb and floating city users over the past decade. We make use of qualitative and quantitative methods and draw on the official AirDNA database to analyse the relation between Airbnb and urban transformation, and the governance context. We conclude that the growth of floating city-users –stimulated by Airbnb– has been the main driver of urban change. The case of Porto –which in many ways illustrates the fast growth of short-term, rental-driven urban tourism in southern Europe– demonstrates that Airbnb’s global corporate narrative around property sharing, micro-entrepreneurship and tourism democratization hardly fits the urban reality of host professionalization, income concentration and growing massification. In this context, besides laissez-faire, urban sustainability concerns call for smarter regulatory approaches associated with more widely shared visions, and clear short, medium and long-term objectives.

In face of the systemic character of urban problems and the uncertainty surrounding planning methodologies, the need to intervene in urban space requires a holistic and spatial-based approach, rather than simply attempting to regulate urban expansion. Such an approach has increasingly been used in restricted areas to deal with complex urban dynamics and conflicting interests. This area-based and multi-problem approach in urbanism, although not new, has gained new relevance as it is highly relevant to the urban competition between cities (and the ‘creative cities’ agenda) and is specially suited to deal with the transformation of urban areas with high regenerative potential. It is also easily associated with public–private partnership and the creation of the ‘atmospheres’ that seem to fit conveniently with the dominant expectations and interests of educated middle- and high-class residents and visitors. In this context, Porto, its city centre and its older heritage area in particular, has provided a very good basis for analysing and discussing the dynamics, intentions and results of area-based initiatives. This is particularly so given the persistence of a range of problems previously commonly found in other cities in Europe some decades which coexist with the dynamics that characterize the larger metropolis where there is a rich recent history of spatial planning in central areas. This article examines what may be described as Europeanization of Porto (and Portuguese) urban policy, and the associated different programmes, projects and plans, providing indications of the agents, processes and results, of what we see as a late and brutal process of transition from public action, or strongly regulated private action, to a dominant private, public-supported urbanism, where social objectives matter much less than aesthetics and ‘spatial-based vitality’, and urbanism seems to create new divides and increased spatial injustice.

Cities experience rapid growth and transformation. Over the past decades, change has been particularly intense and complex, associated to globalization, spatial compression and temporal acceleration. Within this context, the EU funds introduced new urban rehabilitation dynamics that made a city center more and more attractive. This, alongside the growth of international tourism, has increased the number of city users, which has furthered the discussion on the relation between the physical, economic, social and environmental intervention of the city, as well as the debates on the positive and negative impacts of tourism in cities. With that in mind, we look at the intense change that occurred in the city of Porto, Portugal, in the period from an intense economic crisis to the COVID-19 confinement. We consider changes in buildings, retail and policies to conclude that a neoliberal attitude favoured a tourism-led and sustainability blind gentrification. Based on a survey and analysis of 50 urban rehabilitation initiatives in downtown Porto and on the analysis of recent public policies, we discuss the relation between urban rehabilitation and tourism in Porto, and therefore the effectiveness of public policies and its contribution to sustainable urban development.