Urban Policies in Portugal

Abstract

This chapter claims that a Portuguese national urban agenda has been further consolidated and improved since the 1990s, having the European Union as one of its major engine and drivers. After a first overview of the background on urban policies in Portugal, a number of policy programs were studied (Polis, Polis XXI and Portugal 2020, among others), focusing on cities and sustainable urban development during the last three European Union policy programming cycles. The analysis focuses, mainly, on the typology of interventions, including target areas and actors involved, their management, governance models and implementation tools, in order to discuss major tendencies and alignments with international urban agendas. Concepts such as sustainable development, place-based policy or integrated territorial development are at the core of the debate, along with the rhetorical mainstream developed at a European and international level. The chapter settles that, in the studied period, urban policies in Portugal were progressively released from pure physical actions to adopt a rather strategic, integral, governance-based approach, encompassing community programs. The scaling up of the Portuguese national urban policy (NUP) happened at several levels, and now Portugal is considered as an explicit NUP holder, despite no consensus existing on the matter.