Sense of place narratives of residents in neighbourhoods under touristic pressure: Making, entering and enjoying local sociocultural worlds

Abstract

Tourism intensification is today a powerful transforming force in many European cities. Supported by new policies, it brings the displacement of long‐time residents and influxes of new ones, transforming located relations of urban neighbourhoods and their sociocultural worlds. Contributing to a sociopolitical psychology of place, this study explores how residents in touristified contexts make sense of place and its changes and claim rights for located relations. We conducted a narrative analysis of interviews with residents (n = 30) in two Lisbon neighbourhoods under tourism pressure, exploring how their storied accounts of events‐in‐time and self‐and‐other roles and relations construct senses of place and intertwine with claims for place‐rights and located relations. Findings reveal three shared, competing narratives, offering different roles to Selves and Others and their relations, some advancing more individual, some more collective rights‐claims and relational demands and constructing a different sense of place—rooted, elective and cosmopolitan. The study highlights the value of theoretically grounded narrative analysis for extending a sociopolitical psychology of place. It advances too a better understanding of how sociocultural worlds emerge from the inter‐relations of people, place and policy and of the ‘battles of ideas’ over located relations and rights in urban contexts, in particular those affected by tourism.

INTRODUCTION

In 2019, the well‐known slogan of a rental platform—‘Airbnb: live like a local’—started appearing on Lisbon's walls in a new version: ‘Massive tourism, massive evictions: leave like a local’. The new version expresses a critique of the consequences of intensified tourism, and of what the literature calls touristification, that is, a process transforming certain neighbourhoods into market‐oriented tourist areas, enabled by new policies and laws, such as those supportive of the financialization of housing. A process, also, bringing the displacement of long‐time (lower income) residents and influxes of new (shorter term) actors (Cocola‐Gant, 2018; Diaz‐Parra & Jover, 2021; Mendes, 2017; Sequera & Nofre, 2020).

These transformations and their critiques—taking place in Lisbon as well as in many other European cities—offer evidence also and again of how (urban) places are contested arenas of belonging (Dixon & Durrheim, 2000). In other words, they bring evidence of places as arenas where ‘battles of ideas’ (Moscovici & Marková, 2000) continuously happen, contesting and defending different views about who belongs/does not belong in place, about the ‘correct’ rights to place‐and‐city (Gray & Manning, 2022) or the ‘right’ values to privilege in laws governing place (Santos & Castro, 2023). In touristified neighbourhoods, a better psycho‐social understanding of these ‘battles’ can be furthered by analysing the different shared narratives of belonging that may co‐exist there, and how they connect place‐meanings to views about the ‘right’ located relations and ‘correct’ place‐rights (Loder & Stuart, 2023). This goal aligns with psychosocial approaches to place that have long called for more attention to the ‘political dimension of representations about place and located self and others’ (Dixon & Durrheim, 2000, p. 28). These have shown how some of the place‐meanings and values sustaining everyday rights‐claims function to legitimize neoliberal housing‐and‐place laws and policies, while others are able to anchor their contestation (Di Masso, 2015; Madsen et al., 2024; Manzo & Desanto, 2021; Zisakou & Figgou, 2023). In this sense, studying residents' place‐meanings and rights‐claims regarding their neighbourhoods affected by tourism and neoliberal policies is a way of advancing the socio‐psychological comprehension of how sense‐making about (urban) places relates to the reproduction or contestation of different models of citizenship—that is, of the different models for living together in place and nation.

However, despite their relevance, these topics remain under‐researched and under‐theorized (Gössling et al., 2020; Loder & Stuart, 2023). To address this lacuna, this article develops a narrative analysis of interviews with both long‐term and new residents in two Lisbon neighbourhoods heavily affected by tourism. The analysis bridges three main theoretical traditions. The first is conducted with the concept of senses of place (Manzo & Desanto, 2021; Raymond et al., 2021), which integrates two processes central to place‐belonging. The first is place attachment, understood as the affective bond people form with places (Di Masso et al., 2019; Lewicka, 2011). The second is place meaning‐making or the construction of ‘the constellation of place interpretations, meanings and values’ (Manzo & Desanto, 2021, p. 210). Research on senses of place, place‐attachment and place‐meanings spans different scales—from homes to cities or beaches—and draws on diverse epistemological traditions (Patterson & Williams, 2005). This article focuses on the urban neighbourhood scale, especially pertinent for examining the psychosocial implications of touristification. And it brings a relational epistemology to the study of place through the second theoretical tradition it draws on: the dialogical approach to social representations, which sees meaning as emerging from Self–Other relations (Batel & Castro, 2018; Marková, 2003, 2023). From this perspective, social–psychological locatedness—the idea that ‘where we are’ helps constitute ‘who we are’ (Dixon & Durrheim, 2000; Di Masso, 2015)—is extended by two assumptions. First, the kinds of Self–Other relations possible in a place are relevant for ‘who can be’ there, and, second, the policies that govern places are also consequential for these relations. This means that a fuller understanding of locatedness requires conceptualizing urban neighbourhoods as sociocultural worlds (Castro, 2021; Jovchelovitch et al., 2020): worlds of located Self–Other relations where place‐meanings (Madsen et al., 2024), borders of belongingness (Jovchelovitch et al., 2020) and claims about place‐rights (Zisakou & Figgou, 2023) are constructed in interaction with the place‐policies of the day (Castro, 2021). Finally, the third tradition is the narrative approach (Bruner, 1986). This framework allows us to develop an integrated analysis of how residents in the same place construct competing, shared, storied accounts linking past to future, making sense of place and located relations and advancing claims regarding place‐rights.

In what follows, we first outline tourism's challenges to residents. Then present the potential contributions of a dialogical socio‐psychological perspective and a narrative approach for understanding senses of place and place rights‐claims. Finally, we illustrate the three main narratives found and discuss how our framework and methodology advance a sociopolitical psychology of place in (the sociocultural worlds of) urban neighbourhoods heavily affected by tourism.

SENSES OF PLACE AND TOURISTIFICATION

The literature has documented how intensified tourism is transforming certain neighbourhoods into urban ‘touristscapes’, marked by the massive influx of newcomers, the rapid turnover of short‐term rental occupants and the exclusion of many long‐time residents (Cocola‐Gant, 2018; Mendes, 2017; Sequera & Nofre, 2020). Those who remain must navigate not only the new meanings and practices introduced by newcomers but also the house and place policies that support their inflow. Scholars highlight how such processes can place long‐term residents in situations of ‘emplaced displacement’ (Atkinson, 2015) or ‘un‐homing’ (Loder & Stuart, 2023), leading to losses of belonging, continuity and the emergence of place nostalgia (Atkinson, 2015; Diaz‐Parra & Jover, 2021). In Southern European cities, ‘touristscapes’ often emerge in formerly low‐income inner city neighbourhoods. These were historically characterized by rooted forms of sense of place (Lewicka, 2011), grounded in long‐term attachments and everyday practices of conviviality and companionship in public spaces, as observed in Lisbon (Bettencourt & Castro, 2015; Sequera & Nofre, 2020). Today, these rooted forms coexist with newer ones shaped by individual choice and associated with short‐term or newly arrived residents, including tourists and gentrifiers. Such attachments may take the form of elective belonging, where mobile individuals choose a place because it aligns with their lifestyles and aspirations (Savage, 2014). They may also manifest as more fluid and cosmopolitan belongings (Di Masso et al., 2019; Lewicka, 2011), characterized by multiple, simultaneous attachments to different places. These are often underpinned by discourses that claim the right to the freedom to choose where to live in an increasingly globalized world (Savage, 2014; Torkington, 2012; Williams & McIntyre, 2011). The values prioritized in such cosmopolitan discourses and the rights‐claims they sustain—for example, full freedom for individual movement and choice—are also at the core of the mobility‐sustaining and property‐based rights prioritized in todays' neoliberal urban policies (Manzo & Desanto, 2021; Mosedale, 2016). In contrast, the values grounding traditional, rooted, attachment and the rights‐claims they sustain—collective uses of uncommodified places and local companionship (Bettencourt & Castro, 2015; Diaz‐Parra & Jover, 2021)—are less aligned with such policies.

In this way, intensified tourism brings not only different place meanings and attachments—or senses of place—to co‐exist in the same area. It also brings plural claims about rights‐and‐duties regarding place and located Self–Other relations, claims that may clash and contest each other in battles of ideas and legitimacy about place (Castro et al., 2018; Raymond et al., 2021), which are consequential for citizenship dynamics. A dialogical, relational approach, capturing the self‐place–other relations in their policy/institutional contexts, helps theorizing and addressing how these different‐level processes interact in touristic contexts.

Senses of place from a constructionist psycho‐social perspective

The dialogical approach to social representations assumes meaning to be constructed and expressed in Self–Other relations, occurring at different levels of analysis—from individual to societal—and in the interactions between these levels (Batel & Castro, 2018; Negura et al., 2020). Here, the Other can be a direct interlocutor; but the Other can also be a group (e.g., our neighbours); or the Other can be the (institutional) universe of the state and its policies (Santos & Castro, 2023). From this perspective, senses of place at the scale of urban neighbourhoods are constructed in Self–Other relations embedded in the threefold dynamic interactions between people, place and policy (Castro, 2021; Jovchelovitch et al., 2020; Manzo & Desanto, 2021; Wynne & Rogers, 2021). The people component involves the shared meaning‐making processes and cultural resources (social representations, norms, narratives) locally and socially culturally available and mobilized in located relations. The policy component regards the laws and policies governing place (Castro, 2021; Wynne & Rogers, 2021); and finally, the material specificities of place are also involved (Raymond et al., 2017).

Their threefold dynamic interactions open constraints and possibilities for different local sociocultural worlds to emerge at the scale of the neighbourhood (Loder & Stuart, 2023). For example, urban laws protecting long‐time tenancies through capped rents make possible the emergence of local sociocultural worlds of close‐knit communities with conviviality practices—sociocultural aspects that, in fact, are often what attracts new residents and tourists (Sequera & Nofre, 2020). Contrarily, policies supporting unrestricted short‐term rentals open possibilities for individual freedoms and more fragmented sociocultural worlds. In this sense, the type of Self–Other relations possible in the places ‘where we are’, helping constitute who we are, is also constituted through the policies governing those places.

Also from a dialogical perspective, a better understanding of the interactions of people‐place‐policy requires exploring the competing values of citizenship that are privileged by residents, the different place‐relevant rights‐and‐duties sustained by these values, and how they are connected to located relations (Torkington, 2012; Zisakou & Figgou, 2023). By values of citizenship, we understand here those values people and institutions consider to be the ‘right’ ones for how to live together in place and nation, and which are dilemmatic and differently privileged both in everyday rights‐claims and in the making of laws and policies (e.g., Castro & Santos, 2020; Di Masso, 2015; Gray & Manning, 2022; Madsen et al., 2024). For instance, some residents may make rights‐claims that privilege the values of having local communities of close and supporting relations; others may instead make rights‐claims anchored in the values of individual free movement, loose local ties and cosmopolitanism (Torkington, 2012). This means that the battles of ideas and legitimacy about place, expressing different values of citizenship, also defend competing models for living together in place, with these struggles for meaning sustaining different social orders (Castro et al., 2018). This means, too, that some of the rights‐claims competing in everyday meaning struggles can be well aligned with the values institutionally privileged for governing place (i.e., those incorporated in the policies and laws) and the rights they protect, whereas other claims may be less aligned with these (Castro & Santos, 2020; Madsen et al., 2024). Studying these battles is thus a way of going beyond the individual level of analysis and incorporating the political dimension in the psycho‐social study of locatedness (Castro et al., 2018; Dixon & Durrheim, 2000; Zisakou & Figgou, 2023).

In sum, this article adopts a dialogical relational approach to the study of neighbourhoods, seen as sociocultural worlds where senses of place intertwine with the constraints and possibilities offered by place‐policies and struggles over ‘legitimate’ place‐rights and duties. In doing so, it extends a social psychology of place emphasizing the political dimension of locatedness showing how policies governing where we live can enable or hinder the kinds of Self–Other relations we deem ‘correct’ in that context. Finally, as noted, the analysis builds on a third assumption: that a narrative approach is essential for understanding these processes in an integrated manner (Mouro et al., 2018; Murray, 2002).

NARRATIVES OF PLACE

There are different epistemological conceptualisations of narratives as storied accounts connecting events‐through‐time, and there are also different levels at which narratives can be analysed (Bamberg, 2020; Bruner, 1986; Hammack & Pilecki, 2014; Murray, 2002). Some analyses focus on individual narratives, interested in how they can illuminate how people construct a sense of ‘who I am’ and in their psychological and interactional dynamics and functions (Bamberg, 2020). Other analyses focus on shared accounts, of which some can more closely reproduce master narratives—dominant discourses normalizing certain meanings and practices—while others advance (partial or fuller) contestations of these (Bamberg, 2020). The analyses of shared accounts are more interested in exploring how narratives participate in ‘battles of ideas’, fulfilling several functions—psychological, but also social, cultural and political (Hochman & Spector‐Mersel, 2020; Mouro et al., 2018; Oren et al., 2015). We look here to such shared narratives and their functions, seeking to understand two intertwined aspects.

First, the competing storied accounts existing in and about the same (touristified) places and the senses of place they construct. Second, the different rights‐claims these competing storied accounts make and the (also competing) values of citizenship that ground them. For this, we draw from a definition of narrative as a way of making meaning through storied accounts connecting events‐through‐time, defining roles for Self and Others (e.g., heroes, villains, victims) and adopting a prevalent individual (I) or collective (We) voice (Bruner, 1986; Gergen & Gergen, 1988; Hochman & Spector‐Mersel, 2020). We seek to look at the ways in which these elements—temporality, events, voices and roles—are used to frame the relations of Self‐and‐Others in place, construct a sense of place and claim for place‐rights. This allows for an integrative socio‐psychological understanding of the interaction of narratives of place with place‐policies, connecting the narrative elements to the functions residents' storied accounts perform in both located Self–Other relations and in the relations of located selves with policies/institutions (Madsen et al., 2024; Mouro et al., 2018; Taylor, 2009). In other words, this allows connecting the structure of narratives to their social and political context (Murray, 2002).

A narrative approach has already been applied to place, for example, for looking at residential identities (Taylor, 2009; Ropert & Di Masso, 2021), gentrification (Atkinson, 2015) or place transformation (Bailey et al., 2016). However, these studies often do a ‘thematic narrative analysis’ (Bamberg, 2020)—focusing on themes, but not developing an integrated examination of how themes might be linked to different storied connections between events‐through‐time and roles for self and others with relational functions—despite the theoretical centrally of these narrative elements (Bruner, 1986; Gergen & Gergen, 1988). This lacuna will be addressed in the present analysis. The temporal dimension of place‐meanings will be explored by looking at how the past of place is linked to its present and future—as positive (progressive temporality), as negative/undesirable (regressive temporality) or as unremarkable (stable temporality) (see Gergen & Gergen, 1988). This dimension will be linked with the place‐related roles (e.g., heroes, villains) in which self and others are cast, and with the type of voice prevalently used to construct a sense of place and advocate for place‐related rights: a collective (we) voice or an individual (I) voice (Hochman & Spector‐Mersel, 2020). The next section summarizes the context of the research and its goals.

OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH CONTEXT AND GOALS

Lisbon experienced an intensification of tourism after the 2008 crisis (Mendes, 2017), when decision makers started promoting tourism as the (indisputably) positive path for regenerating the city (Boager & Castro, 2022) and a set of new laws and policies aligned with this view were put in place. These included the 2012 New Urban Lease Regime (Law 31/1012) favouring the liberalization of rental and end of capped rents, and the 2014 short‐term rentals (AL) law (Law 128/2014) sustaining the rapid growth of the Airbnb sector. The changes affected especially inner city districts where certain place‐characteristics (narrow streets; small houses, home to successive generations of the same low‐income families), together with capped rents, had helped produce enduring local sociocultural worlds of everyday conviviality (Bettencourt & Castro, 2015; Sequera & Nofre, 2020). The massive entry of tourists and the ‘Airbnb economy’ turned these sociocultural worlds into commodities for touristic consumption, and together with rising prices brought/is bringing the progressive exit of long‐time residents, and of the small‐scale gentrifiers that had arrived some years before (Sequera & Nofre, 2020).

In this context, we focus here on two inner city Lisbon neighbourhoods affected by touristification and which have long‐time residents, as well as newcomers (Sequera & Nofre, 2020). We explore interviews to residents, seeking to understand their different narratives. We examine (1) the different storied accounts constructing a sense of place through the mobilization of place‐relevant events, temporalities, roles and self‐other located relations, putting them in the context of the areas' specific place‐policies; (2) we look at how the narratives combine the previous elements with the values for guiding life in place and nation (i.e. the values of citizenship) that they privilege for grounding the rights‐and duties they claim; (3) we discuss how the different shared narratives found are (more or less) consequential for the construction of their present and future local sociocultural worlds.

METHOD

Participants

Residents in two neighbourhoods affected by tourism intensification—Alfama and Ajuda (n = 30; Alfama, n = 19; Ajuda, n = 11)—were interviewed from April 2019 to July 2021, first contacted on the streets and then by snowball procedure. Ethical approval for this study was obtained from the ethics committee of the first and second authors' institution. In accordance with established ethical standards, all participants provided informed consent by signing a form confirming their voluntary participation and guaranteeing anonymity. The interviews explored experience in place and in time (e.g., ‘what is your day like here?’) and change over time (e.g., ‘has the neighbourhood changed?’). They were recorded (average duration 51′) and transcribed verbatim. Interviewees are heterogeneous in terms of length of residence (min. 1 year; max. 64 years), place of birth (n = 24 Portugal; n = 6 other), working sector and housing status (tenant n = 20; owner n = 10). Former residents (n = 7) who had moved away from the neighbourhood due to tourism and rising prices were also included. Following previous studies (Bettencourt et al., 2021), participants were classified as: (1) long‐time residents if they had lived in the neighbourhood for more than 15 years (LTR interviewed n = 13; mean years in place = 40); (2) new residents if they had arrived in the last 10 years (NR interviewed n = 17; mean years in place = 6).

Analytic procedure

The analysis employed both deductive and inductive procedures (following Hammack & Pilecki, 2014), with four steps. First, we used a deductive process for identifying the existence and the form of the narrative elements used in each interview: (1) the temporality constructed for place‐events and place‐change: regressive, progressive or stable (Gergen & Gergen, 1988); (2) the voice predominantly used: individual (I) or collective (We) (Hochman & Spector‐Mersel, 2020); (3) the place‐relevant roles—place‐heroes, victims, villains—attributed to Self and Others, and the depiction of their relations. Second, through a comparative process, we searched for different patterns in the use of these elements and in the connections that were established among them by the interviewees. This allowed for a first re‐construction of different shared narratives and a perspective about who shared them (long‐term or new residents). In a third step, these elements were linked in an inductive way to the ways of constructing senses of place and located relations. In a fourth step, the shared narratives identified were revisited looking for claims about place‐related rights‐and‐duties and the values of citizenship they sustained.

In what follows, the three narratives identified are discussed and illustrated through brief selected extracts, which all authors revisited multiple times to ensure they effectively exemplify and support the interpretative insights offered (Hammack & Pilecki, 2014).

ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

Summary. The first narrative is made by long‐term residents with a regressive time‐perspective and mostly with a collective voice. The second is told by new residents with a progressive‐to‐regressive temporality and the individual voice predominates. The third, also from new residents, presents a predominantly individual voice but has a progressive time‐perspective. The three narratives construct distinct senses of place (respectively, rooted, elective and cosmopolitan) and claim different rights. They are now discussed and illustrated through selected extracts.

The first narrative: ‘We made this world we had that we don't have today’

This regressive narrative of long‐term residents constructs two temporal moments: a progressive ‘making a collective world’ moment and a regressive ‘losing a world’ moment. Regarding citizenship views, it works for claiming the collective right to a collective world.

Making a collective world

The narrative starts by describing a stable past—one not free of difficulties, but positive—telling about the making of an enduring local sociocultural world, linked to place characteristics. This is exemplified below (Extracts 1, 2, 3).

EXTRACT 1.

“… the houses were not big, and we had to share them with other families (…) So, of course there was no room (inside), so we went to the street! And that was our street, wasn't it? We had to come to the street, and we had everything here… to buy fish, vegetables, groceries… all these people were in the street, and we made this world we had that we don't have today.” (I03, Alfama)

EXTRACT 2.

“People used to come to the (front) doors to talk, people used to come to the doors to light a fire to roast some mackerel, some sardines…and that was very nice.” (I04, Alfama)

EXTRACT 3.

“In the old days people used to come to their street door with a chair, sit down and talk between neighbours. This was the way in Alfama before, wasn't it? And we had it in Ajuda too, and nowadays it's lost.” (I10, Ajuda)

The extracts, depicting a place of narrow streets and squares affording the use of public place as extension of the small homes of (working‐class) families for everyday meals and conviviality, portrait the neighbourhood of the past as accommodating the needs of a collective finding joint solutions for shared problems (there was no room, we went to the street). They tell of the making of a sociocultural world with norms and practices of companionship, a close‐knit community to which one feel deeply rooted. The ‘we’ voice is often employed (we had it), making it the narrative of a world jointly made—but presented as already lost.

Losing a world

Then, the narrative connects losses to the roles of place‐villains (Bruner, 1986): tourism, decision makers, short‐term rentals (AL), place commodification, evictions, closed condominiums. As in gentrification studies (Atkinson, 2015), place‐‘villains’ come associated with nostalgia for a lost sense of collective continuity. Extracts 4, 5, 6, 7 exemplify this.

EXTRACT 4.

“There are no places (for conviviality) anymore. For example, going down this street, there's the (Square X). (…) before there was a… a wall there, with a big tree, where people used to gather… And that ended.… there was the kiosk… And now that's gone. Because of the “esplanadas” Look: of course any of us can go… we can go to an esplanada, can't we? the problem is that today they charge prices for foreigners.” (I04, Alfama)

EXTRACT 5.

“The neighbourhood has suffered a lot due to the situation of AL (tourism rentals). I am not against AL, what happens is that when the flats were bought for AL (prices rose)… this was not the fault of people, the Parish and the Lisbon City Council are the ones to blame.” (I04, Alfama)

EXTRACT 6.

“(before)… we didn't need to go out! But this has nothing to do with the situation today… Today we only see people (on the street) when a van full of tourists arrives!” (I03, Alfama)

EXTRACT 7.

“They built here a private condominium of 500–600, a million, with a swimming pool, private entrance, security, these people do not mingle, they do not live in the neighbourhood, they live in the private complex.” (I10, Ajuda)

Extract 4 depicts loss of the old public conviviality places (the tree, the square) and their new commodified uses (‘esplanadas’, outdoor café terraces) as affecting the continuity of old located relations. Depicting the streets of the present as crossed by transient actors—tourists (Extract 6)—or as places where newcomers do not mingle with long‐time residents (Extract 7), these extracts portray long‐term residents in the role of victims and construct a hierarchy of blame: The main villains being the institutions that changed the laws and allowed AL/Airbnb to proliferate (Extract 5), with tourists (and AL)—but also new residents—being secondary ones.

The extracts exemplify the ‘emplaced displacement’ (Diaz‐Parra & Jover, 2021) found in gentrification studies, reflecting the loss of the old world with its ‘right’ relations, even when the people stay put (Wynne & Rogers, 2021). Extract 8, below, makes it clear how even individual access to property is unable to protect from such displacement.

EXTRACT 8.

“Before, 114–115 people lived in each street. Today, where I live, maybe eight people are living here: I mean, genuine. Genuine means born and bred here in the neighbourhood of Alfama (…) I was born and bred here in the neighbourhood, and I was lucky enough to buy a flat, but I can't say the same about my children (…) or the others. My daughter was evicted, which is deplorable, and the neighbourhood is no longer the Alfama neighbourhood it used to be.” (I05, Alfama)

The extract also exemplifies how this first shared narrative works to defend a specific sense of place—as seen from the position of long‐time residents, the narrators here—over possible others. By defining a rigid socio‐psychological boundary of place‐belongingness (Jovchelovitch et al., 2020)—genuine belonging is depicted as a ‘born‐and‐bred’, rooted attachment creating a ‘genuine’ link of continuity between self and place—this narrative constructs a hierarchy of legitimate self–other relations and holders of place‐rights, positioning long‐time genuine residents higher on the scale.

Claiming collective rights

When the narrative reports villains and victims, these roles work for claiming the right of genuine residents to keep the entitlements and responsibilities of the old sociocultural world—companionship, everyday conviviality in un‐commodified public spaces. As Extracts 9 and 10 below illustrate, now that world is lost, and some long‐time residents want to stay put and some do not. Yet both anchor the decision in the same values and rights—a form of belonging‐in‐place whose values (e.g., companionship) guarantee the neighbourhood's continuity.

EXTRACT 9.

“That companionship that existed once no longer exists today (…) I remember before I sold my house, I will never forget it, I was at my window at one o'clock in the morning, smoking a cigarette, and suddenly I looked at all the doors around me, and I started counting, and I realised that nobody lived there anymore, nobody lived in my square anymore. It was just tourism.” (I07, Alfama)

EXTRACT 10.

“I'm not leaving! At the age I am, born and raised here, my neighbourhood is where I'm going to die! (…) three years ago, they offered me half a million euros for my flat (…) and I won't sell it for any money (…) what for? For keeping the money? (…) or for buying (a flat) on a building and then seating there looking at the wife?” (I05, Alfama)

As mentioned, these extracts show how, in the decision of leaving or staying, what is highlighted is the importance given to a certain type of values for self‐other neighbourhood relations—those enabling the construction of collective worlds of companionship. In Extract 9, the decision of leaving is linked with loss of companionship; Extract 10 imagines—and rejects—a life without it: in an apartment outside the neighbourhood where one sits alone ‘looking at the wife’, without a community. Thus, in this narrative conveyed by long‐time residents, a specific type of located Self‐Other relations is defined as both the loss suffered and the right claimed.

The second narrative: ‘I suddenly feel very foreign’

The second narrative, made by new residents, has a progressive–regressive temporality constructing two moments: ‘entering a local world’ and ‘losing recognition’ in that world, both working to claim individual rights to belong to a chosen world.

Entering a local world

The narrative tells of the slow but progressive gains made in entering a chosen local sociocultural world. It depicts the narrator as an agentic self (Bamberg, 2020) choosing to live in the neighbourhood, seeking ‘elective belonging’ (Savage, 2014) and for it adjusting to the local norms for self‐other relations, as illustrated below.

In Extracts 11 and 12, the neighbourhood is recognized as a sociocultural world chosen by the self for active, elective attachment (Savage, 2014). Creating bonds to this world required time—but especially knowledge of its collective values, practices and norms (I knew the neighbourhood), as well as agentic commitment to them. In the extracts, the self enacts such everyday commitment: creating relations, following place‐specific norms (e.g., buying local). They show how this second narrative works for comparatively differentiating the Self, as someone capable of understanding the collective ways of the chosen world, from transient others, tourists or Airbnb investors, advancing a positive role for the Self (Torkington, 2012). They point out how efforts finally led to place‐belonging (Now, I think I have a good relationship with the neighbours).

EXTRACT 11.

“I became a member of the local Club. I started going to the local restaurants, the local places, and… I don't know… I go to the neighbourhood grocery stores, I don't go to (chain supermarket), which helped me establish a relationship with people. (…) I was with them in the Club. (…) I was always on the side of the neighbourhood because otherwise…” (I21, Alfama)

EXTRACT 12.

“For example, the lady from the grocery shop, which no longer exists, the grocery shop… (…) It took her about a year to trust me. It wasn't easy, no… But I knew it was just a matter of time. I wasn't ready to leave. I knew the neighbourhood, I knew the difficulties… I gave up having a car… (…). Because for me, being here was more important than those things, right? Now, I think I have a good relationship with the neighbours, but it took time… and now I have less and less neighbours (laughs).” (I16, Alfama)

Thus, this narrative conveys awareness of the dialogical dynamic of belonging in place: positioning the self as recognizing the rules of the local world for Self–Other relations, but also acknowledging this is not enough, and also necessary is being recognized by that world as belonging. This in turn also dialogically responds to long‐time residents' concern with the protection of genuine residents, showing awareness of the asymmetric relation between ‘Others’ (long‐term residents) and ‘Self’ (a new resident) and the precarity of such recognition (I was always on the side of the neighbourhood because otherwise…). Yet, tourism's intensification threatens the recognition work carried out over time, leading in the end to difficulties (and I have less and less neighbours).

Losing recognition

The second, regressive, temporal moment presents the recognition gains as disturbed or disrupted by touristification. The Self now occupies the role of victim of place‐change and (new) place‐conflicts (Extract 13):

EXTRACT 13.

“Of course, sometimes people are so tired of the pressures from tourists and all these pressures the neighbourhood is undergoing, that sometimes they say: “but you are not from here.” But Alfama is Lisbon, isn't it? Many aren't from here either. There are very few people who were born here. The people, at least the older ones, also came here.” (I21, Alfama)

The narrative here dialogically questions the first narrative's defence of ‘born and bred’ credentials being required to belong to the neighbourhood (older ones also came here). In this way, it works to contest long‐time dwellers' rigid boundaries (Jovchelovitch et al., 2020) of authentic belonging. At the same time, it still allows the narrator to recognize the difficulties of others (people are so tired of the pressure), defending the Self's belongingness as legitimate, while maintaining villains as diffuse.

Claiming individual rights

This narrative simultaneously claims the individual right to choose and enter a collective local world, and the right to enjoy the continuity of this world. It therefore also shows the tensions emerging when these rights are presented by the (genuine) Other as clashing:

In Extract 14, presenting change as having brought loss of recognition of belonging‐in‐place (I suddenly feel very foreign), rigidifying borders, villains are diffuse. Yet the hierarchy of born and bred entitlements is nevertheless seen as re‐established: recognition by the Self of the rules of the local world is not enough anymore to achieve recognition from that world.

EXTRACT 14.

“I suddenly feel very foreign and I didn't have this feeling before (…) around 2017, the faces that I already knew very well, they knew me, they knew that I had two children, they saw that I took the children to school, we stopped every day to talk… but (now) there is a sort of awareness of ‘things are ending, and if someone has to leave you are the first’.” (I26, Ajuda)

Overall, then, this shared second narrative works for new residents to contest changes but also the way in which the first narrative constructs these narrators. It presents the Self as attempting to reconcile different place‐related rights and views of citizenship—striving to belong to a collective world while advancing the individual right to choose it.

The third narrative: ‘I go everywhere’

The third narrative, also made by new residents, constructs a progressive temporality of ‘enjoying and moving between worlds’ and works in claiming individual mobility rights.

Enjoying and moving between worlds

Residential mobility is linked to a reflexive conciliation of self‐needs and macro‐processes of policy change that support these needs (e.g., easy short‐term rentals). The Self is presented as a cosmopolitan taking advantage of the new legal possibilities for choice and freedom for mobility, navigating between different worlds and enjoying transient bonds with place, as illustrated below in Extract 15.

EXTRACT 15.

“Here I go to the supermarket, and I see the people from the neighbourhood, which is pleasing to me. I can't say that I live the neighbourhood life very much, because I still move a lot by car (…) and normally at the weekend when I leave, I go more to Belém (a nearby affluent neighbourhood), or I go for a walk or a hike because it is by the river, and it is very… very pleasant, no?” (I24, Ajuda)

The Self is here presented in the role of observer, an admirer of the neighbourhood—occupying an external position, he does not seek the Other's recognition for belonging in place. The narrative does not mention efforts to become part of a sociocultural world (I can't say that I live the neighbourhood life very much). The role of observer makes the values and practices of the local world irrelevant, even while the Self lives there: it is just one world, among many possible, a pleasant place from to freely move to enjoy the whole city. The extract makes it clear that some local practices (e.g., little car use) are not shared by the interviewee, who instead takes advantage of the place‐affordances of nearby areas welcoming to cars and frequents the venues outside the neighbourhood fashioned for those who can consume in the new style. The attachment constructed is to place, not people.

Claiming individual mobility rights

In this third narrative, adapting to changes and new place‐configurations and practices is presented as an individual challenge and opportunity, stemming from mobility rights.

In Extract 16 above, the interviewee makes it clear that change is an evolution and attaching to just one neighbourhood can be a negative, rigid position (I go everywhere… I'm not a fundamentalist). The narrative depicts new residents embracing a vibrant city, conciliating an attachment to previous (changing) places with the discovery of new ones, enacting the individual right to move between worlds, a right presented as already guaranteed—at least to the Self.

EXTRACT 16.

“Other kinds of habits and customs are emerging, and I think it's an evolution: it has its good things and its bad things too. (…) I go everywhere (in the city). Yes, from Intendente, to Alfama, the LX Factory, I'm not a fundamentalist, I'm really not. (…) I have a certain empathy for the centre‐city, yes. Intendente was my neighbourhood for many years, and nowadays they are developing there lots of campaigns and festivals… So, I like it… but I also go to LX Factory or Belem…” (I25, Ajuda)

In brief, in this narrative, the Self is displayed as a hero capable of embracing and enjoying urban change through individual agency and privileged forms of place consumption able to satisfy individual rights to mobility. It works in recasting place‐belongingness as place‐use and enjoyment, highlighting the gains of mobility in an illustration of the flow configuration of place‐attachment defined in the literature (Di Masso et al., 2019).

Table 1 presents a summary of the three narratives, organized by group of residents and by the dimensions targeted in the research questions and analyses. This summary is developed in the next section.

TABLE 1.

Summary of the shared narratives.

Narrative	1—making a local sociocultural world	2—entering a local sociocultural world	3—moving between worlds
Narrator	Long‐time residents	New residents	New residents
Voice	Collective	Individual	Individual
Time‐perspective	Stability‐regressive	Progressive‐regressive	Progressive
Place‐villains	Decision makers, AL	Diffuse	No villains
Role of Self	Place maker	Place chooser	Place enjoyer
Located Self–Other relations	Central	Central	Peripheral
Sense of place	Rooted	Elective	Cosmopolitan
Rights‐claims	Collective right of making and belonging to a collective local world	Individual right of choosing and belonging to a collective local world	Individual right to move between local worlds

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Tourism intensification is a powerfully transforming force with far‐ranging consequences for people‐place relations—and for located Self–Other relations. Aiming to contribute to a social psychology of place in contexts transformed by tourism, in this study we chose to focus on the scale of the urban neighbourhood. We interviewed residents in two central neighbourhoods of Lisbon whose long‐standing sociocultural worlds are being changed by the influx of new and mostly temporary newcomers, an influx supported by new neoliberal place‐policies and laws incorporating a view of tourism intensification as a positive path for the city (Boager & Castro, 2022; Sequera & Nofre, 2020). The analysis of the interviews sought to capture how the narratives of residents constructed different shared senses of place and how these intertwined with the different rights‐claims they made in the context of the current place‐policies.

We identified three shared narratives. The first—made by long‐time residents with a mean living‐time in place of 40 years—is predominantly told with a collective (we) voice, presents a regressive time‐perspective, identifies the collective Self as a maker of a collective sociocultural world and identifies the villains challenging it: decision makers, new laws, (too much) AL, tourism, tourists, and new residents. It constructs a rooted, ‘born‐and‐bred’ sense of place as ‘genuine’ belonging, claiming place rights able to sustain belongingness to a community as the ‘right’ form of living together in place. The second—made by new residents with a mean living‐time in the neighbourhood of 6 years—is predominantly told with the individual (I) voice of a Self in the role of chooser of a collective world and its specific type of Self–Other relations, has a progressive–regressive time‐perspective and diffuse villains. It constructs an elective sense of place—claiming (back) the individual right of choosing to enter that world and seeking recognition for belonging by in turn recognizing its meanings, values and practices. Finally, the third narrative—also made by new residents and also told with an individual (I) voice—constructs a progressive time‐perspective, casting the Self in the role of enjoyer of the different worlds that exist in the city and identifying no villains. Constructing a cosmopolitan sense of place as the ‘right’ one, and an attachment to the recreational characteristics of places—but not necessarily to the people residing there—the rights claimed are those sustaining unconstrained individual enjoyment of mobility across different places and worlds.

This means that the third narrative constructs a sense of place more based on place than people, and a Self who does not seek to be part of located Self‐Other relations, contented with sociocultural worlds of tenuous connections and individually defined practices. Instead, the first and second narratives construct senses of place that involve both people and place. Yet while the first accentuates rigid boundaries of belonging, the second seeks to cross them and achieve place‐belongingness by recognizing the sociocultural features of the world inhabited. Although these two narratives tell different stories, both are narratives of loss that ultimately converge on certain values, advancing claims that sometimes conflict and at other times overlap.

What is particularly important when analysing models of citizenship—understood here as models for living together—is how certain narratives, such as the third one described, align closely with the values of neoliberalism and with the rights embedded in current urban policies. Both this narrative and these policies privilege the protection of individual freedom of movement property and choice. They also fit world's best supported by short‐term tenancy contracts and the full liberalization of platforms such as Airbnb.

By contrast, narratives such as the first one—a collective we voice asserting the right to sustain close‐knit communities and in‐place collective rights and duties—receive less support under such policies. This highlights how some narratives are more compatible with today's urban policies and with the dominant values underpinning them (Boager & Castro, 2022). Such alignment places these narratives in a stronger position to prevail in struggles over legitimacy and to shape the kinds of sociocultural worlds and forms of citizenship that can be sustained in the future, should the same policy framework persist (Castro et al., 2018).

These findings underscore the importance of a social psychology of place that takes seriously the political dimension of meanings of place and of located relations (Castro, 2021; Di Masso, 2015; Dixon & Durrheim, 2000; Manzo & Desanto, 2021). In the approach developed here, this meant conceptualizing urban neighbourhoods as sociocultural worlds where senses of place are constructed through the interplay of people, place and policies. Such an approach moves beyond the individual level of analysis, showing how sociocultural worlds are made, claimed and transformed through the interaction between relational processes and policy or institutional ones (Castro, 2021; Zisakou & Figgou, 2023).

This direction is particularly relevant for future research on neighbourhoods affected by tourism. With it, this study was able to provide socio‐psychological insight that complexifies the idea that located critiques of tourism and touristification revolve solely around the right to housing or the right to resist physical displacement. It showed how there are instead ampler rights being claimed and contested—varied manifestations of the rights to make, enter, belong to, maintain and ignore place‐relevant sociocultural worlds of different types and located relations of different kinds. It illuminated how some claims work to sustain, others to challenge the values and changes of touristification, some working to legitimize the idea that the ‘right’ worlds are those of relations happening in communities of conviviality, others working to legitimize worlds of fragmented, individualized dwelling. In this sense, the study sheds further light on how the claiming of different rights—depicting some types of relations as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’—works to define different ways of living together, or different models of citizenship (Zisakou & Figgou, 2023).

Moreover, our approach, broadening the limited research on place‐narratives (Mouro et al., 2018; Ropert & Di Masso, 2021), also goes beyond the commonly used thematic analysis of narratives (Bamberg, 2020). It develops an integrated analysis looking at central structural dimensions of shared narratives—their ways of linking past‐to‐future, the roles attributed to Self‐and‐Other and their voice—while simultaneously linking them to policy/institutional contexts and relational dynamics. In doing so, moving beyond an individual level of analysis, it provides a framework for examining not just the narratives, but their battles: how they dialogically respond to and challenge other values and views, including dominant ones. It has shown how people use their storied accounts for both delimiting rigid psycho‐social borders of place‐belonging, but also for contesting or ignoring them and for seeking recognition for belonging, or for refusing it. It demonstrates in this way the power of theoretically grounded narrative analyses for a social psychology of place attentive both to the inter‐relations of people, place and policy and to finer dialogical and communicative processes.

In this way, even though the findings come from a single case study and some of the interviews took place when tourism was affected by the COVID‐19 pandemic, they contribute to a richer understanding of the psycho‐social processes at stake in the drastic urban transformations linked to tourism and touristification. They shed light on how, in the battles of meaning and legitimacy about tourism and place, different meanings interact differently with the place‐policies of the day and help push local worlds and forms of located living in certain directions, rather than others. In this, the findings contribute to illuminate how what comes to pass in the future of tourism in the city is not an inevitability, but a matter of choice among competing views and models for living together in place.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Enrica Boager: Conceptualization; writing – review and editing; methodology; investigation; writing – original draft; formal analysis; data curation; funding acquisition. Paula Castro: Conceptualization; writing – review and editing; supervision; methodology; writing – original draft; formal analysis; funding acquisition. Andrés Di Masso: Writing – review and editing; supervision.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest whatsoever that is relevant to the publication of the current article.

Boager, E. , Castro, P. , & Di Masso, A. (2025). Sense of place narratives of residents in neighbourhoods under touristic pressure: Making, entering and enjoying local sociocultural worlds. British Journal of Social Psychology, 64, e70016. 10.1111/bjso.70016

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.