Daniel Malet Calvo
The growing presence of international students in the
city of Lisbon attracted my attention ten years ago, when I started my PhD on
the occupation by different social groups of the most emblematic central square
in Lisbon: Praça do Rossio. As a foreigner, I shared several apartments
with international students, at a time when the city of Lisbon was not renowned
as a tourist or student destination. I got to know a group of exchange students
that had developed a particular alternative lifestyle in the patio where
they lived. They organized several meals outside and installed improvised
benches to spend time in the patio, as well as sharing a communitarian
style of living with their Portuguese neighbours. Next year, when the students
left, the next-door Hostel bought those apartments and converted them into suites
for tourists. Replicating the students, they
installed permanent benches and even imitated
their new-age tastes in the decoration. In other words, the hostel reproduced
the students’ creative ways, making products for tourists. When I started to study
Erasmus students back in 2013, I borrowed the term ‘studentification’ to assess
the significance and impact of those populations in Lisbon. However, as an
anthropologist, it was unsettling for me to isolate the housing question from
the wide variety of practices and relations that students established within
Lisbon’s urban processes.
In the present article I discuss the applicability of
the studentification literature to other geographies other than UK’s, stressing
that the main effects on the urban form (spatial concentration, segregation and
density of student populations) are missing in the case of Lisbon. Taking the
study of Francis Collins about South Korean international students in Auckland,
I started to use ‘studentification’ in a wider sense, considering the agency of
students and their ability to reproduce their own cultural practices when
abroad. In this sense, my idea was to present three different cultures of
Erasmus students (the most significant population of international students in
Lisbon) to understand their role and involvement in different processes of
urban change.
First, I identify the party-centred practices of the
so-called ‘typical’ Erasmus students, and their participation -along with young
tourists- in the production and consumption of Lisbon’s tourism gentrification.
Then, I recognize that a group of ‘alternative’ Erasmus students who rejected a
‘typical’ Erasmus life are working as marginal gentrifiers, whose political and
aesthetic orientations lead them to the discovery of new urban territories for
consumption. Finally, there are the ‘scholar’ or hard-working Erasmus students,
who seem to be engaged with entrepreneurial activities, echoing the emphasis on
the knowledge-economy that prevails in today’s urban policies of European
capital cities.
To summarize, international students could be
considered a new class of transnational urban consumers that express
collectively a diversified repertory of practices, cultures and lifestyles.
Wealthier than the average of college students, they are relevant consumers
(and occasionally clever producers) in the travel economy (as foreigners), in lthe
eisure economy (as youth), and in the knowledge economy (as students).
Therefore, they become central actors at the core of the cognitive-cultural,
visitor-centred system of production in contemporary cities.
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