Re-framing a semi-periphery: The making of Lisbon as a global real estate market

This paper examines how Lisbon transformed from a city widely seen as a crisis-ridden ‘no-go’ zone into an ideal real estate investment destination. This redesignation allowed the city to serve as a ‘spatial fix’ for overaccumulated capital in core Europe in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. While the push for capital to ‘switch’ between sectors and geographies rests on systemic dynamics, this paper explores how the spatial fix is also discursively mediated. Studying real estate industry reports as ‘market devices’ and drawing from interviews with real estate actors and observations at industry events, I demonstrate how industry narratives reinforced the need to shift capital to peripheral markets, and re-framed Lisbon itself into a lower-risk, viable destination for investment. This helped set the conditions for global corporate investors to enter the Lisbon market. This article thus builds on a growing dialogue between critical political economy and performativity, by exploring how narratives both reflect and reproduce core-periphery relations.