No abstract

The heightening scale of urban tourism and the fast-growing number of "floating" city users raise new challenges to understand contemporary urban changenamely 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.

Middle/late Devonian and early Carboniferous metasedimentary sequences in the northernmost region (Porto-Espinho-Tomar) of the Ossa-Morena Zone (Portuguese Iberian Variscan Massif) contain black shales of very low to low-grade metamorphism. These metasedimentary rocks form a discrete NNW-SSE structure within a major shear zone (Porto-Tomar-Ferreira do Alentejo) and remain subparallel to the observed regional major structures (folding, thrusts or overthrusts). These black shales are overhanged and then imbricated in an upper Proterozoic metamorphic substratum. A multidisciplinary study of these metasedimentary rocks from the Espinho-Tomar region has tectonostratigraphy, palynology, organic petrology and clay mineralogy combined methods. This approach provides new insights into the tectonic evolution and geological framework of Palaeozoic basement of the Iberian Variscides. Palaeoenvironmental and tectonostratigraphic implications on the Iberian geodynamic framework are discussed.