Urban art has emerged as a new feature of cities in recent decades. Its wide success as a fresh, youthful, and cosmopolitan artistic movement has elicited the attention of urban planners, who increasingly use it in their strategies for urban development. This artistic expression has been understood as a resource to be used in urban and cultural policymaking, especially when it comes to urban reassessment and marketing. This dynamic is embedded in a paradigm where the arts and culture are increasingly understood as resources for urban development and city marketing. In this article, we draw on qualitative empirical material (interviews, official documents, press releases, websites) from an ongoing research project in the context of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. One of the aims of this project is to analyze the link between local authorities and urban art aiming at understanding existing representations and the kinds of strategies that were put in place for its management. We conclude that largely local authorities use urban art to achieve three main strategic goals: the strategy of “landscape construction and urban reassessment,” the strategy of “refashioning the city image/city branding,” and the strategy of “social promotion of stigmatized territories and communities.”

This article focuses on contemporary urban art in the city of Lisbon. We understand urban art as an art world that has developed through a historical process that, in Portugal, is essentially three decades old. It began with the emergence of the subculture of graffiti in Portugal and it culminates in the gradual artification, commodification and institutionalization of graffiti and street art. We believe this was caused by a particular historical arrangement during the previous decade that produced extremely favourable conditions for the emergence of a set of artists in this field. This arrangement is characterized internationally by the expansion and recognition of street art and, on a national level (especially in Lisbon), by the actions of a number of agents (media, municipalities, art world, commercial entities, academia) that contributed to a higher visibility and legitimacy of this artistic community. Thus, we argue that a structure of opportunities was created that a allowed a number of actors to establish and define a strategy of professionalization in this field. In this article we analyse three types of opportunities: practice opportunities, symbolic, and financial. We consider the social actors that generate these opportunities as well as the way in which artists perceive them and adapt.