Lisbon – the identity of an intercultural city

The aim of the article is to draw attention to the specificity of Lisbon’s identity – the identity of an intercultural city, engaged on the one hand in intercultural dialogue that integrates local communities, and on the other – in the process of a commercial use of this dialogue leading to the revitalization and gentrification of urban spaces. The context for presenting the above-mentioned problems involves: the historical background of Lisbon’s interculturalism, the idea of intercultural cities, intercultural dialogue, models of diversity and the city’s neoliberal policy.

This text presents one of the aspects of changes in education which are generated by the expanding range of technical possibilities and contents of the environment networks, namely school gentrification. For the purposes of this text, the term “gentrification” means external to the ennobled object (in this case, schools and education) act of giving it the new features, according to being developed under projects from the outside. This is done through the repair and improvement schemes formulated by professionals who perform interests of payers, but not the actual needs of “ennobled” objects. At the beginning of this article there is a brief outline of the properties of the open network society. Subsequently, the process of gentrification is presented as a process of school improvement towards being “ennobled”, the material conditions of this process in the Polish school, the conditions and opportunities of edutaintment and stages of gentrification through computerization. Finally, questions are asked about the chances for a change in education through the new types of the media and communication and about the possibility of emancipation of education and through education without going through the processes of “gentrification” (in the meaning presented in this text) .