I’m travelling Europe living in a tiny, twenty-year old van. Driving through the steep vineyards of the Douro Valley on our way to Porto, I remember a city of vertiginous streets where hand-painted posters or decorated mannequins stuck over the edges of narrow balconies. When we arrive, a lot has changed since my visits a decade ago. The last time I was here, the 2008 economic crash was more a presence than a memory. The narrow side-streets where I glimpsed the mohicans, leather jackets and spray painted manifestos of punks and anarchists are now lively with shops selling colourful trinkets. Houses which, a decade ago, exuded gothic grandeur from broken wrought iron balconies and vast, dirty Art Deco doors are now hidden from view by scaffolding. Cranes vie with churches for dominance of the skyline. This is now a trendy city break destination, a favourite in fact of European tourists. Journalists have taken to calling it “on the rise”. The city’s contemporary art offering occupies a site at the heart of downtown gentrification: it was Rua Miguel Bombarda, lined with boutique art galleries, that kick-started the “Porto art district” as it is now known. The galleries put not just the city but the country’s contemporary art scene on the map. On this street, a painted rainbow guides shoppers through an alternative shopping centre full of mini art galleries, boutiques, pop up shops and vintage clothing – this last, a fairly recent hipster import to Portugal. Artisan ateliers, gourmet burgers, “co-working” spaces and even that emblem of gentrification, a cereal cafe, seem to have crept outwards into the whole old town. But look a bit closer and the art district is a lot more than just that: it is a collage of the commercial and the free, the curated and the spontaneous, the commissioned and the organic. Street artists are changing the landscape and claiming space for their own ideas about art, and the issue of ownership is at the heart of this. These walls feel like a DIY exhibition - an informal show of the city’s writers. Some people come back again and again to paint these streets: black and white collages, weathered drawings of faces, Costah’s caricatures of people or Hazul’s fluid-lined abstractions. Hashtags and instagram handles appear like artist signatures inviting passers-by off the street and into the digital realm. #Berribly accompanies a series of Munch-like nudes, and leads me to a website and then to sitting down in Berri’s studio to chat about how street artists are making Porto’s art district their own. An Irish/Polish street writer with a background in fine art, she considers herself an “outside perspective”. She cautions that the anticapitalist content of street art has become “a huge cliche at this point”, reflecting that “street art is fundamentally an exercise in branding so no-one is stealing a method [anymore]”. However, she thinks advertisers co-opting street art is a unique feature of Porto’s art district: cider brand “Orchared Thieves” asking people to tag the city with their stencil and Maracuja festival commissioning its own pasteup. I found the website under a world map mural isn’t another artist portfolio but rather, a luxury apartment website - and, when I show her, she says: “it’s a bit insidious about luxury apartments advertising through street art, when a lot of that scene is being negatively impacted by it”. She goes on to tell me the “heartbreaking” story of a friend who, when his long-term lease came up, had to leave his home of 50 years for a small apartment. Berri herself has been evicted twice, once for the landlord to rent her flat on AirBnB and once, so he could turn it into a hotel. Her friend and she aren’t alone: as many as 70 residents a week approaching a tenants’ association seeking help against evictions. I found the average salary is now too low to rent in the city centre, the second most expensive Portuguese spot where prices have risen 88% since 2013. One of the biggest challenges facing Porto today is how to reconcile the opportunities coming from “it” status with the needs and rights of residents.