The project of the Urban Art Gallery is integrated in the Department of Cultural Heritage (DPC) of Lisboa City Council and gives form to the strategic goals of enabling and giving visibility to the cultural expressions of inhabitant communities, but also that of heritage safeguarding, since the visual communication artefacts are evaluated as testimonies of the present relevant for future generations.
The aim is to promote artistic citizenship recognising graffiti and street art as important expressions of contemporary culture, simultaneously raising awareness and preventing the emergence of vandal interventions, based on the intensive dialogue with the artistic community of graffiti and street art, and by a very diverse and vast offer of opportunities of production within the universe of these aesthetical practices.
The direct impact of GAU has been the awareness among public officials to the importance of urban art, both as heritage worth recording as well as a driver for urban regeneration processes. It is also worth mentioning that the best practices of GAU have been disseminating to other Portuguese city councils (such as the City Council of Almada, Setúbal and Loures, among others) and to other cities around the globe, such as Quito, the capital city of Equador (that recently created its own Urban Art Gallery), and Barcelona in Spain. Raising awareness to the debates and critical issues around urban art, allows the dissemination of safeguarding and respecting attitudes towards cultural heritage and other public goods, as well as the promotion of the artistic quality of urban art objects and attitudes of respect for these cultural practices and practitioners. One of the most important transversal impacts for the city has been the international attention given to the city in news all over the world, allowing the dissemination of the values of tolerance and cosmopolitism entangled in the culture of the city.

GAU: GAU (cm-lisboa.pt)