Several movements conceptualise cities’ educational, cultural and urban/regional/transnational development aspects, such as Educating Cities (Villar, 1990), Children’s City (Tonucci, 1996), Eurocities (Joukes & Costa, 2015) or URBACT’s “heritage as an opportunity” (Aymonino, 1988). Cultural tourism/Edutourism have also played important roles, cultural tourism being a non-formal, lifelong education formula led by the individuals (Richards, 1996). Monitoring people’s opinion about the city and getting them to actively participate in projects also enlightens those movements (Alves, 2003; Wood, 2002). In this context, it was carried out a research on Chaves’s historic centre renewal and the study of the Roman Baths (Carneiro, 2013), whose rationale considered educational communities as partners responsible for their own development based mostly in enhancing heritage and the thereof ensuing tourism (Costa, 2009; Diniz et al, 2014). Results showed that teachers value urban renewal processes, while being critical, though. They also stress the rural environment, asserting that the community must decide on the role they want the historic centre to play on the development of the city/region, emphasising information, training and dissemination. The historic centre should be a space for families to live in and is referred to as a multiple use educational resource of formal education strategies (social constructivist paradigm of development). As to students, their view of the historic centre revolves around their youth experiences: visits to pubs and walks through the green areas on either side of the river, considered as part of the historic center (although it is not officially so). For visitors, in the city/historic centre one can enjoy both heritage, nature and history. Guided tours are especially sought-after (tourism as a non-formal/lifelong learning strategy). Like students, visitors “extended” the historic centre to the river, combining nature with built heritage, which leads to new reflections about territorial, physical and conceptual boundaries in urban environments.
