CITY NOT FOR SALE:
RECLAIMING BARCELONA IN THE WAKE OF
TOURISM MASSIFICATION
______
A Thesis Presented to
The Honors Tutorial College
Ohio University
______
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for Graduation
from the Honors Tutorial College
with the degree of
Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology
______
By
Stacie Carlton
April 2019
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Smoki Musuraj for her advice and support. I would also like to thank the Provost Undergraduate Research Fund for their part in helping my fieldwork in Barcelona. I owe this project to the people and organizations who listened to my questions and allowed me to participate in their lives. Thank you.
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Abstract
This study explores how the lives of residents living in Barcelona, Spain are influenced by the phenomenon of “overtourism.” This word, like the phrase tourism massification, expresses the idea that tourism has grown to be an unsustainable and potentially destructive force in the city. Since the city was put on the map after the 1992 Olympic Games, it has been successful at transforming the urban environment to attract evermore tourists, numbering 32 million in 2018. Some of the city’s 1.1 million residents have been expressed their dissatisfaction with tourism’s effects on the city through protests, demonstrations, and activism. This ethnographic study involving two months of semi-structured interviews and participant observation investigates tourism through its impact on the spaces of the city and the residents who inhabit them. In doing so I claim residents’ relationship with their city and to each other is impacted by tourism’s spatial effects. I demonstrate how residential life is challenged by tourism, but also how residents use activism to stake their claim to the city and the decisions which affect its development. I argue that these acts of resistance are important in reimagining how not only tourism, but cities in general, can be shaped to better serve the needs of residents
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ...... i Abstract ...... ii Table of Contents ...... iii List of Figures ...... iv
Introduction ...... 1 Aim and Scope ...... 4 On Tourism ...... 6 On the City ...... 8 On Space ...... 10 Methods...... 11 Chapter Overviews...... 14
Chapter 1: The “Real” Barcelona(s) ...... 17 Authenticity in Tourism ...... 19 The Transformation of La Rambla ...... 20 Resident Authenticity...... 24 Killing the Clown ...... 26 Conclusion ...... 29
Chapter 2: Tourism or Neighborhood ...... 32 Selling the City ...... 34 The High Cost of Living in a “Successful” City...... 38 Evictions ...... 40 Tourism Gentrification vs. Needs of Local Residents ...... 43 Conclusion ...... 46
Chapter 3: Contested Publics of Parks and Gardens ...... 49 The Park ...... 50 Public-Private Partnerships ...... 54 The Garden...... 56 Conclusion ...... 61
Chapter 4: Reclaiming the City...... 63 Collective Organizing: Masses against Massification ...... 65 Individual Activism: Getting Personal with Tourism ...... 72 Conclusion ...... 76 Epilogue ...... 78 References ...... 81
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List of Figures
Figure 1 La Rambla in July, 2018 22
Figure 2 Graffiti in La Rambla depicting where to find “the 23 real” experience
Figure 3 Tourists taking photos in front of La Boqueria 27 Market in La Rambla
Figure 4 Banners hanging from apartments 32
Figure 5 Graffiti on a development project in Poblenou 37
Figure 6 Anti-eviction graffiti on a bank 41
Graffiti denouncing tourism 47 Figure 7
Figure 8 Resident photo of Park Guell under construction in 50 the early 1900s.
Figure 9 Figure 9: The ticketing equipment for the entrance 52 to the monumental zone
Figure 10 A neighborhood garden in Gracia 57
Figure 11 A garden in El Raval under threat of privatization 59
Figure 12 : Graffiti in L’Agora Juan Andres 60
Figure 13 A demonstration on the city’s housing crisis 65
Figure 14 Protest of hotel construction near El Raval and the 68 port of Barcelona
Figure 15 Socrates and the tourist 73 Figure 16 Talking to tourists in Park Guell 75 Figure 17 Barcelona is not for sale 77
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Introduction
The Plaça (pronounced pla.sa) Sant Felip Neri in The Gothic Neighborhood is a crucial stop for tour groups in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, Spain. Finding the square almost requires the help of a guide; the winding maze of narrow streets makes it possible to lose yourself without finding the designated points of interests outlined in maps and guidebooks. It was here that Antoni Gaudi, the modernist architect who constructed many of the famous landmarks of the city went to church, and also where during the Spanish civil war, 42 people died during a bombing by Dictator Francisco
Franco. The impressions of bombs in the stone facades are still visible, and tourists pose in front of them multiple times a day throughout the year. When I visited this square during my two months of field research in Barcelona, I saw few people who were not tour groups, photographers, diners at Relaix and Chauteaux, or schoolchildren on recess from the rebuilt school. On one occasion however, I attended a meeting of the local organization Fem Plaça, who brought residents together in this space to discuss the subject of tourism which has made itself such a visible presence in their daily lives. Fem
Plaça means “we make the square,” but as one blog post written about the organization attests, residents do not only make squares in their occupation of public space. They are attempting to “make” the city (Ehrmann 2018).
The organizers carted in dozens of folding chairs, and multiple people helped set them up in rows across from a larger table which served as a stage. The whole area was bounded by strings holding photographs of the organization’s activities, to mark off this rectangular space from the tour groups which filtered around us. We were here to listen to a social researcher named Augustín Cocola Gant who had undertaken a similar project to 1 mine 3 years earlier. He had interviewed residents of The Gothic Quarter to find out how their daily lives were influenced by tourism. He presented his findings, outlining common resident complaints like noise and mobility concerns, as well as the emotional impact tourism has on residents: making them feel they no longer belong in their city. But not everyone in this space was similarly attuned to his speech. In one especially tense moment, a tour group directly behind our corner of the square began applauding their guide at the end of a tour, drowning out the researcher’s voice. Immediately multiple members of Fem Plaça rose out of their seats and shouted at the tourists to quiet. One went over to speak to them, explaining the outburst in response to their noise. After a few minutes we were able to return our attention to the speaker and the meeting continued.
Even as myself and the rest of Fem Plaça were angered by our apparent invisibility to the tourists, they had unconsciously proven the importance of this gathering. Residents, in carving their own space in the plaza, were making a comment on how tourists’ presence in the city is capable of overpowering their own This event also demonstrates how tourism provokes arguments over the right to space in the city, at the same time its presence makes it difficult to negotiate these rights.
The discussion over how to “fix” tourism in Barcelona is part of a larger anti- tourism movement that is gaining increasing visibility in Europe, whose cities account for
40 percent of the world’s total international tourist arrivals (United Nations World
Tourism Organization). In Barcelona, 32 million visitors visited the city of 1.1 million in
2016 (Leadbeater 2016). The continued pressure on this city and 14 other European
Union members has led them to form a network called The Southern European Cities
Against Touristification. Touristification refers to a process, and the resulting state of
2 massive development of tourism, leading to the transformation of space into a tourism commodity (Renau 2018). This means that public space, housing, and commerce all become structured around tourist use. This occurs as tourism increases the desirability of certain neighborhoods, leading to lucrative private investment opportunities which transform the urban environment to suit tourists (Blanco-Romero, Blázquez-Salom, and
Canoves 2018). Companies can then sell properties at higher prices which leads to rent rising to unaffordable levels for residents and local business owners (Burgen 2017).
Public space is also affected by this transformation, as businesses and restaurants which cater to tourists impact the mobility and desirablitiy of space for local residents (Gotham
2005). In this way concerns of tourism massification, or “overtourism,” as it is sometimes referred, not only reference the sheer numbers of tourists flocking to destination but the lasting effects of their presence in the city.
The issue of tourism and its relation to housing has been acknowledged by the current mayor, Ada Colau, a figure-head of the anti-eviction movement in the city.
Before her election she was arrested in July 2013 for occupying a bank in protest as part of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (Diez 2015). Her activism in this issue helped her jump into the political sphere and get elected in 2015. Since becoming mayor, she has attempted to mitigate the problems of evictions and empty apartments through interventions in the tourism sector. Efforts include targeting unlicensed tourist rentals on sharing platforms like Airbnb and freezing construction of new hotels in the city center
(Croft 2015). To combat tourism’s effect on public space, the Ayuntamiento, or city council, continues to develop research projects to find ways to recover touristic areas of the city for residents (“Transforming La Rambla from a Social and Local Perspective”)
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Despite this, residents continue to question the potential of these policies as they continue to experience evictions and feel excluded from the city’s spaces. An ethnographic case study can provide insight into how a tourism policy can be better shaped to serve the needs of residents in Barcelona, which is potentially useful to other cities around the world facing similar issues of tourism massification.
Aim and Scope
My aim in this thesis is to examine how residents’ rights to the city are challenged by tourism. Although the environmental concerns of tourism are also present in discussions of overtourism, I am focused on how tourism alters residents’ experiences with the city’s spaces and others within them.
The following research questions guided my data collection:
1. How has touristification affected Barcelona residents experience and relation to
urban spaces?
2. How do residents reclaim spaces of the city through collective protests and
individual acts?
3. How do residents’ laments about tourism speak to larger concerns over autonomy
and agency in urban environments?
In addressing these questions this project focuses on the ways in which tourism endangers resident’s feelings of belonging in the city. I argue that tourism massification threatens what they value about urban life and their conception of the ideal city. At the same time, I will demonstrate how residents are not passive victims, but actively attempt
4 to reclaim agency through activism which challenges current conceptions and values of tourism. At the core of the discussion is a question of how much power citizens have over the processes which affect their city, and accordingly their lives. This ethnographic study sheds light on this question by examining how residents use tourism and its surrounding discourse as a tool to stake their claim to the city and control over its development
Barcelona’s distinct local history and its global cache as a tourist destination makes it an interesting place to study the impact of tourism on a city’s identity. It owes its popularity in part to the unique regional Catalonian culture and its influence on the art, architecture, and “vibe,” of the city, which I often heard contrasted to the capital of
Madrid. It is also popular as an emblem of the Mediterranean lifestyle and its position bordering the sea. The Catalan and Spanish languages exist side by side in the city, and tourists experience the combination of cultural symbols which have historically fought to be recognized in the same space.1 The conflict between the Catalonian state and the
Spanish state is still visible today through the signs of the Catalonian Independence movement, which though not a focus of these thesis, opened my eyes to the revolutionary character of the city and the involvement of citizens in the political sphere. This identity of the city as a place for activism permeates discussions of tourism and makes it a prime
1 It is relevant to note Catalonia’s rebellious relationship with the Spanish state, as it forms an important part of the history and identity of the city. This is not a new fight, but one stemming from middle-age power struggles after the marriage of the Kingdoms Aragon (which housed Barcelona) and Castile (which housed Madrid) in 1469. After the shifting of trade to the New World, power began to shift from the Mediterranean port to the central Spanish government. A long history of cultural repression followed until the end of Franco’s dictatorship in 1975. The struggle for independence continues to be visible in the city in 2019. 5 location to study how residents involve themselves in demonstrations against tourism massification.
This study will come at a crucial time and place, as cities around the world are facing similar issues with resident dissatisfaction regarding tourism. This research will contribute to a broader discussion about how globalization processes supporting tourism impact the daily lives of people living in cities. The research will also provide important qualitative data to policymakers invested in sustainable tourism. The thesis also aims to provoke self-reflection on the part of governments that wish for their cities to remain sustainable places to live in the face of becoming hot spots for culture and excitement.
This project is also potentially significant to anyone who finds themselves to be a tourist in the future, hopefully inspiring them to think more about their impact on the places they visit. I intend for the study to provide practical insight into and vision of more sustainable models of tourism that do justice to the local cultures they aim to promote.
My research contributes to the discipline of anthropology as a case-study of how people
“make” place through discourse and action. Finally, it makes a contribution to interdisciplinary studies of tourism, cities, and space. These studies by anthropologists, geographers, and urban scholars provide insights into how tourism affects people living in urban spaces, and the potential in these spaces for people to shape their own lives as well.
On Tourism
In Barcelona and other places, it is not tourism in itself which residents find fault with, but rather the conditions which promote its massification and detrimental effects on neighborhoods. Tourism cannot be generalized to be either positive or negative, but
6 rather occupies an ambiguous state where it impacts societies in simultaneously positive and negative ways. Further, the effect tourism has on a community is dependent on a variety of contextual factors. Tourism can bring economic benefits to local people, as they make money by offering goods and services to foreigners who visit (Nunez 1963).
This is most beneficial when local people can control how tourists are distributed and the income they generate (Greenwood 1972). Tourism can also potentially benefit local people by increasing interest or value of their culture, as with the indigenous cultures and people in some areas of Latin America (Theodossopoulos 2010). However, tourism popularizes at the risk of commodifying the cultural features it promotes, highlighting a culture shaped by its demands, rather than authentic cultural practices (Young 2012).
Anthropologists are wary to speak of tourisms destruction on culture itself, as they recognize that a view of culture as “lost” represents communities as static, while they are actually involved always in complex processes of stability and change
(Greenwood 1989). Anthropologists have since shifted from weighing the benefits and drawbacks of tourism to focusing on specific effects on communities. One of these effects which has been well-studied in Barcelona and other contexts is resident displacement due to urban development projects aimed at attracting tourists.
Displacement can be physical as it forces people to move, but it has also been studied in its emotional dimension, in the forms of sensory disruption and threats to people’s sense of place (Pinkster, Fenne and Boterman 2017). This displacement due to tourism has been conceived of as its own type of gentrification as new developments attract those privileged enough to travel, who are commonly middle to upper class (Tesfahuney,
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Mekonnen and Schough 2016). The changes in housing and commerce which occur serves not the year-round residents, but the continuous stream of temporary visitors.
Studies of tourism gentrification acknowledge that tourism can be a driving force for speculation and property transformations which threaten residents, but they contend that this should not be conceived of as a completely independent process. It can be viewed more holistically as a part of other, broader forces impacting cities and their residents. For Barcelona, overtourism and its characteristics are not simply born from the city’s popularity with visitors but are supported and fed by urban processes which have been changing the structure and nature of cities for decades (Mansilla-Lopez 2018). For this reason, it is necessary to look to studies of the urban to ground and explain experiences of tourism in post-industrial, post-fordist cities like Barcelona.
On the City
The study of the urban in anthropology is relatively recent in the discipline, which historically concerned itself with studies of rural cultures, mistakenly referred to as
“primitive societies.” The ignorance to the urban question was partly because of the divide between sociology and anthropology, as anthropologists focused on non-western societies while western societies were designated for sociological studies. In the 1970’s, this attitude began to change as anthropologists looked inward to their own cities to study anthropology in and of urban settings (Smart and Smart, 2003). Since this time cities have been categorically studied as they relate to different aspects of life. Some of these categories include the ethnic city, divided city, gendered city, contested city, de- industrialized city, and modernist city (Low 1996). While space does not permit a
8 definition of all the ways cities can be studied, it is important to note their capacity for difference and the subjectivity within them. As Andrew Irving states,
the city does not exist in an individual’s mind or ‘out there’ as an objective physical landscape but as a collective entity that gathers people’s emotions and memories, mixes them with architecture and elicits distinctive practices and ways of being (Irving 2004, 2)
The varying nature of cities is one reason anthropologists have taken up the study of the urban, while another is the realization that cities are prime sites to study the processes affecting human beings. The city is not the only place where these processes may be studied, but they are often found intensified in urban areas, as are their effects (Low
1996). This is because cities are prime places for international flows to meet (Peterson
2006). One of these processes is globalization, which is used to refer to the “growing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures, and populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods and services, technology, and flows of investment, people, and information” (Kolb 2019). Anthropologists contribute to this definition by highlighting the effect of these social relations on everyday activities (Smart and Smart,
2003). Globalization is sometimes considered positively, as it contributes to the growth potential of cities. This has caused many cities since the 1970’s to adopt neoliberal economic policies which facilitate growth in favoring free-market capitalism. Though this makes cities more competitive and therefore profitable, it has also been criticized for its undesirable effects on social and economic equality and civil rights (Kriznik 2018).
Neoliberalism can also endanger the “right to the city” itself. First conceived by
Henry Lefebvre (1996), this entails citizens’ rights to appropriate urban spaces for their own, as well as the autogestion to make collective decisions themselves rather than state
9 officials (Lefebvre 1996). The idea of the right to the city has since become popular as part of grassroots movements and political initiatives, but governments rarely advocate the radical turn Lefebvre imagined. In this way the state retains power alongside economic when it comes to the decisions shaping cities (Purcell 2017). With the conflicting ideas held by citizens and private and political elites about how space should be used, the right to the city is a prime concept to employ in “contested cities” like
Barcelona where residents and political and economic elites struggle to reconcile their competing visions and ideals of space.
On Space
As resident dissatisfaction with tourism deals with and is expressed through the discourse of space, literature on this topic serves to ground my thesis and communicate with the wider discussion of public space in cities. First, anthropologists and geographers have long struggled to make concrete and disparate definitions of space and place, though the two terms are often interchangeable or taken to mean the same thing. In this thesis the difference is not paramount, but discussions of space in particular invoke discussions of power and agency.
Johanna Brewer (2008) is useful to consult on the difference between place and space. She defines place as the “somewhere.” A place can be an office, the woods, or in this case a city. But “space” is “a mathematical construction by which our discontinuous experience of the everyday world is made uniform” (Brewer 2008: 966). In other words, space is the between of places, helping to connect settings. It is a product of movement and reflection (de Certeau 1984). People become then a crucial part of space, creating it through their social relationships, and producing place through the patterns of everyday
10 movements (Pred 1986). In this way space provides a gateway into understanding social relationships and how they affect and are affected by the environment in which they take place.
Alberto Corsin Jimenez (2003) also emphasizes spaces sociality, viewing social relationships are inherently spatial. Space is what people do, and emphasizes the actions which take place in a given locale (Corsin Jimenez 2003, 138). Space, like place, should not be conceived of as static, as it is composed of local and multiple constructions which are” politicized, culturally relative, and historically specific” (Rodman 1992, 641). Space does not confine inhabitants (Appadurai 1988), though they are also affected by spatial practices and representations of others. This idea can be encapsulated in Lefebvre’s terms, social production and social production of space. He wrote that political and economic forces design use of space and imbue it with intentions and meanings (social production) which are then contentiously appropriated, produced, and reproduced by users and residents (socially constructed), (Lefebvre 1991). Setha M. Low explains how this works as professional and political elite’s vision of the city is rarely consistent with experiences and understandings of residents and workers, but people are able to reappropriate space to serve their own needs which may elude the goals of urban planners
(Low 2009). This is visible in Barcelona as demonstrations mounted by residents historically and to the present make a point of taking up physical space, and the public and open nature of these manifestations can be seen as a direct argument against the privatization of space and resources which is supported by neoliberal economic practice
(Asara 2016).
Methods: Doing Anthropology in the City
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This thesis is based on field research conducted in Barcelona from May to July
during the Summer of 2018. During this time I employed ethnographic methods—
participant observation, tag-alongs with informants, descriptive observations of the city,
and semi-structured interviews to investigate how the phenomenon of tourism shapes the
people and landscape of Barcelona. These methods were used in various neighborhoods,
dependent on where I could find contacts as well as on where important tourist sites are
located. Research encompasses accounts from people which speak to the neighborhoods
of Gracia (where I resided during my research) as well as El Raval, El Gotic, Poblenou,
La Barceloneta. El Raval, El Gotic, and La Barceloneta are located in the city center, the
district of Ciutat Vella where many tourists visit. Gracia and Poblenou are regarded as
neighborhoods where tourists are not as readily visible, and they are advertised as more
“local” areas. They too are increasingly susceptible to encroachment by tourism as the
city center becomes too crowded.
Participant observation in the different neighborhoods involved attending conferences, like the Innovative European Policies on Sustainable Urban Tourism hosted by the Global Eco Forum, and meetings held by neighborhood organizations and groups including La Xemeneia, Accio Raval and Xarxa Ciutat Vella. I was able to understand and interpret these events due to 6 years of experience learning Spanish. While I am less comfortable with the regional language of Catalan, my informants who spoke this language also spoke Spanish and made conversation and translation of speeches and documents in Catalan possible. Participant observation also involved tag-alongs with informants around the city, including observing them while they worked on their activism projects.
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I employed De Certeau’s (1984) method of walking through the city on tag-a- longs with informants or by myself. I observed during this time how residents use space in comparison with tourists, while also comparing spatial behaviors in more residential areas with the touristic sites outlined in guidebooks and maps. I also went on a number of guided tours through El Raval and El Gotic to get perspective on how tourists and tour guides interact, and to see how tour groups interact with each other and the city itself. I frequented Park Guell and La Barceloneta to observe the tourists there and how they interacted with street vendors, often being approached and treated as a tourist due to my appearance. Though people did not immediately guess I was American, my skin color, hair, and eyes immediately identified me as an outsider. I also used these opportunities to perform descriptive observation of the physical space itself, taking note of the banners I saw on buildings as well as the graffiti present on the walls and sidewalks of the city.
Some of these mentioned tourism or tourists directly, while others referred to speculation, gentrification, or specific organizations in the city.
Finally, semi-structured interviews were used to glean insights from informants who I sought through Twitter and Facebook pages of organizations as well as those I met at meetings and conferences. I conducted interviews in English and Spanish, lasting from thirty minutes to in some cases over two hours. They provided me with material spanning from life experiences of my informants to their history in Barcelona and their current activities there. In all interviews, perceptions of tourism and tourists, migration and immigration, and Spanish politics were major themes. My understanding of tourism in
Barcelona was also aided by conversations I held with tour guides and tourists. These conversations helped me understand what attracts foreigners to Barcelona, what activities
13 they decide to do once they arrive, and what about the city makes a strong emotional impact on them.
From these methods and materials like fieldnotes and video recordings, photographs, and maps, this thesis seeks to provide insights about the effect of tourism on residents of Barcelona. Of course, there are inherent limitations to this study. The small number of people I interviewed should not be taken to represent all the possible views on tourism present in this city. However, their testimonies, along with their similarities and differences provide an entry point to understanding tourism in this context. Also, the themes I explore in this thesis are only a few of the countless paths that branch out from the data collected in the process of field research. At the same time as I was studying tourism I was surrounded by signs of the Catalan Independence movement. This movement is similar to my concerns about freedom and self-determination in cities but is not a focus of this thesis. Rather than attempting to explain a movement which as an outsider cannot fully speak for, I hope to provide insights into the importance of personal independence and autonomy for the people I studied—those residents and activists who frequently reminded me that autonomy and agency is not a privilege, but an innate human right.
Chapter Overviews
Chapter 1 discusses the metaphor of the theme park, which is used by residents to
describe how they feel the city is becoming less “real” under the influence of tourism. I
look to one space, the popular tourist destination of La Rambla, to examine how it
contrasts with resident’s views on what makes a city authentic. I discuss the notion of
authenticity as a process of living, rather than as a static thing to be seen or purchased. I
14 demonstrate the effect of these differing notions of authenticity on resident’s use and experience of the street, exploring how La Rambla has changed from a place primarily for residents, to a place for tourists. This chapter also deals with how the street has historical importance as a meeting ground for people to fight for and act out their vision of the ideal city, one which fosters revolutionary thought, freedom, and collectivity. I contrast this vision with the perspective that modern tourism creates distance between people in its focus on sight-seeing and consumerism.
Chapter 2 focuses on how tourism is related to the processes of gentrification and speculation affecting housing and commercial changes within the city. I trace tourism’s importance as an area for investment and how these investments affect the character of the neighborhood according to residents. I also explain how eviction processes are linked to tourism push residents out of the city center, thus threatening their right to the city in making it harder for them to live in, and appropriate space in the center. This contributes to the idea that the city is transforming into a theme park by making tourists more visible in the city than residents. I also discuss how the aspect of community is central to the ideal neighborhood that residents desire, and essential to survival for those who are pushed to move by the effect of tourism speculation on housing and commerce.
Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship between tourism, urban governance, and public green spaces in the city. Like streets, these public spaces serve an important function as meeting grounds, but their functions are being transformed by tourism. They are also increasingly important as the only spaces left for residents to make their own as the city becomes increasingly developed, concretized, and privatized. I look to one green space already “lost” to tourism to explain how government partnerships with private
15 entities challenge resident conceptions of public access and proper management of Park
Guell. I then examine neighborhood gardens currently occupied by residents which provide them opportunities to critique tourism and the privatization threatening their rights to space. In doing so I discuss how resident’s right to the city is damaged in terms of the denial of their right to appropriate green spaces, and their absence in the decision- making processes which transform these spaces. This has far-reaching implications for the democratic potential of cities, as the concept of citizen and the rights accorded to them is threatened by privatization.
Chapter 4 focuses on the kinds of activism tourism inspires. Residents join collectively to protest the building of a new hotel, which they fear will lead to more changes in the neighborhood. They also stage a demonstration on the housing crisis in the public space of the street. Individual actors also break out of the collective organization tradition to do their own activism which focuses more on engaging personally with tourists. This chapter discusses the potential of these forms of activism in solving the city’s tourism crisis, and how they represent a reclaiming of residents’ rights to the city, and acknowledgement of the larger enemies of residential happiness and belonging.
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Chapter 1 The “Real” Barcelona(s): Contested Meanings of Space
The city center of Barcelona is Placa Catalunya, though not a geographic center, it is today as in the past, a meeting ground of difference. It is here, that in the 1800s the walls of the medieval city were torn down so that the old district: El Gotico, El Raval, and Ciutat Vella could meet the new expansion of L’Eixample. It was also here in 1936, where anarchists leading the revolution met Spanish nationalists in a bloody confrontation leading up to the civil war. When I visited the Placa, I saw it as a square composed of fountains, statues, and pigeons, bordered by an Apple Store and a mall complex containing an Urban Outfitters. Not far from these symbols of modern consumer culture is the entry point to the “old” Barcelona of El Gotico, which draws tourists year- round to see portions of the medieval wall which still exist.
The commercial center does not seem far from the city’s industrial past, in distance or in the overcrowding which characterizes the area. Though today it is not walls which keep people trapped together in close proximity, but the concentration of tourism activities and resources. The prevalence of tourists and their services were the inspiration behind a comment I overheard while walking around the plaza, that the city is becoming
“como un parque tematico” (like a theme park). I heard, and saw this comparison written in graffiti, many times during my fieldwork in the Summer of 2018. What residents point to with this statement is that nobody could live in a theme park, nor would they want to.
A theme park conjures images of overwhelming crowds headed for their next dose of entertainment in the form of expensive food, rides, and experiences. It is not a place where people live their daily lives, which is why tourist spaces are often seen as
17 incompatible with residential life, and reality itself. My informant Juan illustrated this when he told me,
Every year Barcelona has more tourists and more overnights, but in the long term this is not a good thing. The people who want to visit Barcelona will think “there are too many tourists, and no local restaurants,” and they are going to stop coming here. It happens in other cities, the people start to think they are not real cities, just for tourists. Like a Disneyland, where you don’t see any people who live there.
The idea that there were too many tourists in Barcelona was expressed to me by informants who described the city as saturado (saturated). Like putting sugar in coffee, my informant Sergi explained to me, there comes a point where it becomes so sweet you can no longer drink it. The result is the city becoming too touristic for even the tourists themselves. This is because tourists and the services provided to them, are seen to exist outside the “real” Barcelona which residents inhabit. While it may not matter to a tourist that the city is losing the qualities that citizens believe are signs of authenticity, it matters to citizens who are losing the spaces that give meaning to the city, to their social relationships, and their own social identity.
In this chapter I argue that tourism ascribes different meanings and values to space, which results in a privileging of tourists’ belonging at the expense of residents. I begin with a discussion of authenticity, to demonstrate how for residents, this label depends less on cultural symbols within space, and more on the potential for space to aid in the creation and maintenance of a strong social fabric. I will then describe the space of
La Rambla, which used to be associated with freedom, and has now been coopted by the tourist sector to the point that residents now associate it with suppression of freedom.
This example shows what happens when tourist and residential ideologies collide, and how this influences the city to become a “theme park” in the eyes of residents.
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Authenticity in tourism
To borrow the words of my friend Harry, “There is no one Barcelona. Everyone inhabits their own.” Despite the endless Barcelona’s that can be found in each person’s imaginary, the idea that there is an authentic city is important for tourism. This is why restaurants appealing to tourists will all feature a picture of a large paella they sell for 15 euros, and why flyers in tourist directories all speak to the city’s famous architecture, its nightlife, and the FC Barca futbol team. Tourists who wish to find the authentic, or believe themselves to be in it, look for these cultural symbols that signal they are here in this city, not any other.
Dean MacCannell (1973) demonstrated the complexity of authenticity in tourism in his study of how tourists operate. Borrowing Goffman’s (1959) structural division of front and back applied this to the presentation of places for tourists. The back stage provides an illusion of reality, a “staged” authenticity, but the tourist is unable to ever fully remove themselves from the performance (MacCannell 1973, 592). When I asked an informant if she believed tourists get an authentic view of the city, she told me:
It depends what is “Authentic” because at the end, this is what they're being sold. They see it, they get it. Opium nightclub, the touristic bars, the English pubs, this is what they are seeing. We can’t really say they are not getting the authentic because nowadays this is part of our lives.2
MacCannell (1973) also contends that tourism can represent authentic experiences in the sense that it has become a part of everyday life for the residents of tourist destinations.
Some tourism scholars fault the concern with authenticity however, arguing that all places are constructed through performances, and that tourists are producers of their
2 Interview with Tatiana. May 2018. 19 experiences just as much as the local “actors” (Haldrup and Larsen 2015). While tourists do make choices about what to see when they visit Barcelona, and how to interpret it, I am focusing on how resident’s consider La Rambla to be no longer “real” in the wake of tourism. The transformation of La Rambla also exemplifies how residents have little say in the transformation of their urban spaces for tourism. Their laments about the absence of residents in this space show how their movements to avoid the street, though of their own volition, go against their personal desires to use this space. The following section demonstrates how this has occurred by looking to the history of the street and how it is characterized today.
The transformation of La Rambla
La Rambla (Figure 1) loosely translates to the word “ravine.” It is sometimes referred to in the plural, Las Ramblas, for the way it is actually different streets connected together. Its name refers to its historical state as a stream of dirty water which fell from the mountains, taking it to the sea (“Why La Rambla, Barcelona Main Street, Is Called La
Rambla“). In the fifteenth century it was reconstructed as a wide street, since this time serving as a place for residents to gather. Residents I spoke to with memories of the 50’s,
60’s, and 70’s told me how they would get together in this space to talk about soccer, bullfighting, and politics. Every Sunday it was a popular place for people to stroll up and down, interacting with their neighbors. After the 70’s and the death of Franco, the street became an emblem for the people’s newfound freedom. It was this atmosphere of freedom that made Harry, a 40-year resident of the city originally from England, decide to move to Barcelona. He found in La Rambla a perfect place for his street performances, funny skits which poked fun at things. One example of something he did in La Rambla
20 was to hold out a hat with a hole in the bottom, so that when people put money in, it would fall to the ground and he would leave it there. He never performed for money, but to amuse his imagination.
The important thing to me about the Ramblas was that it was like my best friend
or the mother that really loves you. You want to do it? Go ahead and really do it.
Freedom to do whatever. I never have had that from any human being as far as I
can remember.3
The capacity of the space for freedom was crucial to the identity and usefulness of the space for residents. After the death of Dictator Francisco Franco this was especially true, as an era of Socialist reforms began which endeavored to give the streets back to the citizens. It was also especially a “free” space in the lead up to the Olympics, as the city placed more value on cultural programming. Harry explained,
There was an atmosphere of a civilized, cultivated, educated, creative place. A lot
of people went to the Ramblas if not every weekend once a month because it was
interesting. Every day you were there because there might be performers, you
might meet somebody you haven’t seen for six months. It was a lively place.4
In this quote the liveliness of the space is reliant on the presence of residents who interacted with each other and created their own entertainment. For residents, La Rambla represents an example of how the memory of the city is fabricated through spaces where collectivity, community, and civility come to the fore (Epps 2002:195).
3 Interview with Harry. July 2018. 4 Interview with Harry. July 2018. 21
Figure 1: La Rambla in July, 2018
After the Olympics, however, La Rambla was no longer a space were the values of collectivity, community, and civility were found. For one, swindlers took over the street, and La Rambla garnered a reputation for pickpockets and muggings. The reason for this I was told, was simply that law enforcement turned a blind eye. The residents stopped coming as the reputation of the space turned dangerous. Community was no longer present either, as the activities residents used to do in this space, performances and selling wares became strictly controlled. From then on the only street performers visible were the statues, people dressed in paint and elaborate costumes who Harry told me,
“could only appeal to tourists.” Because these two things were ousted from the space, the collectivity it fostered for residents was also no longer present. Residents were unwilling to risk the pickpockets, and like many of the popular touristic spaces, local residents are hard to find there. I was told “the only time locals go is if they need to cross.”
22
Tourists however, are willing to risk the pickpockets to stroll up and down what is still referred to in advertisements as “the liveliest” or “the best” street in Barcelona.
When they get there they are confronted with sights to see and things to buy. In the street there are designated points of interests: The Placa Catalunya serving as one entry point, where they are able to pass by La Boqueria market, museums, international retailers, restaurants, and people selling souvenirs before they reach the port of Barcelona. I was told how none of these businesses were useful to residents, as they noted to me the proliferation of souvenir stores, and overcrowding of all the markets and grocery stores.
It also contrasts with residents ideals of a “real” space, visible through the graffiti marking one statue in the street , which reads “Real Experience” with arrows pointing right and left (Figure 2).
Figure 2: This way to the "Real"
23
This image, as well as the voices of residents demonstrates how the real city becomes associated with those aspects of everyday life which lie outside populated tourist areas; spaces which contain residents living their lives free from concerns of tourism. The next section details how residents’ depictions of authenticity emphasize the function of space to bring people together in meaningful ways.
Resident Authenticity
For residents, the authentic city is opposite of the manicured, consumer space which characterizes touristic areas. When I asked Tatiana about her neighborhood, El Raval, located on one side of La Rambla she said,
What I like about it is it’s very authentic, some might call it the ghetto, in the sense there is people from everywhere, and it’s a bit grungy. I don't feel so comfortable designer places, where everything is so clean and absolutely nice, as if our lives were really like this. Well maybe for tourists to believe it but I don’t, and in this neighborhood I see this nice sweet, decadence of reality at the end.5
For her, authenticity is found in the imperfect, “organic” neighborhood. This includes the city’s problems and its imperfections. La Rambla by contrast, is a center for sight-seeing and shopping. Though it retains a reputation for danger, and tourists are often offered drugs discretely on the street, the street appears as manicured space, its marketing as the best street in Barcelona imbues it with a manicured, sanitized quality.
Though the buildings are very real, it denies reality similar to theme parks and new urbanism development projects which cover up the presence of what occupied the space before (Cunningham 2005). In the example of La Rambla, it is the presence of locals and the businesses and restaurants which they frequented when La Rambla was “theirs”. The
5 Interview with Tatiana. May 2018. 24 history of the space’s importance for residents is mapped over as well, by the proliferation of consumer goods in the form of international retailers, restaurants, and shops.
Resident conceptions of the authentic city are also not the cultural symbols that tourists are taught to recognize: paella, flamenco, and sangria. Rather, the authentic city is wrapped up in the concerns of everyday life, and the ability of people to organize together to address their problems. Tatiana told me when I asked what she liked about her neighborhood of El Raval, that is was among the “most authentic,” because it has “more entities organized by people for people, including the most NGO’s in the city.” Rather than authentic being a label for an object, here it emerges as a quality which is found when people live their daily lives, making things for themselves and others. Tourists do not need NGO’s or organizations to help them address their problems or quality of life concerns, as they do not live in the city. But for residents, it is this characteristic of the city, how people come together within it to make things for themselves which makes the city authentic.
In that locals no longer go to La Rambla and use the space as a meeting ground, it is difficult for the space to embody the values of collectivity which residents identify elsewhere in more “authentic” areas. The street is not considered by them to be a place for coming together, but rather as a place which divides people. The next section demonstrates how La Rambla makes residents feel invisible in the lack of sociality they find in the space. The incapacity for this space to foster the kinds of social relationships which give value to their city further separates the realm of the “local” and “tourist,” and accordingly the “authentic” and the “theme park.”
25
Killing the Clown
My informant who previously did street performances in La Rambla, no longer practices this hobby here, finding the response of tourists to be antithetic to the purpose of his performances. He described to me how tourists responded to one of his last performances, which he did inspired by the 400th anniversary of the novel Don Quixote:
I had a windmill on my head made of wood in a plastic paper and cardboard. I had
a mop and a shield, crossing in front of the Boqueria market. And every time the
lights change for tourists to cross, I went up with my shield down with my mop
and crossed over. In a normal situation, people going to the market would have
noticed me. But for most people I was invisible. The tourist didn't see me. They
were going to go the Boqueria or they had just been, or they were looking at the
Marilyn Monroe there in the erotic museum. The one contact I had with a tourist
was him almost running me over with his suitcase.
This experience he said, “killed the clown in me,” as he felt stranger to not be seen doing his street performances. He gives the reason tourists do not witness him is because they are too consumed with the places to see and the things to do, which are not on the street directly, but located in buildings on the side of the street Whenever I passed by The
Boqueria during my fieldwork, I would see tourists taking photos of the iconic front sign hanging above the other tourists packed inside (Figure 3).
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Figure 3: Tourists taking photos in front of La Boqueria Market in La Rambla
In this way it is possible to see how La Boqueria and La Rambla as a whole have become less of a participatory space, and more of a spectacle to be experienced through sight alone. This new purpose for the street is at odds with the idea of the space as a meeting ground, as people are concerned with taking photos of iconic landmarks, instead of interacting with each other. This idea is supported by scholarship on tourism which proposes that tourists often follow a “program” which highlights some features of the city as worthy of attention at the expense of omitting others. Site-seeing is considered to be choreographed, in the sense that tourists go places to take images of places they have already seen images of (Travlous 2002). Certain objects are marked as worthy, while others are subtracted from their map. The things tourists add to the program are not
27 entirely based on their interests but are results of previous impressions of the city which have become globalized with the help of media— television, movies, and the internet
(Haldrup and Larsen 2015). Residents expressed to me how they viewed the process of taking photos as evidence of the superficial quality of modern tourism. For Harry, he viewed these photos functioning as “proof” for tourists to show other people they had been somewhere, existing not only for themselves but for others. Tatiana also expressed a similar view that the aesthetics of the Barcelona’s famous architecture were privileged over a “real” understanding of their meaning and significance.
It is not just the value of photos, but the use of cell phones to find landmarks that local people feel threatens the tourist’s relationship to space, and with locals themselves.
One resident I spoke to blamed phones for the lack of communication between locals and tourists. Instead of asking locals where to go, Felip believed people just looked to their phones.6 In doing so residents believed that tourists would just go to where all the other tourists had been, missing the places where local life could be found. Of course, these are normal behaviors for tourists to engage in. Taking pictures and using maps on a phone were activities I performed during fieldwork as well. However it is clear from Harry’s example that it runs the risk of casting residents as invisible in their own space.
The effect of this is on residents is their feelings of exclusion in this space, a phenomenon whereby, the places by which people once defined their neighbourhood become spaces with which they no longer associate (Davidson 2009:224). La Rambla has become what French anthropologist Marc Auge terms a non-place, as “a space of transience where human beings remain anonymous” as opposed to “anthropological
6 Interview with Felip. June 2018. 28 place” which offers a space in which people can meet other people with whom they share social references, thus empowering their identity (Auge 1988). Rather than being empowered, Harry’s identity as a social performer, a “clown” in his own words, is no longer supported by La Rambla and the tourists who pass through. As he complained to me, “The tourist has no yesterday, and no tomorrow, there is no relationship there.” He is referring to the way tourists operate on a program, which promotes a certain vision of space which is focused on consumerism, not on forming relationships. This focus is perceived to further separate the realm of the tourist and of the resident, the “authentic” city of the resident imaginary and the fake city they see Barcelona becoming.
Conclusion
La Rambla is no longer “nobody’s place and everyone’s place,”7 as the public street was conceived by Harry, functioning to be inclusive to tourists and exclusionary residents. The example of La Rambla shows how freedom for residents and freedom for tourists are seen as incompatible in the same space. As Tatiana told me, “Barcelona was always a free city, but now the freedom is only for the tourists.” In other words, the proliferation of tourists and the services provided to them are endangering residents’ freedom to enjoy the city and its spaces. This is a threat not only to their use of the city, but the very ideal of the city as a revolutionary, free place. Instead, tourism is perceived to transform the city into antisocial spaces for consumption, where local residents and their struggles are rendered invisible. The alignment of resident-populated spaces with the “real” and the latter with the “fake” shows how residents attach value to inclusive spaces which leave them free to create meaning within them. Following Boorstin (2012),
7 Interview with Harry. July 2018. 29 the touristic space of La Rambla offers a contrived, “artificial experience to be consumed in the same place where the real thing is as free as air.”(Boorstin, Joseph and Rushkoff
2012, 99). While this may not matter to tourists, who have their own perceptions of authenticity, the “life” in this street is not the kind residents value.
The point is not that it is inherently consumerism that makes places inauthentic, which David Chaney (2002) has criticized for being problematic in the way it reserves travel for an elite who can experience culture without polluting it, and condemns popular audiences to a false consciousness (Chaney 2002, 200). While I am not arguing that the consumer focus of modern tourism is inherently inauthentic, I am arguing that it is the exclusionary potential of these practices which is the focus of resident’s concerns with authenticity. To illustrate my point, I turn to the words of Harry when I asked him if he thought a new initiative by the city council could return La Rambla “to the way it was before.” He corrected me, saying
“I don’t want it to go back to the way it was before, I want us to go back there and
make what we make of it, with the new demographic mix that didn’t exist 25
years ago.”
In this way, the desire of residents is not to move back to a past without tourism, and without consumer experiences, but to have the autonomy to act of their own accord, making their own decisions which shape the city rather than having these decisions made for them. In this way authenticity is linked to autonomy, as well as the agency to act out these decisions. The next chapter shows how this agency is problematized by the political and economic forces supporting tourism in the city. I examine the entities transforming the city into a theme park through their effects on housing and commercial structure,
30 demonstrating the lack of control residents feel in this process, and how this too infringes their right to the city.
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Chapter 2:
Tourism or Neighborhood: Effects on Housing, Commerce, and Belonging
Figure 4: Banners in apartments: “We want a proper neighborhood.”
Walking through the streets of Barcelona, my eyes were often drawn upwards to the architecture, and the curved edges and colorful façades of some of the modernist buildings which helped make the city famous. I was also drawn to the more “normal” looking apartments, for the way many of them had banners hanging from balconies which spoke about the selling of the city, usually in Catalan. One banner read No ens fora especuladors (Speculators will not push us out) with a picture of a vulture surrounded by a circle with a line through it. Another read Volem un barri digne (We want a proper neighborhood) (Figure 4). These signs voice concerns that I found ubiquitous among residents I interviewed, namely vulnerability of losing their homes when speculators,
32 likened to vultures, come in and buy properties, raising the rents to unaffordable levels, and changing the commercial structure of neighborhoods. Tourism does not work alone in this process, with decades of urban transformations contributing to the investment potential of the city (Mansilla-López 2018). However, in increasing the desirability of neighborhoods it can cause rents to rise and residents to move who cannot afford the higher prices (Arkaraprasertkul 2017).
Mayor Ada Colau has made this housing crisis a focus of her political career, protesting evictions of residents from foreclosed flats as part of the Plataforma de
Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH). But although her promise to save people from getting evicted got her elected, the phenomenon continues, and residents blame the tourism industry as well as the government’s inability to control it. This chapter explores the housing problem from the perspective of residents to understand the links between tourism to gentrification processes and the housing crisis. I begin by explaining the relationship between tourism speculation and neoliberal economic policies, showing how doubt about the effectiveness of policy changes which do not change the current housing laws in the city to acknowledge housing as a human right. Then I turn to explaining how this provokes gentrification which pushes local residents out of their homes and neighborhoods, leaving tourists to fill the spaces. This problem demonstrates how in order to stop the way tourism speculation rids locals from the neighborhood, it is necessary to question the way housing is built in the city, and who it is built for. This requires renegotiating the relationship of private capital and the state, as well as acknowledging that if housing is a human right, cities need to reform laws which treat it
33 as a business. This can help halt the transformation of the city into a “theme park” in the eyes of residents.
Selling the City
Tourism has continued to be important to Barcelona’s economy since the 1950’s when tourism boomed after the end of the Second World War. Even through Franco’s dictatorship tourism was supported to bring in capital and improve Spain’s image, and continued to play an important role in the 1970s, when a global economic crisis sent governments in search of ways to draw in capital (Peck and Tickell 2017). Lefebvre noted in the 1970s that in the Mediterranean, “tourism and leisure become major areas of investment and profitability, adding their weight to the construction sector, to property speculation, to generalized urbanization” (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith, 2009).
Tourism, served as part of the neoliberal project to encourage growth and investment, which supports the private sector and views competition as key to success (Blanco-
Romero, Blasquez-Salom and Canoves, 2018).
Urban development aimed at attracting tourists really exploded in the lead up to the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. These urban transformations aimed to change the image of the city from a repressive industrial zone into a democracy bustling with cultural pride and tourists (McNeill 2009). At the beginning, urban planning processes involved the input and support of neighborhood organizations. After 1995, however, this cooperation changed as the plan for urban renewal was handed to individual districts, planning regulations fell apart, and private developers and speculators were left to use
Barcelona’s land as they saw fit (Degan and Garcia 2012). The entrepreneurial turn of local governments to foster neoliberal policies gave them a new role, in which they, “in 34 conjunction with private agents and urban elites, have turned into promoters/developers, producing the city” (Miro 2012).
The “Barcelona Model” of making public space usable for private developers continues to be regarded as a success at its transformation of the urban environment
(Degan and Garcia 2012). These urban interventions are thought to be beneficial for residents as well as tourists, but Barcelona residents do not feel they are the main recipients of the “rewards” of becoming a successful city. As my informant Bernat said,
The Ayuntamiento (City Hall) wants to better a zone and gentrify it but really they do not want to gentrify, they want to better the urban environment and want people to live better, but really this provokes gentrification. So all the governments in the world need to when they rejuventate a zone, make sure that the rentors, the people living there, have the opportunity to continue living there because if not what you are doing is bettering a zone not for the people who live there, but for the people who are going to come.8
Bernat is expressing how urban competitiveness can be dangerous for residents when it influences the demographics of neighborhoods to change from primarily residents, to tourists. A common phrase in the anti-tourism movement is, “One more tourist apartment means one less family in the neighborhood,” exemplifying how residents feel they are being replaced by tourists. One informant explained to me how tourism speculation functions to threaten locals.
Everything is connected with tourism in that when many people started coming, banks and all these agencies realize that it's a very good place to invest money. They realize that if they buy a building and kick out the owners they can renovate the building and sell it at 5 times more expensive than it is...Once the company has the building, they clean it out and put tourists inside. These are the tourists’ apartments, luxurious flats that local people cannot buy, because they are
8 Interview with Bernat. July 2018. 35
designing these for foreigners, people that are not from here, and kicking out the locals.9 Residents view that people are purposefully trying to attract tourists, and this aligns with how real estate speculation emerges as a solution to recent economic crises.
When the Spanish economy crashed along with others around the world in 2008, government entities sought to expand tourism through real estate speculation meant to make the city more attractive for visitors. A recent study done in Barcelona showed one- third of home purchases being realized through investment funds whose objective is to maximize profits by allocating them for tourist use (Blanco Romero, Blasquez-Salom and
Canoves, 2018). Agustin Cocola-Gant links this to an acceleration of the process of gentrification as, “the demands of visitors increases rent extraction possibilities” (Cocola-
Gant 2018, 286). My informant Tatiana agreed with this statement, telling me residents like herself are unwilling or unable to pay the heightened prices.
During my fieldwork it was not uncommon to see graffiti on sites where luxury apartments were being built. These areas were seen as a threat for the way they were meant to draw people with a higher purchasing power than the local population. One piece of graffiti I saw was in the neighborhood of Poblenou, a previously industrial area which residents fear becoming another tourist enclave for its close proximity to the beach as well as the central districts of the city. On the poster advertising the new apartments with a pool were the words , los veins tambe quiere un piscina (the neighbors also want a
9 Interview with Tatiana. May 2018. 36 pool). Like others, this graffiti was meant to point out that the desires of wealthy newcomers were being addressed before those of already existing residents (Figure 5).
Figure 5: “The Neighbors also want a pool.” Along with “BCN is not for sale.”
The use of the phrase “Barcelona no está en venta” (Barcelona is not for sale) is used to express the belief of residents are selling the city itself as they construct new luxury properties to sell. This points to the fact that the economic model views housing as a business and not a fundamental right of people (Blanco Romero, Blasquez-Salom and
Canoves, 2018). The result of this real estate speculation is an increased demand for housing, on the side of speculators, and also on the side of residents who find the accommodations that suit their lifestyle to be dwindling in numbers. This is compounded by residents who rent out their homes to tourists, and companies who invest in residential apartments which they then sell to tourists (Burgen 2017). These habitations may not even be legal, as investors and speculators to accumulate properties and create pseudo
37 companies for tourist rental that evade tax oversight. They are marketed through home sharing sights like airbnb, which benefit from these businesses but do not verify their legality (Blanco Romero, Blasquez-Salom and Canoves, 2018).
Paradoxically, even as there is a housing shortage, there is the ongoing phenomenon of empty flats with no one to occupy them. As the current economic model which leaves private businesses in control of housing, it becomes possible for companies to keep empty housing stock off the market. In one instance, a building of apartments was left empty by the private owners for over 26 years (“Refan Uns Pisos De Luxe Del Raval
Després De 26 Anys Tancats”). Residents are resentful not only because they struggle to retain ownership of their homes and find affordable housing within the city, but also because, as one twitter user put it: “Did you know all the empty flats in La Vile de Gracia could house the entire city’s homeless population?” Empty flats also provoke feelings of insecurity by neighbors who worry about the proliferation of drugs in their neighborhoods. In the neighborhood of Raval, I was told this is the most pressing problem, as people associated with the Mafia are able to squat empty flats for drug running businesses. This means that families in complexes with empty flats have to live beside criminal activity and they complain of the mess and noise generated by these narcopisos, meaning drug apartments, where users gather to get high off the street and away from police.
The High Cost of Living in a “Successful” City
Tourism gentrification does not just affect the price of homes in discrete areas of the city, its effects can be seen throughout in not only the tourist areas, but more “local” ones as well. In touristic areas, the intensification of land use causes property values to 38 rise (Logan and Molotch 2007). In Barcelona the price escalation took off in early 2015 with the end of the Boyer Law, which froze rent in Spain from 1994 to 2014 for properties with lease agreements before a certain date (Halse 2015). An informant of mine felt this rise personally as he told me his rent in L’Eixample had risen 34%.
Because of this reason he and his wife were looking to move outside the city, further out into the metropolitan area, possibly to Santa Coloma.
The increased prices mean that people have to spend more of their household income on rent, at times over 40% (Blanco Romero, Blasquez-Salom and Canoves,
2018). The unaffordability of the city affected another informant I spoke to, whose son from the Gracia neighborhood was looking to move outside of the city as his rent rose to
1000 euros per month ($1,137 USD). The high prices also threaten the autonomy of young adults looking to move into their own apartments. If they do get to move, they too will likely have to look outside the city center where prices are cheaper.
In this way, residents are being forced to move to the margins of the city, out of the neighborhoods in which they used to live. The movement of residents to the outskirts is reminiscent of Lefebvre’s writings on the “tragedy of the banliesards” in Paris, whereby the poorer sectors of the population were segregated in the outskirts of the city
(Lefebvre 1996). In accordance with Lefebvre, the inability of residents to afford housing in the center is a denial of their right to the city, and to appropriate the center. Although the people I spoke to about this issue were already thinking of moving out of the neighborhood, I heard stories of other residents being bribed by companies to leave their apartments. Others are pushed to leave when building owners stop maintenance of the building (letting elevators break with no promise of repair), or even by mobbing tactics
39
(putting glue in locks). Even more directly, when people cannot afford their homes they are confronted with law enforcement forcibly kicking them out of their homes. They are evicted.
Evictions
In Barcelona, the number of people who rent their homes is 30%. This is above the Spanish average, with home ownership still being the preferred form of living, but lower than other cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris where rent accounts for 60% of housing. Rental laws also offer more protection for tenants in these cities where renting is the norm (Sindicat de Llogaters). Despite their comparatively low number of rentors, the film Si se puede: Siete dias en PAH highlights how Spain is the country with the most evictions and most empty housing in Europe (Fau, Pau dir.)
In 2016 there were 2,691 evictions in the city of Barcelona. The total number of people who had suffered eviction in a 7-year study was half a million (Corrigan 2016).
The problem of eviction does not end with seizure of the home, as people remain indebted to the bank what they could not pay. This causes banks to be seen as the enemy, as they are referred to as “assassins” in graffiti for their role in evicting people (Figure 6).
Banks are not only considered killers of the city for ousting locals, but capable of killing locals themselves due to the extreme mental health issues present after people are evicted and remain indebted to the bank. Organizations spawned by this problem emphasize that
40 it is not the citizen’s fault, but the speculation increasing rents and the laws which privilege banks over tenants.
Figure 6: A man cleans the words “Assassins, stop evictions” written outside of a bank. Egg shells litter the ground as people observe from the hostel next door.
Every day on Twitter a number of organizations spawned in response to this problem is informing people of evictions and trying to mobilize resistance. One of these, the Plataforma de los Afectados por la Hipoteca, the Platform for People affected by
Mortgages (PAH), created in 2009 following the economic crisis of 2008. The current mayor, Ada Colau is one of the founding members of the PAH in Barcelona, which has grown to 200 branch organizations across Spain. They operate assemblies to inform people of their legal rights when faced with eviction processes, helping them to get daciones or negotiations from the banks who control the mortgages. In the Film, 7 Days at PAH Barcelona, Colau says, “No one will be out on the street if they come to the
PAH.” Other than working to prevent evictions they are dedicated to helping those find
41 housing who are evicted, either by squatting back evicted or otherwise empty flats, or by arguing the tenant’s case for access to social housing (Fau, Pau, dir.). But as successful as squatting can be, “it is a solution for a few people, not for everyone,” according to my informant from the organization Accio Raval. When I asked her what is the solution to the housing crisis she said “Laws, or consciousness.”
A legal solution is just what the PAH and other organizations attempted to make when they brought a law to the state government including articles which stated that banks and real estate entities had to propose solutions for evicted families before evicting them and that the Public Administration should fine entities that own empty dwellings.
These two articles specifically were shot down as “unconstitutional” prompting the PAH to seek support at the regional level. In February of 2019, the unconstitutionality claims were rejected by the government of Catalonia (Tattersall 2019). This presents itself as a victory as the law is near being finalized, but the PAH is still stopping evictions daily, and putting pressure on entities like banks and real estate companies to make sure they follow the law.
There is also the problem of open date evictions, which occur when people are not even given a date they will be removed from their homes, but a time period where they are left with no idea about when authorities are going to come and evict them. In 2018, the numbers of open-date evictions have increased (Prou Desnonaments Oberts). The organization Prou Desnonaments Oberts (Against Open Evictions) notes:
Open date evictions are intended to paralyze the neighborhood organization, isolate the affected families and prevent a forceful response on the day of eviction. This means that the organization serves and seeks to disable us (Prou Desnonaments Oberts).
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Open evictions make it harder for neighborhood organizations to stop evictions, which they do by drawing many people together to raise money and seek legal recourse.
Without the support of neighborhood organizations, people often have no way of resisting forceful expulsion from their homes.
The PAH and other entities are also not always able to stop evictions. Though their organization is dedicated to finding solutions for evicted people, it is not only the personal home which is lost, but the relationships that were sustained in that space.
Evictions are especially threatening to the elderly who have mobility and health problems and have all the neighbors they used to rely on forced out of their homes. Families with many children also have a harder time, as they need to find housing for more than just themselves. The next section demonstrates how relationships between members of a neighborhood are similarly threatened by the commercial gentrification which threatens local businesses.
Tourism Gentrification vs. Commercial needs of Residents
Tourism gentrification does not only change the neighborhood in terms of housing, but also in the kinds of commercial businesses present. The neighborhood then becomes a kind of showcase for tourists, with no entities that meet the needs of year- round residents. This Commercial displacement due to tourism gentrification has been acknowledged since the late 1980s (Sandford 1987). As tourism is an activity centered around consumption, it inspires the expansion of retail facilities, restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues. Gotham (2005) shows how this threatens local businesses when
43 they cannot compete with the purchasing power of large franchises when land value increases. The same thing was expressed to me by my informant, Sergi.
“In the streets of Barceloneta, you can see, that before it was a neighborhood like this one (Poblenou), in front of here a pharmacy, further down a shoe store, a clothing store. Now it is restaurants, bars, restaurants, bars. When there are a lot of tourists, they don’t need a shoe store, they need supermarkets to buy things and restaurants and bars, little else.10
Sergi is talking about La Barceloneta, a neighborhood which was highly transformed for the Olympic Games by replacing the industrial port and shantytowns lining the coast with a beach. Now it is considered a “tourist” beach, with the MareMagnum shopping mall close by, the aquarium as well as the marine museum. Now in the area I was told it is hard to see a local who does not work in the industry in some form. The transformation of
Barceloneta is just one example in the city of local stores being replaced by franchises, and if not large chains, places which cater to the consumption habits of tourists rather than locals. I was told by my informants that the restaurants and stores exclude locals by selling at prices which only tourists are willing or able to pay, “Many tourists can pay for a meal at 15 or 16 euros, but the people from the zone do not go there.” 11
Sergi contrasts the famous Rambla with La Rambla of Poblenou, the pedestrian street for this neighborhood, where local people can be seen sitting on benches, and pushing strollers of children. There are no “sights” to see here, no Boqueria Market or
Erotic Museum, and for this reason less tourists frequent this street, to the enjoyment of the locals. But this is subject to change, for the neighborhoods close proximity to La
10 Interview with Sergi. May 2018. 11 Interview with Sergi. May 2018. 44
Barceloneta. When I asked Pere about the effect of tourism on his neighborhood he said that it was not much, but that
It’s arriving (in Poblenou). Maybe 15 or 20 percent has changed. The tip of the neighborhood. But the changes can be very fast. In The Gothic, La Barceloneta, the changes occurred in less than ten years after the process began. In less than ten years the neighborhoods became saturated. The pressure and demand is very high.12
Residents fear their previously untouched neighborhoods becoming more like the areas of the city that are already saturated, with their homogenized stores and services geared toward tourists, who outnumber year-round residents.
Local areas are also weak to the pressures of tourism gentrification by virtue of their “good local life.” An informant told me that places like his neighborhood of
Poblenou
Maybe attract less tourists but more gentrifiers. One of the things they look for is if the neighborhood has a lot of associations, cultural things. They are looking for this because it is something attractive. This place where we are it is a lot of neighbors, but if gentrifiers arrive here then maybe these social relationships disappear. And there will be new social relationships, but not the same as the past.13
What Juan is expressing is the common feeling of a loss of social relationships with people that you see often and inhabit your neighborhood. Another informant of mine expressed the importance of the neighborhood connections when I asked him what he liked about the city. He told me,
up to now, the neighborhoods were very neighborly (“muy de barri”), the people knew each other. There is a lot of activities and association with the neighborhood and many people value it, it’s not like New York where the people are very impersonal and you do not know anybody. This does not happen here. The people
12 Interview with Sergi. May 2018. 13 Interview with Bernat. July 2018. 45
have lived here a long time, I talk to people on the street and ask how long they have lived here and they say no I was born here. It is positive and friendly.14 Here Pere contrasts his ideal of neighborhood, people who know each other and gather together with the neighborhood serving as a common thread, with the impersonal quality of New York. New York, of course is characterized in popular culture as a fast-paced environment where everyone is more concerned with making it to work than making small talk on the street. This is exactly what residents like Pere do not want, instead valuing the personal connection they have with their neighbors.
This personal connection to others in the neighborhood is emblematic of the concept of communitas coined by Victor Turner, but later taken up by his wife Edith. In communitas. This concept describes the intense feelings of social togetherness and belonging associated with shared experiences between people (Turner 2012). For neighbors, these experiences are centered around the neighborhood. Throughout the year in Barcelona, different neighborhoods hold festivals where the community comes together to drink, eat, and socialize. I saw flyers for these festivals posted around different neighborhoods as I walked through them and shared by neighborhood organizations through Twitter and Facebook. Community is only fostered by neighborhood parties, but the strength of organizations when they attempt to defend fellow neighbors from eviction. In other words, community is essential to survival in the neighborhood for those unable to pay their mortgages, who rely on the support of neighbors to plead their case and help them find affordable housing.
Conclusion: Tourism or Barri?
14 Interview with Sergi. May 2018. 46
Figure 7: Graffiti which reads “Tourism or Neighborhood”
This chapter explained how tourism is seen to be inconsistent with the ideals of neighborhood, by threatening people’s rights to housing and their access to amenities which neighborhoods should have. This idea that people should have equal access to housing and resources is a historically relevant one, as this was the ideal of the planner
Ildefons Cerda, when the city was struggling with overpopulation behind the medieval walls. When the walls were torn down, he presented a plan to the city council in 1867, which was in following with his Theory of Urbanization. His plan was unlike any ever seen before, with gardens in the middle of each street block, rich and poor living side by side, and pedestrian friendly squares with limitations for traffic. Though his oddly shaped diamond blocks came to fruition when the extension of L’Eixample was built, the rest of his plan was left unrealized. The new district of the city became for the bourgeoisie, the sides of the blocks which were supposed to remain open for the gardens were closed up
47 by businesses and more apartments (Neuman 2011). The plan for self-sustaining neighborhoods, equidistant from resources like schools and hospitals was doomed to be just a dream. In the past, like today, speculators were allowed to buy up the space and turn it into private property. Neighborhood organizations fighting against speculation and the effects on residents are reviving this dream of a utopic barri with the knowledge that it will require a shunning of private interests which make the city so “successful” at tourism. The following chapter shows how privatization of the city’s green spaces further threatens the creation of an ideal city centered around the needs of residents.
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Chapter 3
Whose Green Spaces? Contested Publics of Parks and Gardens
One of the most iconic parts of the city, a must-see of every tourist guidebook is
Park Guell located in the neighborhood of Gracia. Other than the park, there is not much advertised to tourists, and for that reason its rare to see them on any streets other than the ones bordering the park. During my field research I lived in Gracia, about a 15-minute walk from the park, and rarely heard any language beside Spanish or Catalan in the street.
Even if tourists do not venture through the neighborhood, the “local” atmosphere is advertised to tourists for being just that, an example of Barcelona untouched by tourism.
This does not mean the area does not suffer from overtourism however, facing the same threats to resident belonging and control over space as other parts of the city.
Like La Rambla, residents of the city no longer pass their time in Park Guell, partly because of the overcrowding but also because of the issues surrounding its privatization. Unlike La Rambla, it is not the businesses selling souvenirs and food to tourists which is the focus of resident’s ire. Instead it is the transfer of control of the park from the city council to private entities who control the construction and security of the park. This coincides with the installation of a fee to enter the monumental zone, this area deemed the most culturally significant as it contains most of the modernist architectural symbols built by Gaudi.
This chapter provides another example of public spaces being transformed in meaning to exclude residents. As I focus on green spaces, I show the specific ways privatization affects these areas, and what is at stake that is unique from public spaces
49 like the street, and squares. I begin by showing how the government’s public-private partnerships come in conflict with residents conceptions of “public” and “access” in Park
Guell. I turn to showing how other green spaces around the city face similar threats of privatization, upon the transfer of ownership from neighbors to private entities who they fear will turn them into more tourist apartments. Both of these examples demonstrate the larger issue of privatization threatening the concept of citizens and the rights they are entitled to as inhabitants. This chapter continues the argument that tourism transforms the meaning and function of space but adds that in doing so it threatens the meeting grounds where residents cultivate and fight for politically active, inclusive citizenship – a feature which figures prominently in their imaginary of the ideal city.
The Park
Figure 8: Park Guell under construction in the early 1900s.
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Park Guell was built from 1900 to 1914, by Antoni Gaudi, a renowned modernist architect (Figure 8). It began as a residential development commissioned by the Guell family to build 40 houses in the space. Only two were completed, and they were designed to be gatehouses, though Gaudi chose one as his home (“Over a Hundred Years of
History”). Now they serve as a museum of Gaudi’s life and work, as well as an interpretation center for the park. Passed the houses there is a flight of steps guarded by a dragon, a symbolic gesture to Catalan identity. Up the flight of steps is the plaza, where people can walk underneath and see mosaic tiles depicting the seasons. Walking up more steps leads to the viewpoint, a large open area designed for theatrical performances where the city’s streets leading to the ocean can be seen below. This area of the park is the only part which is truly unnatural due to the building materials, but all the architectural features are designed to portray nature. For example, the mosaic tiles on the viewpoint of the plaza are curved, like waves. Originally the plaza also served the function of collecting water which passed through the columns to provide water to the park. Park
Guell demonstrates well Gaudi’s commitment to nature, as well as his belief in religion and Catalan pride.
UNESCO also considered it worthy of the title of a world heritage site, bestowing it in 1984. UNESCO website lists the criterion for Park Guells inclusion as a cultural patrimony, citing Gaudi’s creative contribution to architecture and building technology, the cultural and artistic values of Catalan modernism, and his influence on the building typology of the period (“Works of Antoni Gaudí ). As a place of cultural significance, the attraction now attracts more tourists than the residents it was intended to serve. I was told when the residential development project failed to attract buyers in 1924, the Guell
51 family gave the park to the city as a donation meant for the “use and enjoyment of the citizens” However, since becoming a site of world renown, it no longer serves the interests of residents who now shun the park, particularly because of the installation of the fee to enter the monumental zone (Figure 9).
Figure 9: The ticketing equipment for the entrance to the monumental zone
The city has divided the park into 3 zones, the regulated zone, the monumental zone, and the forestral zone. They assert that only a small part of the monumental zone requires a ticket, but this happens to be the most culturally significant, containing most of the architectural elemtents which made it worthy of the UNESCO title. The city council tells people the reason for the regulated zone to avoid overcrowding by tourists. My informant also told me that the city council said the fee would help pay any damages to
52 the park caused by the influx of tourists. The city council also presents the fee as something only tourists pay, stating, “All of Park Guell is open and freely accessible to
Barcelona residents.” Later on this becomes confused as they note “the neighbors in the 5 zones around the park have the right to apply for a free access card” (“Why a Resticted
Area?”). This implies that the process for residents farther away from the park is harder, or more expensive.
Despite the way the regulated zone attempts to preserve access for residents, I was told that simply by means of its installation the park is no longer considered “open” to residents. Instead they no longer go, made to feel like the park is no longer for them because of the bureaucracy they must endure to get a free pass. The member of the Park
Guell Platform, who lived near the park explained
I have to use a card, a pass, in order to move around the park that if I forget I cannot enter. You cannot enter with your ID, you have to have this pass, and this from our point of view makes no sense. I am in my city, I do not know why I have to show who I am in order to be in a public park. If it is public then the word public says everything.15 My informant from El Raval also felt similarly, saying that When I came to Barcelona, Park Guell was free. Everybody could go whenever they want. And it’s been like this forever. Now, you have to be a neighbor from Gracia neighborhood or have a special member card to enter. It might be free but you have to go through an administration process. It's not a big deal. But still why? 16 Tatiana says it is not a big deal, but the fact they must go through the process at all to gain entrance is antithetic to the idea of a public park. She continued saying, “It’s like if someone came into a park you’ve been in all your life and said ‘now this is for tourists’.”
15 Interview with Felip. June 2018. 16 Interview with Tatiana. May 2018. 53
This is how the fee represents a shift in the goals of the park, as residents feel it can no longer be for them if entrance is regulated. This is one example of how the park has become a privatized public space, due to the “intensified surveillance,” of the security who must make sure that everyone who enters the zone has paid (Brenner and Theodore
2012). The partnership of private companies and the city council to manage the security and construction of the park is another example of how the space has become privatized.
The next section demonstrates how this transfer of power has influenced the space to become an emblem of “shame” rather than cultural pride.
Public-Private Partnerships
The city council employed private companies to construct the ticketing equipment for the new regulation of the park, as well as using them to provide the security. The emergence of public-private partnerships is a wider event seen across cities turning towards neoliberal economic policies, whereby private entities are used to invest and manage city building. The government partners with private companies because it is seen to help the city’s growth potential, and provide them with greater efficiency (Miro 2011).
The connection between the state and capital has been crucial to the creation of the entertainment infrastructure of the city and partnering for tourism is a way to increase the growth potential even more.
The city council handing over control of security and construction of the park is blamed by residents for harming the cultural patrimony of the site. I learned during my fieldwork that the Plataforma Defensem Park Guell (We Defend Park Guell) has compiled a list of the damages to the park which were believed to be a result of the construction of the ticketing equipment. Most importantly to my informant Rodrigo, was
54 the removal of Gaudi’s rosary, as some of his 100 concrete spheres where uplifted and damaged to go under the ground to serve the fiber optic cable needed for the ticketing center’s technology. He also pointed out how various elements of the “reconstruction” had “nada que ver con Gaudi” (nothing to do with Gaudi). Rodrigo described the park in the current state as “the shame of Barcelona.” This contrasts with the statement of
UNESCO which states, “in general the components enjoy a high degree of integrity,” asserting that
The Park Guell is still used as a public park and green space, the purpose for
which it was designed; now combining this with tourist and cultural use, while
conserving the original features in their entirety (“Works of Antoni Gaudi”).
Residents find issues with both parts of this statement, as the “public” the park was originally intended for no longer uses it, as well as the fact that the ticketing equipment damaged original design elements of the park. Rodrigo told me he believed the UNESCO title should be stripped, stating
This UNESCO, maybe it’s a filthy thing, because they are giving money and
respect to things that should not be there. It can’t be that you destroy a patrimony
of humanity and it can continue being a patrimony of humanity.17
In his view, the park no longer fits the ideal of a public space or matches the intentions of
Gaudi when he built the space. In becoming a paid space, Park Guell is no longer a symbol of cultural pride, and ostracizes the very residents it is intended to bring together.
17 Interview with Felip. June 2018. 55
The privatization of Park Guell exemplifies how in altering the concept of public from everyone to everyone who can pay, it is damaging to citizenship. Marina Peterson
(2006) explains while writing about the California Plaza in Los Angeles, how,
“ownership, access, and social practices are all integral to defining public space as such.
Its transformation, therefore, implicates not only institutional actors, but the nature of democracy and citizenship” (Peterson 2006: 376). In Park Guell, ownership has shifted from public to private, and in the process access has shifted from residents to tourists.
They shun the space as it no longer provides access to their definition of public, which is all the inhabitants of the city. As spatial rights become for sale, citizens are less willing to claim these rights, as more work is required to gain access to a public space than they deem is fair. It also challenges citizens’ rights to the decisions which affect their city, as spaces like Park Guell become harmed through the privatization process and altered in ways that go against the wishes of residents. The next section shows what is at stake for other green spaces in the city threatened by privatization.
The Garden While Park Guell is a green space considered already privatized, there are others in the city that are currently at risk. Not of becoming tourist attractions, but potentially tourist apartments, which perform the same function of excluding residents and making them feel their neighborhoods no longer belong to them. One of the neighborhood gardens I visited was also located in Gracia, and where I spoke to my informant about
Park Guell. Instead of taking me to the park, he decided to take me to the place “tourists do not see.” In this Jardi, the Catalan word for garden, there were plants and flowers
56 being grown by neighbors, along with a small koi pond, tables and chairs layered with gardening materials around the space.
Figure 10: An occupied space serving as a neighborhood garden in Gracia.
A sign was fixed to a wall bordering one side of the garden which read “Recuperem els espais morts fem horts de vida” which translates to, “We recover the dead spaces to make orchards of life” (Figure 10).
The gardens technically are occupied spaces, which I was told at any moment police could come and kick the people out of the space because they did not legally have ownership. This was expressed to me as an inevitability of the space, that someday it would no longer be theirs. Rodrigo shrugged this off, saying that “when this happens, we will just find another place,” continuing “There comes a time when Barcelona is not yours.” Though the potential exists for residents to find other dead spaces to recover, the
57 danger of tourism massification means that as more spaces become privatized, there will be less opportunities to find other places. These green spaces are essential to the city, as places where residents can guarantee their security. I was told that the street was not a place children could play, so a benefit of this space is that children can play here. More than this, residents can grow food and use this space as a meeting grounds.
Though no others were in the garden in Gracia, I witnessed how a neighborhood garden in El Raval supplied this capacity. I visited to on a graffiti tour of the city, led by an artist who balances her art career making money showing tourists the artistic spots of the neighborhood. One of the gardens, L’Agora de Juan Andres Benitez, is located on a street where a man was shot by police. This event angered the community, and many of the graffiti images in the space deal with this event. They also engage with the issues of migrants in the community, as El Raval has historically been where most migrants live. It used to be referred to as Barrio Chino, or the chinese neighborhood. But now it is possible to see people from many places, from Asia to Southeast Asia and countries in
Africa. It was this multicultural character that my informant told me earlier made this neighborhood seem authentic to her. L’Agora not only serves as a meeting grounds for those in El Raval, but also from outside the city center. On one of my visits I spoke to a woman who lived an hour from the city, who was in the center to go to the government office for issues dealing with her immigration papers. The importance of the space became clear to me on that day as I she invited me to eat paella with the dozen other women gathered there, none of whom knew me. Even though the women I was told, were keen to squabble with each other “over nothing,” they all helped prepare the meal, sitting down together and enjoying each other’s company. This demonstrated to me the clear
58 social function of this space, which at the time I visited, was at risk of no longer existing..
At the time the residents of the space were facing a fine by the city, because they were trying to sell the space to a private company.
Figure 11: L’Agora de Juan Andres Benitez in El Raval
The people refused to leave, holding a demonstration in the space and making a new banner for the front which read “L’agora es queda al barri” (L’Agora stays with the neighborhood).
This event also demonstrates the important political function of the space. One day I attended an open forum where various members of the community spoke about what the garden meant to them. Their speech focused a lot on their right to this space, and vehemently oppose the transfer of the space they made, into hands which in their eyes
59 had no right to the space. The potential private owners did not build the space, and they surely would not use it the way residents have up to this point, and desired to continue.
Even with no words spoken, the space communicated its feelings about the issues of privatization and how it was linked to tourism, through graffiti. One of the pieces is very large and confronts the visitor as soon as they enter (Figure 12). On one side the image has has a tree with a house in it, and hands coming out of the tree as if playing a game of giant chess, something I had seen people do in another open plaza in the neighborhood. The words “Ravalat” were spread across the tree, which harkens back to a sign I saw in another area of the neighborhood. Near the school of design is a banner which reads “Ravelejar,” and conjugates the made-up word in various forms. In doing so the place, El Raval, becomes something people do.
Figure 12: Graffiti in L’Agora Juan Andres
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On the other side of the graffiti are plumes of smoke from a factory. Various icons are located in the plumes, the words “I heart BCN,” in the logo of “I heart NY” as well as a Mcdonalds logo. Large buildings stretch out of the smoke on top of what appears to be the turrets of the Sagrada Familia. Army figurines or police figures are also shooting at the birds in the sky. This graffiti shows a struggle between two forces, the natural organic side of EL Raval, and the Barcelona which is constructed to serve the interests of globalization, including tourism. This green space then provides a location for residents to express their feelings about the city and its problems, as well as debate them with meetings and demonstrations which fill the space. If private owners took over the space, it is possible for residents to move, but still this space will be lost, and represents the larger stakes at hand. Particularly that privatization of public space has the potential to affect city’s abilities to promote democracy (Sorkin 1992). This is evident here as citizens and their issues become less important than the transfer of money, where the city can build on top of spaces occupied to serve residents needs and offers them nothing in return.
Conclusion
The impact of privatization linked to tourism is that it threatens the conception of city users as citizens, as public spaces become only useful to tourists, not the people living in them year-round. This contributes to the theme park by giving a price to existing in space, which goes against the idea of public as defined by residents. The public using the space then becomes the privileged group who is willing to pay the price, which is more often tourists themselves. This encapsulates why residents say Barcelona is being sold, as not only their houses but all the spaces of their city are no longer free. This issue
61 calls into question how we define citizenship in cities, if rights to space are not guaranteed to the actual people who live there year-round. It also calls into question how governments attend to the rights of citizens. This lack of help from the government with the issues presented by tourism has led citizens to take matters into their own hands to save their city, and their place in the city. The next chapter attends to some examples of this activism and what it offers as a solution in the place of actually existing government solutions.
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Chapter 4
Reclaiming the City
This thesis opened with an example of activism in the Placa Sant Felip Neri, where those residents gathered to “make” the square. Residents demonstrated how they came together to occupy the public space of the city to draw attention to their issues with tourism, and to listen to the results of a study of tourism in the neighborhood around the plaza. I return to this occasion to highlight the final note of the meeting—the researcher concluding that residents were actively resisting the changes imposed by tourism simply by continuing to live in the city. Even they are not in a neighborhood organization, or putting themselves in touristic spaces, the continuation of their everyday life is its own form of protest. This follows what other social researchers have found, that attempting normal life when everything normal starts to disappear can be a meaningful critique
(Ahmad 2011). But, as I have alluded to throughout this thesis with the examples of groups who occupy the public space of the street, show up to protest evictions, and hold meetings in the city’s green spaces, activism is an important facet of many people’s
“normal” lives in the city. For some, it is even as routine as going to the grocery store, every day they wake up, they are thinking about ways they can help further the quest for a more sustainable tourism policy. This chapter attends to the way in which, in Manuel
Castells’ words:
Every day and in every context, people acting individually or collectively,
produce or reproduce their rules of society, and translate them into their spatial
expression and their institutional management. (Castells, 1983. P. xvi)
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Following Castells, I aim to show that questioning the rules of society is not only seen in cases of social revolt, or events painted as violent attacks, like the storming of tour buses by the youth group Arran. The focus on these “explosive” incidents occludes that the tension with tourism is not something that bubbles over at certain times of the year, but a constant pressure on people’s daily lives that they attempt to change, daily. This chapter attends to how people collectively and individually attempt to inform others about
Barcelona’s issues with tourism. Whether they act in a group or alone, these individuals are bringing their city’s problems to the attention of more people, in the hopes that this can someday change the nature of tourism in this city and others like it. I begin with examples of the kind of collective activism Barcelona has been known for, as “the most revolutionary city in Europe.”
Though the demonstrations I view are not calling for support of any labor union, political party, economic system, or advocating for anarchism which has a rich history in
Barcelona. I am to show that at the surface these demonstrations may seem to be focused on tourism, but in actuality they are a critique of the structure of neoliberal urbanism to blame for tourism’s impact on space. While demonstrations may not be successful at transforming tourism or underlying structure of urban life, their actions pose the question to cities: “Is this the best we can possibly be?” This question is also apparent in the minds of the actors who engage in activism by themselves. I draw attention to these activists to demonstrate that viable movements against tourism massification can also be successful without a collective group. Both kinds of activism call for a radical rethinking not only of tourism, but of urban governance and the values which underwrite how we are, how we think, and how we move in the world.
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Collective Organizing: Masses against Massification
I have already shown with the example of Fem Placa how residents occupy public space to draw attention to the issue of sharing the street with tourists. Now I would like to focus on the kinds of impositions made on public space by residents that attend to other issues of the city with regards to tourism, most visibly the issues of housing and gentrification. These meetings provide details about how collective action functions in the city, and the values that it perpetuates. One meeting I attended was headed by a youth organization called La Xemeina.
Figure 13: La Xemeina occupied the public space to protest the city’s housing crisis and its relationship to tourism.
While the members of this group set up the tents and banners in the public space of La Rambla del Poblenou, a member of the Neighborhood Association of Poblenou helped tape up flyers on the light posts around. Others also set up the table and chairs
65 where the speakers would be, who were older than the members of La Xemeina, members of other organizations as well as a researcher of gentrification. On one of the blue tents set up in the space a sign read, “If the prices of rent keep going up, we will live here!” (Figure 13).
Other than the tents, there was also a shopping cart full of children’s toys and board games, and a white banner on the ground which said, “What are actions we can do?” with space for people to write their ideas for activism underneath. Once many people started showing up, they grabbed board games and played together for a while.
Eventually the speakers started, and we took to the chairs spread out in a semi-circle. The researcher spoke about gentrification, and the theories behind the process, answering questions from the audience afterwards. After a number of individuals in the audience spoke into the microphone being passed around the meeting officially ended, though people dispersed to write on the banner, and continue to chat with others. At one point a few police officers came into the space and told the group that they would have to move the tents, for they were not allowed to be in the public space. The organizers told them they would move them, acting unbothered by the exchange, fully expecting the police to have a problem with their peaceful occupation.
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This example shows that demonstrations, even peaceful ones, are thwarted by elite members of society when they counter the hegemonic vision of order. Despite this, the meeting was successful at demonstrating the ability of multiple entities to come together to organize. It also demonstrates the thought involved in collective organization: having children’s toys if they were present, making a space and time to socialize through play, providing a way for everyone to get involved whether they wanted to speak their minds in front of the group or write anonymously on a piece of paper. This example of activism only lasted a short while, requiring that people be present at a certain place and time to experience it. The other example of collective activism I wish to highlight shows how imposition in the public space of the city is made more permanent by organizations to suit their specific goals.
On the other side of the city from Poblenou, the organizations around the neighborhood of El Raval gathered to protest gentrification as it threatened to follow the building of a hotel near La Dressanes. This part of the city is near to La Rambla and the port, where tourism gentrification has already taken place. Currently in the space where the hotel is to be built is the remains of an old building and an open dirt area lined with ping pong tables. Behind the space there is an apartment building, where banners saying
“Salvem les dressanes,” We save Dressanes) are visible. These neighbors would have their view affected by the hotel, but also their neighborhood if it caused an influx of tourists to what is at the time I saw it a quiet residential area of the city.
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Figure 14: Protest of Hotel Construction near El Raval and the port of Barcelona
The organizers had a long white banner stretching the chain link fence around the open space (Figure 14). They made squares for the numeros organizations in the neighborhood of El Raval, including Accio Raval and Accio Reina Amalia to writeor draw something which encapsulated their feelings. There was a tent set up with food and music, as people talked, drank, and drew on the banner. Members of Fem Placa were also there, a man talking Polaroid photos with an old camera, and others speaking to a videocamera taping the event. I watched as two young boys drew a picture on the banner of a menacing looking octopus “hotel” riding a skateboard of “political power” carrying suitcases of “greed.” Another group drew a picture of a tree, calling to the organic desire they had for the neighborhood, once again placing potential green spaces in conflict with development. This example of activism is notable for the way it combines creativity and political expression through art. 68
This example also expresses how collective organizing in Barcelona does not just link people together in one organization, but join many individual organizationstogether
It differs from the Poblenou example in that this demonstration was more permanent the banner staying up so that residents, tourists, and others could witness and become more aware of the threat the hotel presented. It hoped to raise awareness and at the very least provided an affirmation of a collective feeling of the residents in this neighborhood and others who would pass by. However, when I asked Tatiana one of the members of Accio
Raval who was present about their next steps, she was hesitant about the success of this action, saying “Someday someone will build something here. This fight is not guarantee,” expressing that although this had made the issue of tourism gentrification visible, it still might not change the minds of urban political or economic elites allowing the space to be turned into a hotel. In this way forces controlling the development of the city threaten the potential for this activism to change the future of the space.
In struggling to be heard against the forces of government and private elites, residents still demonstrate how much and how many are affected by tourism. Though they may never stop the hotel, historically large groups of residents have been able to stop development projects they disagree with, so the hope that they may sway the outcome is still present (McNeill 2009). In this way this type of collective organization has potential in its strength and ability to demonstrate the magnitude of those affected, which may someday make those in control of urban development shift their choices to align more with residents’ desires. However, this activism requires that the group agrees on a course of action, planning so they may work together, and gathering many materials.
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The ability of people to come together in these spaces to make things for themselves and provide space for everyone to have a voice, is reminiscent of historical and present day movements against the status quo in Barcelona. One of these movements is the Worker’s revolution of 1936, which I had not heard of until Tatiana informed me.
She told me how “starting in Barcelona and throughout Catalonia began a process of collectivizat (collectivization), where “everything became of everybody.” This was achieved by members of the Anarchist movement in Spain, who were fighting against fascism during Franco’s rise to power. While it has been documented as a time of unjust killings and executions, other sources speak about how during this time, cities were able to feed, clothe, and meet the needs of their several million inhabitants. In the countryside, the collectives of workers were able to cultivate huge swaths of land and effectively eliminate starvation (Ackelsberg and Breitbart 2017). For Tatiana it shows that “when people come together they are able to accomplish things,” and this was the legacy the neighborhood organizations wanted to emulate.
Another more recent example from Barcelona is the 15M Movement, also called the Indignados. In cities across Spain people gathered in the street to protest the effects of the economic crisis of 2011. Since this time, they have been returning on May 15 each year as an anniversary to perform these same kinds of demonstrations. The goal of toma la plaza, a slogan from this movement meaning to “take the plaza” was to have people come together in public spaces to assert not only their rights to occupy the physical space of the square, but space in the dialogue of how to make a better society (Asara 2016).
However, this right to occupy space is often contested by the government. Large groups of people protesting neoliberalism are often targeted by the government as rioters and
70 looters, despite the peaceful origins of their protests. This occurred during the 15m
Movement as well as in another example of anti-capitalist protest tied up with tourism,
The Gezi Park protests in Turkey.
In this example, people occupied space in response to a development project to turn the park into a shopping mall. The focus of contemporary urbanism on capital accumulation was attacked with chants of “Capital be gone, Gezi park is ours” (Kuymulu
2-13). Similarly, the phrase “Barcelona no está en venta” (Barcelona is not for sale), represents the same idea that the interests of capital should not be put over those of residents. In this example as in 15M, capitalism was not the only enemy, but the political system was as well. The 15M movement denounced the unrepresentative nature of the current system, calling into question democratic representation to argue that voting every two years and unfulfilled promises is not enough for society to be truly democratic (Asara
2016). While economic and political elites are targeted by these movements, the larger enemy which encompasses them all is neoliberal urbanism, for placing the concerns of capital over the concerns of people. Following Castells (1983) the movement against tourism massification is not about the singular structural trend, but rather a movement against a combination of forces shaping life in cities.
While an enemy as large as neoliberal urbanism itself may require an army of people to fight it, large groups of people taking up space to protest the status quo are often viewed with suspicion by the government and suffer the unavoidable labels of rioters and looters (Kuymulu 2013). In 15m and Gezi Park protesters were met with police brutality which resulted in the demonstrations being cast as violent. In terms of
71 tourism manifestations, I did not witness any police violence, but I did witness police demand residents to stop their occupation of the public space in Poblenou.
As visible and powerful as collective organizing can be, the illegitimacy accorded to them by governments scared of their agency makes it difficult for their claims to be taken seriously. Some activists avoid this problem by acting alone, under the radar of police obstruction. Their activism in contrast to the collective organizing discussed above may be considered passive, however they are equal in the potential to question the current state of tourism in the city in the hopes of making change. These individual activists see limits in the potential of collective demonstrations, having to be accountable for all their decisions instead of just doing activism on their own terms. The following examples of this activism show how blurred the lines can be between everyday life and activism, with individuals infusing it into their daily routines. This not only demonstrates the commitment and magnitude of this issue, but also the potential for alternate forms of activism to make a difference in how tourism is viewed and functions in the city.
Individual Activism: Getting Personal with Tourism
Harry, my informant from England who has lived in the city 40 years, told me he engages in his own activism because of La Rambla and what it meant to him. If La
Rambla had not been what it was, he told me, neither would he have been able to be himself. Due to his invisibility now in La Rambla, he picks another touristic spot to do what he calls “Socrates,” sitting and holding discussions with tourists in public places
(Figure 15.)
72
Figure 15: Harry in front of La Catedral de Barcelona in The Gothic, talking to a tourist.
On whatever days of the week he is able, he sits in front of La Catedral de
Barcelona, in the Gothic Quarter. This is another crucial stop for tour guides as they teach tourists about gothic architecture, and the saints whose stories are depicted and intertwined with the time period of the church. When the church is available to enter, people form a long line outside to pay and wait. Others take photos in front of the church, or sit on the steps in front. Harry sits on top of these steps or in front of them on a folding chair holding signs in his hand and wearing them on his hat and back. The signs say various things about tourism in different languages, linking tourism to the high price of his rent, while also drawing attention to larger themes of health and happiness. He waits to go set up until the sun starts to fall and the numbers of tourists have lessened so he can be noticed. Some people just stare at him from afar, while others are drawn to him and
73 start a conversation or become involved once they see him in conversation with someone else.
The conversations are sometimes in agreement with what Harry and his signs depict, a tourist I met while I was observing him listened attentively and agreed that tourism had become a destructive force in many parts of the world. Other times he met people who questioned his view, arguing that tourism brings “so many creatives to the city.” The conversations were civil, but it was easy to tell in the above instance when
Harry and the tourist had committed to agreeing to disagree. This point brings out the difficulty of this kind of interaction. When I asked Harry if he felt like it was a job, he said,
It's very hard work and sometimes you end up absolutely exhausted and soul
destroyed. Then somehow it seems to be the next day, and you say oh well, let’s
go again.
Despite the differences in opinion with tourists, he continues to try to engage them. His knowledge of a few languages allows him to be accessible to many tourists. In creating a dialogue with them he is possibly the only resident that tourists have an in-depth conversation with, which extends from pleasantries at a store or on a tour. At the same time, he told me he would like if it were possible to not only talk about tourism, but to talk about other philosophical subjects as well, like he used to do with residents in the space of the street. Now that there are few residents in the city center to talk to, he realized that tourists were only sure to talk to him if he brought them into the conversation. In his engagement with tourists, he is placing within them a memory that,
74 even if they did not speak to him directly, might call on them to think more about the impacts of tourism after they return home, remembering the man with the many signs.
Another individual who engages in individual activism was my informant Felip, who I met through his spearheading of the Defensem Park Guell platform. I soon found out that he does his own work individually, explaining that, “There comes a time when you alone can accomplish more than 20 people.” Though he has had many battles with the administration including over garbage collection and metro tickets, this battle for a free Park Guell is the latest and has taken the longest. Every day or every few days he goes into the park, climbing up the hill to almost the highest point, past the monumental zone in the forestral zone where it is free to access.
Figure 16: Felip directing a tourist which path to take in the forestral zone of Park Guell
75
Here, visitors are spit out onto a path with three options of where to go, sideways, up, or down. As I observed Felip, tourists stopped to this point, examining a sign written in Catalan, at a loss of what choice to make. At this point he jumped in, asking them would they like to see a good view? Go up! Would they like to see a better view that is a farther walk? Go sideways! And would you like to go backwards? Go down. Like Harry, he speaks not only Spanish and Catalan, but many languages including English and
Swedish which allow him to better engage with tourists (Figure 16). Many of the conversations I watched led to laughter, as Rodrigo starts small talk about anything he notices about them. The tourists express their thanks to him before they embark on whichever direction they decided, and at this point Rodrigo gives them a flyer about Park
Guell, which he also carries in many languages. He tells them to view the documentary they had made earlier about the regulation of the park, and how his platform thinks the whole park should be free. It is impossible to know whether the tourists actually go home and watch the documentary, or think any more about their encounter after they leave.
However, by opening up the line for communication Rodrigo is stretching the divide which is often made between tourists and locals by the current state of tourism massification.
Conclusion
In all, activism around tourism is undertaken collectively in groups and personally by individuals. It deals with the issues regarding tourism’s effect on the public space of the street, to its effect on gentrification and privatization. Both collective and individual organizing have benefits as well as drawbacks. Collective organizing may be more visible but may not attract the attention of tourists who are put off by the crowds or
76 unable to understand the language. Individual organizing that aims at interacting with tourists may solve this problem by making residents more approachable, opening a dialogue between groups that are otherwise not seen to coexist in the city. These acts examined here are telling of the magnitude of the problems associated with tourism, as well as the commitment of the individuals affected by them. However, the possibility for these acts to pave the way to a more sustainable tourism is in question, as these forms of activism are rarely legitimized and favored by urban political and economic elites.
Despite this they provide insight into the ways people actively take part in shaping the city and work towards the kind of tourism they desire it to embody, which is thoughtful, reflexive, and brings people together in spaces designed to foster social relationships. These forms of protests are important as they demonstrate the impact of tourism on space to physically and emotionally exclude residents from their city. At the same time they demonstrate the agency of residents to appropriate them in order to make and promote their own vision of the city.
Figure 17: “Barcelona no está en venta” (Barcelona is not for sale).
77
Epilogue “I heard local people don’t go to the clubs by the beach, they are just for tourists?” I asked Bernat as we sat at a bar in Poblenou, talking about tourism. “I went just last week.” He told me, following this with a concession that he was getting past the age for partying, with a wife, a son, and a P.H.D. track. I was surprised, as a club promoter told me previously that if the clubs were for local people they would go broke.
This could still be true, but it clearly did not mean that local residents were unable to enjoy the clubs in the same way tourists do. During my fieldwork I learned over and over that I could not generalize instances of tourist activity as positive or negative, they inhabited an ambivalent space where they could be both at the same time. Juan also explained how the view of cities wanting “less tourists, and more quality tourists” is classist. He told me,
“You do high class tourist activity or low class depending on your status or your
age. If you are young you go do some things during the day and go party at night.
It’s normal.”
Despite the graffiti which can be found around the city calling for tourists to “go home” it is not the view of those I interviewed that the problem with tourism was tourists. Instead this thesis argues that the problem with tourism is not with travel itself, but with the way it threatens residents’ relationships with each other and with their city through the spatial changes in function and meaning.
At the same time as neoliberal cities take agency from people in giving decision- making power to economic and political elites, I have also shown how residents take action to reclaim this agency in attempts to make change. This shows that the problems that come with urban living should not be taken for granted, but actively questioned.
78
While an “ideal” utopic city may be out of reach, Purcell (2017) believes people have the power to pursue Lefebvre’s vision of “urgent utopias” which “combine the real and the ideal, the existing and the possible” (Lefebvre 2003b/1970, 7). Residents do not conceive of themselves as powerless in the face of tourism massification, but as capable of making something better. To get to this utopia requires hard work in terms of reimagining how cities are structured, and the way rights are distributed within them. This thesis argues that residents rights to the city need to be effectively addressed if the problems linked to tourism massification are ever to go away. This requires city governments to actively put the concerns of residents over the concerns of capital accumulation. Laws are one way to do this, by altering the laws surrounding real estate speculation and privatization of public spaces. To be successful on the legal level, however, requires a raising of consciousness to the issues associated with tourism and just how deeply sown they are in society. While residents feel the effects of tourism massification firsthand, consciousness comes with the territory. Consciousness must also be apparent on the level of the tourist, as tourists to have their own agency to alter the harmful meanings of modern tourism.
This requires a reflexivity which acknowledges our role in the broader issues of tourism. Sometimes conversations about tourism lead to defensive stances and attitudes that the tourist knows better than the resident. A common response I heard during my fieldwork was “Barcelona benefits from tourism,” or “Tourism helps the economy!”
These comments treat Barcelona as a singular entity, mistaking that every person in
Barcelona cannot possibly benefit from tourism. The question we need to ask ourselves is: who is benefitting from tourism? At this point in time it is not residents, and it is not those working in the industry either. I spoke to two immigrants who worked selling
79 tickets for the clubs by La Barceloneta, who told me about the fast turnover of people who quit, ill from the heat of the sun as well as the unstable pay. If you sell no tickets, you get no money. I point this out to show that while tourism provides opportunities, they are not great for everyone, and that means there lies the potential to do better. While residents and temporary workers get little from tourism, I have explained how politicians, bankers, and entrepreneurs are seen as the ones with the most to gain from unregulated tourism practices.
Tourism is not inherently destructive but requires sustainability for its potential benefits to be felt. By looking at tourism we can see how neoliberal urbanism works to destabilize resident life in cities, making the city unlivable for year-round residents. This matters because culture does not exist in a photo or souvenir, but is created daily by people living their lives according to their own desires and needs. The present state of tourism represents a time when people living in cities are restricted by the pressures of capital influencing the choices they make, and the spaces they inhabit. To make tourism better serve the needs of residents, we need not only reimagine how to travel, but how everyday life can be restructured so tourists and residents can meet in spaces which suit both of their needs.
80
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