welcome-tourist-bcn

At present my research focuses on the relationship between tourism and gentrification, stressing how tourism can be interpreted as a gentrifying process that displaces both local businesses and local people. In Mediterranean and Latin American cities, the failure of attracting advanced services and professionals has led the capitalist class to turn to tourism as a way of extracting the highest profit from the city. Here cities are conceived as machines of rent extraction − exchange value − a fact that contrasts with the use value that residents need. In Spain, local elites have carefully built what can be called the ideology of tourism: a permanent media campaign that celebrates the growth of visitors as something that benefits the whole society and, therefore, as something that we should be proud of. In this context, authorities make efforts to collect data about growth, but make nothing to understand and measure how such growth actually impacts on the environment, privatisation of public space, commercial gentrification or the housing market. In this sense, my project seeks to fill this gap, and by giving voice to local residents, the intention is to reveal what the ideology of tourism conceals: that for many people, the fact of remaining in their neighbourhood is only achieved through practices of resistance.

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