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Protesters in Barcelona have sprayed visitors with water as part of a demonstration against mass tourism.
Demonstrators marching through areas popular with tourists on Saturday chanted “tourists go home” and squirted them with water pistols, while others carried signs with slogans including “Barcelona is not for sale.”
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of the city in the latest demonstration against mass tourism in Spain, which has seen similar actions in the Canary Islands and Mallorca recently, decrying the impact on living costs and quality of life for local people.
The demonstration was organised by a group of more than 100 local organizations, led by the Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic (Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth).
Which means nothing when it only creates poor paying jobs and pushes everyone out of their cities lol. Most of the money generated by tourism doesnt reach the working class pockets while it clearly makes their quality of life worse. Mass unregulated tourism only helps the wealthy.
It’s not a tourism problem, it’s a regulation problem then… I like the protest and everything but it just feels funny .
Well have fun “regulating” capitalism away.
I mean they mostly want to get rid of airbnbs, which I think it’s also not fair but that’s Barcelonas main problem. I’d say there should be some zoning rules or limits regarding them. But bans would also just prompt to ways of getting around those bans. I am not a big fan of “blame the system” when it’s people setting up airbnbs as it is more cost effective for them than regular renting. We need to self regulate ourselves somehow — give us another economic or political system, and the same inequalities and abuses will show up, I have not much proof but also no doubt . The system is not the problem, greed is, and it’s not capitalism-induced greed , it’s part of human nature.
I’m always very confused by comments like this.
You say
Like, bro, what makes one option more cost-effective than another option? What do you call the set of rules, regulations, the set of institutions that create them and the set of relations and norms that govern the dependencies between the parts of society that end up creating this or that incentive structure? Because in my vocabulary, the easiest way to describe this concept is …a system.
This is such a meaningless statement. Humans operate within societies. Societies impose incentive structures and set up institutions that make certain activities easy and others hard. Certain behaviours are societally penalized, others are rewarded. It’s the same species of humans that lives in countries with a lot of corruption and in countries without very little corruption for example. Same human nature here and there, but different outcomes. Changing, improving, reforming, replacing the system is a very meaningful discourse to have. It’s literally what democratic politics is supposed to be about: how a citizenry decides what the common polity is to be.
Talking about Barcelonas and most cities’ gentrification problem, it’s not capitalism is what I meant for “blaming the system”. Then the other was regarding “regulation”. The incentive could be elsewhere instead, e.g. let BCN be a tourism whorehouse and improve the QOL in the suburbs, connect them with trains, shift big tech companies to relocate with tax benefits etc . It’s not a tourism problem its an everybody wants to be in the same city problem. Just expand what makes BCN amazing outwards . Transport , bike lanes , wide roads and urban planning . It’s like, they made one great plan and they forgot to iterate on it for the current time, and expand it properly. I don’t feel it’s fair to use capitalism as a sort of “swear word” freely . Like you state the problem can be attacked from a lot of angles and it’s not a “capitalism” problem but the sum of relations and norms , wants and needs. If all cities were “not capitalist” there would still be some more coveted than others and that would create a housing problem anyway.
Rampant, unfettered capitalism exponentially enhances greed as more people gain unlimited wealth.
The way to limit greed is to have laws in place that limit capitalism. Unfortunately many of those laws we used to have were dismantled during the trickle-down era of Reagan and Thatcher.
Really it’s just greed. Every system of government has the same fundamental flaw, it consolidates power, and creates an oligarchy. The solution is the same one we’ve been using, strong worker protections, regulations on corporations, and a constant reinforcement of the social safety net.
Our system is perpetually falling into oligarchy. It’s our (and our representatives) job to ensure that we’re regularly propping it back up with heavy investment into the populations welfare.
Big brain move. The money that’s generated from tourism doesn’t trickle down to the people so instead of going after the rich that control the tourism industry and using unions to lift up their wages they would rather go after the same class of people as them because they’re angry at a system that was designed to make them mad at the tourists rather than those profiting directly from it.
I’m all for demanding more of a cut of the pie, and being upset about the city not building housing meant for the people that live there, but this is just plain wrong.
Lmao, massified tourism cant be sustained anywhere, even in zones where the average citizen is wealthier than in Barcelona its starting to get regulated.
What is plain wrong is to talk out of your ass about a matter you dont even start to understand.
Barcelona city should have the highest gdp/capita in Spain, even out-ranking Madrid. Metro area isn’t as extreme but overall Catalonia is still rich.
Consider it more like trying to turn NYC into a tourist resort.
I wasnt talking about richer cities than Barcelona inside spain, altough the numbers are skewed due to having very rich zones at the same time they have very poor neighborhoods. I was talking about the rest of the world in zones that are already regulating tourism, as in New York, Venezia etc
It just keeps showing that mass tourism cant be sustained and never benefits the working class, people that is against regulating tourism dont really know what they are talking about.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/venice-introduces-five-euro-tourist-153408391.html
https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2023-10-04/after-new-york-placed-limits-on-airbnb-are-we-witnessing-the-end-of-a-model.html
Define “mass tourism”. If we’re simply going by tourists per capita, or better tourist-days per capita, there’s plenty of places with very high numbers that are doing well – but those aren’t cities, much less vibrant ones. They’re things like mountain villages with ski resorts, with a couple of original farms offering a couple of rooms, a few smaller hotels dotted throughout, plenty of seasonal workers and when the season is over the whole villages resumes to what it has done for millennia: Subsistence agriculture. Maybe some forestry, and there’s also a sawmill. At a way higher living standards than would be possible by exporting cheese or whatnot.
…not speaking about extreme places like Davos, though, nothing is normal or typical about that place. They’re also more than rich enough to afford public housing and democratic enough to actually build it, YMMV in otherwise comparable places.
What basically never works out economics-wise is all-inclusive resorts: Those are generally built by outside investors, capitals thus flowing out of the local area, they may pay the local residents well in season but out of season they’re out of work and local non-tourist industry has to deal with not being able to afford workers in season. Some may be able to adapt but you can’t just shut down most factories, physically and/or because you need that operation time to pay back your loans. Thus the local industry gets killed off, or can’t develop in the first place. Not going to happen in that mountain village because it never had the chance to develop anything serious in the first place, geography and all.
Oh, other example: Wacken. Just over 2000 inhabitants, maybe 6k taking surrounding municipalities into account, each year visited by 80-100k pilgrims. About 10% of the inhabitants flee during the festival, the rest is hustling. It’s short enough to not disturb the local economy yet brings in tons of money.
Before i reply i really would need to know if you are even joking, i get that its a trend on lemmy, going rondabouts in a discussion completely losing the point of the argument in a long post instead of replying to what the other user said, but to have to read arguments about tourism outside major cities in things like ski resorts and small villages when the thread is about Barcelona (and the metropolitan area around it) and im bringing examples about what other major cities are doing just seems like trolling at this point by your part.
The metropolitan area of Barcelona has 5,3 million population, im sure an example of a random village with 2k people applies. By the way, a big part of tourism in BCN is already on the edges of the metropolitan area on illegal, or at least gray, airBnbs.
Go on again about tourism on villages in specific seasons and agriculture? Just lol.
Anyway, have a good day mate.
I mean it was you who started making claims about mass tourism in general, not specifically mass tourism in cities.
If all those tourists would pack up and flock to Extremadura I bet the locals would be very welcoming, not much more than agriculture and power generation there, economy-wise.
The only mass tourism outside cities is Disney world. Only cities are big enough for mass tourism
Oh I forgot you’re a specialist in city planning, urban development and hospitality.
Cities and countries rely on a variety of sources of income and taxes to sustain a quality of life. Understanding that one is still needed while recognizing we can do more to improve the lives of others isn’t talking out of my ass. It’s common sense knowledge. I live close to the Bay Area and frequent tourist areas because of my line of work and recognize that they get populated by people as seasons fluctuate. It’s frustrating, but that’s part of running a successful city. Keeping a vibrant life for people and enticing them to come visit. If Barcelona is just meant to provide only housing for its citizens it becomes another American style suburb instead of what makes Barcelona a cool attraction and lucrative destination.
It does create jobs though. Think of all the small restaurants and shops and your guides in these areas. This provides real people and income that they go on to spend at other businesses in an area.
This is why places advertise for people to come, it boosts the economy.
They didn’t say that it doesn’t create jobs. They said that it creates poor paying jobs. Which it does. All those restaurants and shops and guides are low wage jobs, and often, only seasonal jobs as well.
In the vacation town I grew up in, up to 50% of businesses were closed 8 months out of the year. In these kinds of areas, tourism isn’t a boost to the economy. It is the economy. It eats it up until there’s almost nothing left. Any industry that doesn’t serve the tourism is pushed out by the high profit margins of only being open long enough to service the seasonal tourism. I used to work at a fish market in that town that stayed open all year, and outside the tourist season, the boss reduced the hours to half of what they were during the tourist season. Because he couldn’t afford to keep the business running full-time. The store ran at a loss 8 months out of the year, and the busiest day of the tourist season largely kept the place open the rest of the year. It would’ve been more profitable for him to close down, but he stayed open because he didn’t want his local customers and employees to go somewhere else.
Most of the towns in that county are tourist towns, and that county has the highest rates of drug addiction in the state and huge homelessness problems. Because there’s very little to do most of the year since everything is closed, and combine the seasonal labor/low wage tourism industry with the housing stock being bought up by wealthy people for their vacation homes or Air BnBs while apartments prioritize short-term seasonal rentals because of how much more they can charge, and locals can’t afford to live in town anymore. There’s one town there that has a year-round population of 2,000 and can see up to 60,000 people there in the summer. And anybody I’ve ever talked to who has lived in a vacation town has cited the exact same issues consistently - high rates of poverty, homelessness, and drug use/addiction.
Oh yeah, a job that pays less than what costs just the rent everywhere in a 3 hour radious of where that job is. Really useful to anyone that is fine with living below a bridge.