RELEMBRANDO 2014 : Um Aviso para o Futuro em Lisboa … O Efeito devorador/devastador do Turismo de massas nas cidades Europeias

EM LISBOA

EM VENEZA

How to stop the “assault” of mass tourism in Venice?

http://www.thevenicetimes.com/how-to-stop-the-assault-of-mass-tourism-in-venice-814/

These days in Venice… and for a few weeks to come, at least until September and with the arrival of the Venice Film Festival, the city will receive a real mass tourism “assault”. Visitors will sit on the steps of the century old buildings and bridges, eating, trashing and not showing the respect these buildings deserve. Walking on the small narrow streets without left and right side order, like in other cities, making the traffic impossible to stand, offering a true caustrophobic experience.

So this is why the city needs those who are not afraid to say that something MUST be done. Ilaria Borletti Buitoni former president of the Fai, an Italian Environment Fund believes that there must be some type of tourist access control in Venice. “I know that I will draw negative comments by saying this, but Venice is an open-air museum and the city is dying. The mass of tourists in the city is expected to increase to unbearable amount in the coming years. The idea of establishing an admission ticket to the city for its maintenance should be considered. It will protect the city and improve the quality of tourism.”

According to a recent survey by the local newspaper La Nuova, 66% of its readers agree that there must be some type of restriction to Venice and only 12% believe that there should be no restriction since the city belongs to the World. The rest of the voters believe Venice needs new administration and better management.

The Telegraph also asked the readers to vote and as of today the results show that 53.55% (98 votes) are for a fee entrance, but 46.45% (85 votes) say “No – stop being such a snob”.

The Venice Times also encourages our readers to tell the world what do you think is the solution…How should the city of Venice manage the flock of mass tourism? How should we preserve Venice and give the city and its residents (whatever is left of them) the respect they deserve?

ANGRY VENETIANS HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THE GIANT CRUISE SHIPS POLLUTING THEIR CITY

By Pietro Minto Jun 9 2014 / http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/venice-no-big-ships-protest

Cruise ships have been ploughing their way through Venice’s canals for the past couple of decades. You may have seen those canals, either IRL or in some mid-afternoon BBC show about 16th century art; they’re definitely not built to accommodate gigantic boats carrying thousands of people.

While mooring up in the Venice lagoon (near St Mark’s Square) might give tourists the kind of views they installed Instagram for, the boats’ giant engines are shaking the foundations of the centuries-old city and depositing a huge amount of pollution into the water every year. Local environmentalists, understandably, aren’t happy about this, and have been campaigning against the boat traffic for a number of years through the No Grandi Navi (No Big Ships) committee.

The group’s protests, though passionate, are usually relatively small. So while organisers were putting together a rally for this past Saturday, the 7th of June, they presumably didn’t anticipate quite how large the day’s demonstration would become.

The campaign’s recent boost came courtesy of a scandal at the MOSE Project, the multi-million pound flood protection system that broke ground 11 years ago and has since suffered a series of delays and setbacks. Over the past week the Italian judiciary uncovered how businessmen, retired police and a number of public figures – including former mayor of Venice, Piergiorgio Orsoni, and former president of the Veneto region, Giancarlo Galan – had allegedly been siphoning off millions of Euros from the project, taking bribes from the Consorzio Venezia Nuova – the consortium behind construction – in return for fast-tracking the approval of contracts.

Riled up by both the nautical assault on Venice and the authorities’ apparent willingness to fill their pockets instead of doing their jobs properly, protesters gathered on Saturday at the Piazzale Roma in front of the Constitution Bridge. They were mostly 20-somethings holding “No Big Ships” banners and flags of the Most Serene Republic of Venice, the emblem of Venetian separatists who are campaigning for independence for the region of Veneto in a bid to avoid the corruption they say is rife in southern Italy.

The demonstrators’ chants ranged from, “The lagoon has no fear”, to direct calls for politicians to stand down. “[Current president of the Veneto region] Luca Zaia should resign!” shouted one protester. “If he knew about the corruption, he must resign because he didn’t say anything. If he didn’t know, then he must resign anyway because he’s a dickhead!”

Besides that biting political commentary, people were mostly shouting about the Consorzio Venezia Nuova. “Today was supposed to be a day of action against big ships in the lagoon, but it’s now become a day of struggle against the Venetian system," announced one of the organisers. Another added: "In Venice, the mafia has a name: Consorzio Venezia Nuova."

At about 2PM the crowd moved 100 metres up the road and began blocking the Liberty Bridge, which connects the group of islands that make up Venice to the rest of Europe. Aiming to stop tourists from boarding a cruise ship, the protesters started putting together a barrier, first out of their own bodies, before opting for a fishing net instead. One group then splintered off towards the “people mover”, a driverless tram system that connects the Piazzale Roma to the Maritime cruise terminal. Because if you want to fuck up somebody’s holiday, you need to take every available avenue.

Bar leaving a crowd of tourists visibly confused, the protest didn’t really seem to achieve very much. Of course, finding a solution to a problem like this is always going to be complicated, and there's a lot more to be done than waving banners around in the street; according to Venice city councilman Beppe Caccia, it’s not just a couple of “rotten apples” that need to be removed, but great chunks of the ruling system.

“That’s why,” he told me, “we have proposed the dissolution of the Consorzio Venezia Nuova, as well as calling for a real, independent investigation into the progress of the work and the adequacy of the costs. Because a criminal system was used to bypass all those elements of audit and control."

Others – like Marco Baravalle, one of the demo’s organisers – had more instantly achievable goals. He told me that instead of having the ships anchor in the lagoon, therefore crossing the St Mark’s basin, they should stop in the stretch of water where the lagoon and the Adriatic Sea meet. From there, he said, tourists could be brought into the city on boats that don’t destroy what it is they’ve come to look at.

For now, however, the protesters have little control over what happens, leaving them to watch on as their city continues to deal with both the cruise ships and a ruling system apparently built upon corruption and greed.

@pietrominto

Mass tourism can kill a city – just ask Barcelona’s residents

We’ve all been a tourist at some point, but citizens of this great city are fighting for a way of life as they are sidelined by the authorities

Ada Colau

theguardian.com, Tuesday 2 September 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/mass-tourism-kill-city-barcelona

The last local underwear shop in Venice closed a decade ago. Since then, residents of this city of islands have had to go to the mainland to make such essential purchases. This is a warning sign. Any city that sacrifices itself on the altar of mass tourism will be abandoned by its people when they can no longer afford the cost of housing, food, and basic everyday necessities.

We’re starting to see Venice without Venetians. It’s happening here in Barcelona, too, a city of 2 million inhabitants that hosted 7.5 million tourists last year. The city council, run by the Catalan right, has said that it wants to increase this to 10 million visitors per year.

These mind-boggling figures have led to open conflict this summer. In tourism hotspots of the city, the scale of visitor numbers is affecting not only residents’ quality of life, but their very ability to live in the area. This summer, in La Barceloneta, the city’s historic seafaring neighbourhood, there have been neighbourhood assemblies, protest and, in one case, tensions with naked tourists who didn’t realise that they were in a city, not a theme park. In the past few months there have also been demonstrations against businesses involved in the illegal rental of apartments, an activity that the city council has only begun to combat recently.

Neighbourhood communities are central to the culture of southern Europe. They are where life happens. Yet people who live in areas popular with tourists are at risk of being forced out, by speculators who raise the rents of apartments and shop premises in pursuit of the tourist market. If they manage to stay, they have to put up with noise and pollution that are difficult to combine with daily life. It’s paradoxical, but uncontrolled mass tourism ends up destroying the very things that made a city attractive to visitors in the first place: the unique atmosphere of the local culture.

Most people identify the 1992 Olympic Games as the turning point for tourism in Barcelona. Geographer David Harvey has argued that the interests of the then IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch in the Barcelona property market were connected to the decision to hold the games in the city. Since then, the uncontrolled growth of the tourism industry has been intimately linked with structural corruption in Spain. When Itziar González, a local socialist politician, tried to regulate tourist apartments and hotels in the city, she was isolated by her own party, received death threats, and was ultimately forced to resign.

The economic crisis and the collapse of the construction boom in Spain have led to deindustrialisation across the country. An over-reliance on the service sector has led to the exploitation of tourism by the city. Without a doubt, it’s a sector that creates jobs (it makes up 15% of the city’s GDP), but these jobs are often badly paid with slave-like working conditions. At the same time, economic speculation in the city is having worrying consequences, such as a hotel trade that knows its strength and has access to and disproportionate influence over politicians.

In Barcelona, the democratic crisis that is taking place across Europe has been accompanied by the replacement of the welfare state with the debt-collecting state and the crisis of the post-Franco regime (a regime controlled by Brussels), and delegitimised by kleptocracy and systematic corruption. The tourism crisis in Barcelona is further proof of the emptiness of the promises of neo-liberalism that deregulation and privatisation will allow us all to prosper.

Of course, the answer is not to attack tourism. Everyone is a tourist at some point in their life. Rather, we have to regulate the sector, return to the traditions of local urban planning, and put the rights of residents before those of big business.

The way of life for all Barcelonans is seriously under threat. And the only solution is to win back democracy for the city. This is precisely what the residents of La Barceloneta are doing – defending their neighbourhood, their city, from the free market and from the political elites that are putting our home up for sale. And this has inspired the creation of Guanyem Barcelona (Let’s Win Back Barcelona), a citizen platform launched by neighbourhood activists, social and political movements, professionals and academics, that has set itself the challenge of winning the May 2015 municipal elections to democratise the city and put its institutions at the service of the common good.

‘The men in the shop are right to be offended, and residents of this area of Barcelona plagued by mass, ostentatiously cheap tourism are right to protest.’ Photograph: Vicens Forner

The naked Italians in Barcelona are a sad reflection on modern tourism

You can’t just have fun any more. You have to be seen to be having fun, whether touring central London dressed as an animal, or taking all of your clothes off

Jonathan Jones

theguardian.com, Friday 22 August 2014 /  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/22/naked-italians-barcelona-tourism

Tourists used to be onlookers. Once upon a time we travelled with guidebook in hand, eyes wide open to the wonders of art and architecture, of new places and other people. Or that was the ideal. Now, to judge from this photograph of Italian tourists partying naked on the streets of Barcelona, the nature of travel has been reversed: the tourist is the sight, the wonder, the monster to behold.

It’s as if, in the age of the selfie, no one can stand to be a mere spectator. The centre of the show has to be me, me, me. The streakers’ parents may have travelled in tour parties led by a guide through La Sagrada Família or Las Ramblas but, at least to judge from this picture and other reports of casual mayhem at some resorts this summer, many people are now going abroad to make a spectacle of themselves.

At first glance, in this case, that show seems less offensive than it might be. Nudity in a public place is a defiance of social norms, but these young men at least have bodies that many might believe to be beautiful. It is possible to imagine a far less aesthetic display by young British males full of beer and fish and chips. But while Italian bad behaviour arguably looks more stylish – even at this naked extreme – than bad British behaviour, it is a revealing exposé of idiotic narcissism.

The men in the shop are right to be offended, and residents of this area of Barcelona plagued by mass, ostentatiously cheap tourism are right to protest that it is not only ruining their streets but wrecking the place for more refined (and moneyed) visitors. Cultured travel of a more traditional sort is good for cities, bringing money to restaurants and shops instead of just to booze merchants.

It’s not as if Barcelona lacks interest for more civilised visitors. The city of Picasso and Gaudi has loads to see. But looking has become a cliche: going on holiday to observe, let alone learn, is too self-denying for a generation obsessed with its own image as seen on a smartphone screen. “Forgetting to update your status – priceless”, said an advert at Athens airport when I arrived there a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, right – the punctuation of email alert beeps mingling with the cicadas on the slopes of the Acropolis suggested otherwise.

The fascinating thing about this glimpse of holidaymakers behaving badly is that it reveals something essential about the malaise of modern tourism – that loutishness is increased by social media, by the selfie age, by an era that turns everyone into a sub-Warholian self-regarding celebrity. You can’t just have fun any more. You have to be seen to be having fun, whether it’s by hiring a stretch limo for a night out, touring central London dressed as an animal, or taking all of your clothes off to shock the people of Barcelona.

This is – clearly – a generalisation. Lots of people go on holiday without taking their clothes off in public once. On the quiet Greek island I visited there was no sign of any of this summer’s widely reported drunken horrors. I got the impression some of the bar owners might have welcomed a bit of mayhem, if only to fill their half-empty terraces. Yet it is clearly hard for people to leave digital devices and the culture of self-display they promote behind. This picture reveals how that modern narcissism can turn tourism into a noxious plague.