Guest
Editorial: Why some cities don't like tourists anymore
Leonid Bershidsky
Aug 15, 2015 13
Cities like
Barcelona, Berlin, Lisbon and Hong Kong, which only became major
tourist destinations in the last couple of decades, are starting to
look for ways to keep visitors out. This isn’t about xenophobia:
It’s a protest against the changing nature of tourism.
In Barcelona,
leftist mayor Ada Colau has advocated a cap on the number of tourists
in the city, the world’s 11th biggest destination for overnight
visitors last year, drawing 7.37 million of them — more than four
times the city’s population. Colau ended up introducing only a
one-year moratorium on new tourist accommodation licenses, due to
opposition from the national government. Even so, that created
uncertainty for 30 still-unlicensed hotel, hostel and
bed-and-breakfast projects under way in the city. Short-term rentals,
through services such as Airbnb, are already illegal in Barcelona.
In Lisbon, a rising
European destination expected to receive 3.6 million overnight
foreign visitors this year (about 6.5 times its resident population),
local officials like what Colau has done for Barcelona. A group
called “People Live Here” advocates for protecting locals against
the flood of tourists.
In Berlin, which
received 4.5 million foreign overnight visitors last year (a million
more than its population), anti- tourist sentiment has festered for
years. There have been protests, and some clubs and bars make
foreigners feel unwelcome. Airbnb is illegal, even if widely used in
practice.
Meanwhile, in Hong
Kong — the world’s ninth-biggest tourist destination, with 8.84
million overnight international visitors last year (about 1.7 million
more than its population) — there has been a strong backlash
against the flood of tourists from mainland China.
One could put such
hostility down to these cities’ relative lack of experience with
tourist overflow. Parisians, for example, are philosophical about
their 15.57 million annual visitors, a figure second only to London
and Bangkok, and are enterprising about making money from them. The
French authorities fight Uber to the death, but they’re unlikely to
outlaw Airbnb, the Uber of the hospitality business — even if city
officials do sometimes crack down on the hosts.
But this growing
hostility can’t be explained by growing pains alone. Today’s
urban tourism is also more intrusive than it used to be. “New urban
tourists,” as researchers call them, can no longer be railroaded
into parts of town especially meant for them, known as tourist
“bubbles” or “enclaves:” Gaze at a cathedral on your right,
check out the palace on your left, see some art, eat at a tourist
restaurant, sleep in a hotel, go away.
Today, tourists are
often looking for “authentic,” or “off the beaten track”
experiences. Entire industries are devoted to creating the illusion
of such authenticity. Tourists show up where ordinary people live and
make contact, often surprised that locals in a blue-collar area had
never felt the need to learn English.
Some Berlin pubs
used to put signs in their windows saying: “There are no lattes
here.” The goal was to keep tourists out, but the signs may just
have made these venues more attractive to people in search of
authenticity. “The sought-after imaginary of urbanity is often
connected to former working-class and post- industrial inner-city
neighborhoods,” Henning Fueller and Boris Michel wrote in a 2014
paper on tourism in Berlin’s bohemian area, Kreuzberg, which in
2010 banned the opening of new hostels, much as Colau has done in
Barcelona.
Once the tourists
show up, however, gentrification soon sets in. The causality here is
not certain: It could be that the visitors want the local color to be
safe, preferring to hang out in areas that are already gentrifying;
or it could be that local businesses and landlords spot the upturn in
visitor numbers and start catering to them. Yet to locals, there is a
clear connection between rising tourist numbers and upswings in
housing costs, as well as the replacement of their favorite haunts
with upscale cafes, wine bars and hipster gastropubs.
There’s nothing
visitors can do to look like locals in foreign cities, especially
where they don’t speak the language. All they can do is to be as
quiet and respectful as possible, while burrowing down into the local
life. This includes not flashing cash and spending only as much as
locals would, to keep neighborhood ecosystems intact.
In other words,
travelers need to behave as they do their our own neighborhoods —
like neighbors, rather than tourists.
Bloomberg View
contributor Leonid Bershidsky is based in Berlin.
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