I am uncomfortable in my city.
It’s normal, because you live in a theme park and have to share space every day with people who have very different interests than yours.
Tourists?
Yes, large cities embrace the tourist and suffocate the neighbor because the tourist has a greater availability of spending and ends up defining the city according to his interest.
The tourist is passing through.
That’s why if I have a hardware store, I better close it and open a pizzeria, it will be better for me.
Has rentierism replaced production?
Yes. Dividing an apartment and renting it by rooms is more profitable than renting it to a family with a five-year contract.
And what do city councils do?
Currently its main function is to attract flows from outside, whether in investment, digital nomads or tourists… City councils enter into competition with each other. The administrations have become entrepreneurs of the city, and that has good press.
Have cities become a product and increasingly expensive?
Yes. Cities have become brands that need to attract new investors even if that means that the people who live there cannot compete with that incoming capital.
And what does this model lead us to?
To the growth of the urban area. Europe is a refuge, a magnificent place for the high incomes of the world because there is a more or less stable society and there is hardly any violence, so everyone wants a house and a passport, and that displaces the natives.
Madrid and London, the most unequal cities in Europe.
In the center of Madrid during Holy Week the firefighters had to take charge of the brotherhood because no longer live there Madrid residents. When you put a city on the market, you run the risk of being bought.
And the slowdown, more humane and greener cities?
Yes, and without a private vehicle and with local commerce, it is an idea that will end up being imposed as a matter of survival, but will they continue to be only for those who can afford them or for everyone?
What is going to happen to the Spain of the swimming pools and the drought?
Once again this is a private use of a public good. Private use is the swimming pools, irrigation and the exploitation system through a hotel plus golf course.
But that is not possible anymore.
I have the feeling that the warning is not valid. When you are in the middle of the party, the only thing that stops you is the shock that “there is no more water, it’s over.”
…
And the scare will come in Andalusia and Castilla-La Mancha, where they continue with this model of converting dryland crops into irrigated land, using illegal irrigation and establishing urbanizations plus golf courses and urban projects based on swimming pools.
We see drunk tourists in swimsuits in the city center at seven in the evening.
The political project that defended that this model had to be limited has not won the elections.
Of.
And the same thing happens in the Balearic Islands, the idea of ??“we can’t take it anymore” has lost the elections. Spain is a place linked to the party, which is an international word thanks to Hemingway.
Is it our great contribution to the world?
Pamplona has 15 days in July that goes crazy, that suffers a catharsis, a huge tourist influx, but it has not become a tourist city all year round.
Why didn’t he want to?
It has not made the bet that tourism is its main industry, nor has Bilbao, where they have the center of attraction that is the Guggenheim but at the same time they have reindustrialized the city. However, Barcelona, ??Madrid or Malaga live off tourism.
And where does that take us?
To very multicultural cities with large urban areas where the people who work in that city live. Los Angeles is the great mirror in which to look at ourselves
Models based on urban segregation?
Yes, where there is no interaction between the various social groups, and that causes cities to end up being conflictive, we see it in the US or France, where they have periodic outbreaks of violence. The city is the mix, the coexistence in which agreements must be reached.
Is inequality more than a mistake?
Inequality is a model that many consider good because it promotes creativity and competition. And if certain services are privatized, you go from citizen to client, and that is also a model.
