When you visit the city of Nottingham today, you can recreate the irruption of Luddism, a movement that emerged at the beginning of the 19th century in industrial England in opposition to rampant industrialization and the consequent loss of jobs. Luddites not only called strikes, they destroyed the first machine they found. This attitude resurfaces today in opposition to the technological revolution. In New York, for example, a year ago the Luddite Club was created, formed by a collective of teenagers fed up with the tyranny of the networks and the infinite scroll who met in a park to read paper books carrying phones from when smartphones had not yet been invented.
What is less common is for an administration to block a technology to prevent unwanted effects. This is why the decision by Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) to hide bus line 116 from tourists in the Google Maps application and to remove the promotion of anti-aircraft batteries from the Tourist Bus website of Carmel.
These are measures that meet the demands of residents who are fed up with having to travel in full buses and endure the bottlenecks with privileged panoramic views of the city. Emergency solutions that can be justified at specific moments and that also show the willingness of the authorities to correct the unwanted effects of mass tourism, but that cannot be foreseen in the long term.
First of all, because it is very difficult to turn off content from the network without users finding a way to recover it by other means. In addition, in the case of bunkers, the promotion of the enclave has been traveling happily on social networks for more than a decade, so it is irrelevant whether it is advertised on the TMB website or not: the possibility flying over a city with a seabed will always be worth the trip, whether by bus or on foot.
Secondly, by adopting a measure aimed at conditioning the mobility of a certain group, such as visitors, it is deepening a division that contravenes the increasingly assumed logic that we are all tourists, whether in our own city or that of others.
Finally, initiatives such as lowering the promotion of a site of such historical value as that of the old canons of Carmel – where a Civil War battle took place that was actually a prelude to the Second World War – has a certain incongruity in a city forced to publicize itself through culture as the only alternative to the most predatory tourism. It is an exaggeration that no one considers, but this same logic taken to the limit would force the Picasso Museum or the Macba to be turned off in order not to saturate with tourism or gentrify the Gòtic and the Raval.
The tourist pressure is obvious and more and more residents – in Barcelona and in other cities – are demanding corrective measures. And they can be enabled through a ferry control of tourist flats and investing in the services shared by locals and tourists, so that they don’t feel marginalized in their own city. Increasing the frequency of buses that pass through places of tourist interest or increasing the number of police officers who guard spaces such as bunkers would be more structural solutions than creating ghost buses or ceasing to promote cultural assets. The City Council is already compensating for part of the inconvenience with investments generated by the tourist tax, but there is still room for the latter to increase and better serve its purpose.
As for the anti-aircraft batteries, even if it hurts to put doors on the landscape, it would be necessary to start considering a complete museumisation, like the one applied to Park Güell, with an entrance fee and significant discounts for the residents. The historic and sentimental value of the place deserves a level of protection similar to that of Gaudí’s architectural prodigy. And the neighborhood tranquility too.