"Big cities embrace the tourist and suffocate the neighbor"

I’m uncomfortable in my city.

It’s normal, because you live in a theme park and you have to share space every day with people who have interests that are very different from yours.

The tourists?

Yes, big cities embrace the tourist and suffocate the neighbor because the tourist has a higher 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’d better close it and open a pizzeria, I’ll be better off.

Rentism has replaced production?

Yes. Dividing a flat and renting it by rooms is more profitable than renting it to a family with a five-year contract.

And what do councils do?

Currently its main function is to attract flows from outside, be it investment, digital nomads or tourists… Municipalities enter into competition with each other. The administrations have become entrepreneurs of the city, and this has good press.

Have cities become a product and increasingly expensive?

Yes. Cities have become brands that need to attract new investors, even if this means that the people who live there cannot compete with the capital that comes.

And what does this model lead us to?

To the growth of the urban area. Europe is a haven, a great place for the world’s high earners because there is a more or less stable society and 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 over the confraternity because there are no more people from Madrid living there. When you put a city on the market, you run the risk of being bought.

And the slowdown, more human 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 will happen to the Spain of swimming pools and drought?

This is again a private use of a public good. The private use is the swimming pools, the irrigation system and the exploitation system through the hotel plus the golf course.

But this is no longer possible.

It seems to me that the warning is not valid. When you’re halfway through the party, you’re only stopped by the fear that “there’s no more water, it’s over”.

…

And the scare will come to Andalusia and Castilla-, where they continue with this model of converting rainfed crops to irrigated, using illegal irrigation and establishing housing estates plus golf courses and urban projects based on swimming pools.

We see drunk tourists in bathing suits around the city center at seven in the afternoon.

The political project that defended the need to limit this model has not won the elections.

And.

And the same thing happens in the Balearic Islands, the idea of ??”we can’t do it anymore” has lost the elections. Spain is a place linked to fiesta, which is an international word thanks to Hemingway.

Is it our greatest contribution to the world?

Pamplona has fifteen days in July that it goes crazy, that suffers a catharsis, an enormous tourist influx, but it has not become a tourist city all year.

Because he didn’t want to, right?

It has not made the bet that tourism is the main industry, nor has Bilbao, where they have the focus of tourist attraction which is the Guggenheim but at the same time they have reindustrialized the city. Nevertheless, Barcelona, ??Madrid or Málaga live from tourism.

And where does that take us?

In 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 this makes cities end up being conflictual, we see it in the United States or in France, where they have periodic outbreaks of violence. The city is the mixture, 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 this is also a model.