Barcelona As A Global Brand.
From “The Best Shop In The
World” to “Tourist, You Are The Terrorist”
[“Tourism and Seductions of Difference”.
Tourism-Contact-Culture Research Network / Centre for
Tourism and Cultural Change (CTCC), Leeds Met University /
Portuguese Network Centre for Anthropological Research
(CRIA). Lisbon, Portugal / 9-12 September 2010]
Andrés Antebi / Gerard Horta /
Sergi Yanes
(Observatori de la Vida Quotidiana)
Introduction
This presentation is both the result and the
continuation of a line of research begun in 2007 by Observatory de la Vida Quotidiana
with economic support from Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de
Catalunya. A team of seven researchers has been analysing tourism phenomena
such as uses, consumption, occupation, and itineraries tourists follow,
elaborate and produce in the streets of Barcelona
city. The result of this work, A voltes. Pels itineraris turístics de Barcelona, is one of the
first social anthropology monographs about tourism and transit in the city's
streets. One of the most motivating factors for this work has been the
significant absence of research and reference work about tourism ethnology in
the city.
Why is this not a matter of interest to social
sciences beyond the cyclical supply of widely published statistics? How is it
possible that such a relevant sociological phenomenon –not only because of
economic reasons but because of the type of social processes it has unleashed–
has not yet reached a deserving place in public administration donations,
research groups, academic curricula and a long etcetera?
According to Llorenç Prats (2003), one of few experts
on the subject in Catalonia,
this relative lack of attention towards tourism is not general in the world.
However, this seems to be the case in the Mediterranean context of
anthropological research. The economic perspective, both from public
administration and private enterprise, has dismissed qualitative aspects in
favor of quantitative ones. The tourist phenomenon of Barcelona seems to only be explained from the
number of visitors or the level of economic profit , ruling out
socio-anthropologically burdening with problems
other aspects of this process and unleashing certain processes..
Despite the fact that this research paper could be
related to classic studies linked to impactology and acculturation (Turner and
Ash, 1991), (Santana, 1997) , Young (1973) and Doxey (1975), such has not been
our intention at all. Without taking respect away from the importance of the
traces left by the tourist, we have explored new territory using conceptual and
analytical tools belonging to urban ethnography and those specific for work on
the anthropology of tourism.
Walking around Barcelona's
city centre nowadays constitutes an excellent opportunity to ask oneself about
who speaks through a city's physical body. Who and how does one own a city?
What mimetic relationships are developed inside its physical and psychological
space? Is the tourist “outside” the city or, as opposed to it, is he just a
given reaction against a certain, multishaped way of “being” in the city? Walking around Barcelona, and looking at those who look at
us, also makes us ask ourselves about the motivation behind the trip. What
premises and representations do tourist experiences in the city respond to? Are
tourists themselves victims or concious consumers of city after city
standardised and typified representations?
If Bauman's liquid modernity has overtaken solid
modernity, is it possible that the next step to a gas modernity begins to
configure through tourist cosmovision and experiences? Liquid runs through
fingers but gas adopts the spectral category of presences that suddenly appear
and dissapear. An immense physical mass
of zombie-like automated bodies walk around places and paths without knowing
where they are coming from, going to, why they are going, or for what. They are
often induced by institutionalised idillyc representations during which the
tourist destination starts to take shape.
If the tourist trip gives place to the surfacing of a
repressed self that is hidden during most part of days and nights of the year,
how does one articulate, then, the unending body of social relationships made
out of gestures, attitudes, behaviours, regards, silences, surges, words,
interrelations, and experiences linked to the presence of the tourist in the
street? And how does the encounter that will end up shaping, or perhaps end,
the relationship between host and visitor, as differencial subjects, weave in
the street?
From Barcelona to BCN
The city of Barcelona
has become one of the most visited places in the world during the last two
decades. The transformation process into global tourist capital has been as
vertiginous as spectacular. Some key figures: between 1990 and 2009, the number
of annual visitors has increased from 1.5 million to 6.5 million. The number of
hotels has gone up from 118 to 320, most of them located in Ciutat Vella. The
number of conventions, congresses and incentive trips –adding up to half the
number of total annual visitors– has
increased from 373 to 1873.
The designation of Barcelona as 1992's Olympic Host City marks
the beginning of the trend. Ever since that moment the city started
consolidating as a regeneration project of multidimensional transformation
–very visible in relation to short term economic and urban aspects but very
profound with regards to issues related to expressive, symbolic and identity
dynamics–.
Maximalist architecture and its huge symbols were used
to represent the change in productive sector. New greatly built Olympic
facilities, together with the vedette show of architecture, had room within the
integral regeneration project for the historical city centre. Spaces
traditionally used by locals such as La Rambla, Plaça de la Catedral or Plaça Reial,
emblems of an emerging cultural tourism, such as MACBA and CCCB (Fumaroli,
1991, analises the role these cultural institutions hold as the new religion of
state), or totally regenerated spaces in leisure areas, such as the beach front, were promoted as symbols of this
“revitalising” huge process. This term is only ever used in order to refer to working class
neighbourhoods as if they were dying neighbourhoods one has to redeem of their
forced agonising condition. These became, together with the Modernist Route and all the other routes
that followed, new centres of tourist pilgrimage. Paralel to this, an
ideological and symbolic arsenal has acted as configurating factor of a
sophisticated citizen utopia. And so, good citizens are represented, now more
than ever, as bearers of innocent qualities, with a lack of conflictive
attitude, subjugated and consumed, attached to the old concept of host.
Barcelona's political, economic and cultural elite imposed a
program for the scrapping of the industrial city and the birth of a new third
sector focused city, centred around cultural, tourist and “knowledge”
industries. This was done in reference to a conceptual scheme of urban
regeneration linked to a “spiritual
reform” of the city. Barcelona
became BCN in the middle of a permanent
performance. The promotion and canalisation of incoming tourism, which
began to exponentially multiply year after year, got configured gradually under
the control of what Smith (2005) calls “urban regime” or “symbolic regime”: a strong
strategic alliance between the private sector, government bodies and community
leaders, joined together by the objective of giving a definite boost to the
city's integral transformation into a first class tourist destination. The
creation of Consorci Turisme de Barcelona in 1994 implies, in this sense, the
definitive adoption of a management model that equates the city to a commercial
brand. This brand is destined to compete successfully in the global market of
cities. Barcelona
began by being “The Best Shop In The World” according to one of the first
marketing campaigns of this body. The tourist boom was testimony to it. We are
talking about Barcelona, a city that had been
known as the Rose of Fire by a large
part of Europe's working class during the 20th
century. The name came as a reference to the anarchist, emancipating fight of
its citizens.
A new social model is then outlined under the shelter
of self-promotional tourist slogans such as “Barcelona More Than Ever” or “Barcelona, Make Yourself
Pretty”. This model was presented as exemplary and required absence of conflict
through, wrongly assumed, collaboration from citizens. Everyone was meant to be
mobilised, recruited as volunteers for this new paradise emerging in the south
of Europe: “One can perceive the hospitality
and kindness of its inhabitants walking around the streets, full of people and
life” read the text of one of the leaflets given to tourists by the Consorcio
at the time.
From Brand To
Theme Park
Concepts such as 'festivalisation', 'thematisation' or
'disneyfication' (Augé, 1998) have been widely used to refer to Barcelona's evolution as
tourist destination during the last twenty years. Many of the tourists walking
around the Gothic Quarter in the evening often ask “What time do they close?”.
They don't consider that there are people who still live there.
With regards to public space, the success of Bus
Turístic –more than 2 million users in 2009– has diversified the supply into
all sorts of guided tours and rental options for movement: bycicles, scooters,
rollerblades, skateboards, segways and electric cars. The birth of a new
tourist territorialisation based on intensive street use. Such offers are
mainly oriented towards easing movement around the urban tapestry and towards
making this moving around an exciting “adventure”, under the rules of
consumerism, of course.
Hence, the good citizen, kind, Mediterranean, active
and compromised, has become one of the first raw materials from which the Barcelona image given to
the world nourishes. The moral qualities of locals begin to be promoted as
added value to the sea, shopping or Modernism. This is specially so since the
years preceding the celebration of Fòrum de les Cultures 2004 (Horta, 2004;
Horta/Antebi, 2006), when the city is sold as a paradise of civic behaviour,
cultural diversity and tolerance. Another example of this is the regeneration
of Rambla del Raval (Horta, 2010). What is the tourist's behavioural response
to these ideas? How does their city experience develop? To what extent does
this motivate the conceptualisation of the tourist experience of the streets,
and in the streets, of the city? Both tourists and locals are participants of
this city project and this is the reason why the disposition of the city
(ordered, kind, lacking in conflict) pretends to include all citizens
(permanent and in transit) under standardised premises of behaviour,
consumption and uncritical conduct. Delgado (2005) has questioned these issues
upfront.
We see the acceptance of a globalised city as a
dialectic process in which local and collective interests, together with
response, or coping, strategies for a tourism model that is no always homogeneous on the part of the citizen,
intervene. Tourism is the meeting of some with others, between two worlds with apparent different
temporal interests, that meet and react.
Touristphobia
“Is this what we wanted?” is what some locals
incredulously ask whilst looking at the multitude of visitors roaming the city
centre. They have to push and shove in order to reach city centre located
markets in order to buy fruit...
Many neighbourhood associations, and other local
entities, report an unsustainable situation –hotels with dubious legal status,
unregulated tourist apartments, radical transformation of commerce,
indiscriminated increase in prices, over-occupation of public space,
massification, noise, dirt, lack of security, etc.– after the speculative
process of the last 20 years.
We can find symbolically violent traces of this lack
of affection for tourists written on walls in Raval, Gothic Quarter, Park Guell
or the beach promenade. Edged on crusty façades, hand rails or walls, we can
read: “Tourists, you are the terrorists”, “Tourists go home” “Good tourist,
dead tourist” o “Why do they call it tourist season if we cannot shoot them?”.
Just this summer, signs have appeared on crowded streets' pavements proposing
separate paths for tourists and locals. These are prints on stone expressing a
diffuse, ambiguous and paradoxical social upset of forced coexistence, economic
dependency and rejection, of course.
Often, this is about pure simple phraseology, pointing
the finger towards the Other, towards those who come from the outside, making
them guilty of all the bad things happening in the city, and which, in reality,
works as the other side of the coin of classic primary racism, applied towards
immigrants. Often, tourists themselves suffer the stigmatising consequences of
the dominating model.
It even seems that the administration has begun to
take note of this perception of tourism as a factor of social destabilisation.
Initial documents for Barcelona's Tourism
Strategic Plan 2008-2015 speak of the “feeling of growing conflict and
tension”, “the need to ensure sustainability and the continuation of tourism
success in Barcelona”
and “the interest in achieving the involvement of locals in order to create a positive
consciousness about the tourist reality”.
The chosen path is the “washing” of classic mass
tourism in favour of the elitisation of the visitor. The public mise en scene is done through the
multiple presence of luxury cruise ships, new iconic hotels, more propaganda
that includes local natives as full rights actors and, paradoxically, an
increase of police controls of all kinds. Barcelona's
locals are often the first victims of these.
Police hassles African immigrant vagrant sellers at
the beach front day after day, right next to the luxurious W Hotel in Barcelona, built right in
the sea –breaking the national Coastal Law, which prohibits building at least 100 metres from the sea
shore–. This hotel –the W standing for Whatever, Whenever– is one of the last
icon buildings of the city's maximalist architecture. Its monumental glass
façade projects a symptomatic game of mirrors: the old fishermans' neighbourhood,
Barceloneta, is opened right through the middle given the massive arrival of
speculators and high class visitors and its long standing inhabitants are
forced to pack and leave due to the pressure of real state. Even so, it will
still have to be seen whether this process will develop as those in charge have
planned the no-future of their subjects.
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