The ‘Urban Village’ versus the ‘City for Profit’: Querying NIMBY through a comparative analysis of touristification in Lisbon and Madrid

Begoña Aramayona Quintana,Susana Batel

doi:10.14198/obets2022.17.1.03

Abstract

Southern European cities face the challenges associated with the recent emergence of the formal and informal economies of the ‘Tourist City’ and are the scenario for diverse social tensions. Local protests against these changes, sometimes discredited as NIMBY –Not In My Backyard– have led to conflicts with visitors and local public administrations. However, fuzzy definitions of the groups organising these protests are often found in the literature, as well as regarding the previous urban conditions for and the impacts of their actions. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the protests in the Portuguese neighbourhood of Bairro Alto (Lisbon) and the Spanish neighbourhood of La Latina (Madrid), in order to explore how moral ownership and ‘belonging narratives’ around places are variously put into play to legitimise and/or contest urban changes. We also reflect on the benefits and perils of building strong local identities versus the contemporary global tourism that flows into Southern European cities.

Highlights

This paper is a comparative study of protests in two neighbourhoods: Bairro Alto in Lisbon, Portugal, and La Latina in Madrid, Spain
Our aim is to shed light on how other, earlier, urban change processes facilitated later touristification processes and on which discursive legacies can be traced in current protests and mobilisation against tourism-oriented changes arising from these previously organised collective actions, such as those related to the moral ownership of places and belonging narratives
In the first section of the paper, we address some of the tensions experienced in recent years on a local scale in Southern European cities, through the increase in urban changes that set the stage for more acute urban changes brought by global urban tourism and the ‘visitor economy’

Summary

Introduction

This paper is a comparative study of protests in two neighbourhoods: Bairro Alto in Lisbon, Portugal, and La Latina in Madrid, Spain These neighbourhoods witnessed similar changes – night-time economy and organised protests by residents – before the boom of urban tourism in both cities. The two protests described here were not initially against touristification itself, they allow us to explore some of the previous urban and social conditions that prompted broader and more diverse mobilisation against the ‘Tourist City’ (Colomb & Novy, 2017; Sequera & Nofre, 2018, 2019) in Lisbon and in Madrid This may help to understand how tourism contributes to motivating protest in other spheres of the urban space, as well as to ‘exacerbating or mitigating existing or latent urban conflicts’ We aim to enrich some of the current debates on the conflicting relationship between tourism and other processes of urban change, such as national or transnational gentrification (Sequera & Nofre, 2018; Cocola-Gant & Lopez-Gay, 2020; Malet, 2017)

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Conclusion