Valparaíso: Touristification and displacement in a UNESCO city

Abstract

ABSTRACT Tourism has become a sector that is transforming historic areas of the current city. Its impact on the quality of life of communities, local economy, access to affordable housing, urban landscape, is being analyzed from studies on gentrification and touristification. This article analyzes the case of Valparaíso (Chile) and how the declaration of its historic area as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003, triggered a process of touristification. Through public programmes and private investment, houses were transformed into tourist shops and hotels, shaping a tourist bubble in these residential areas. How inhabitants felt and experienced the tourist transformation of their neighborhoods was analyzed through the use of interviews. The residents reports material and symbolic changes in their living conditions, which are experienced as pressure by displacement from their neighborhood. A pressure expressed in the loss of privacy, depopulation and loss of community networks, the displacement of neighborhood shops, the increase in property taxes, and the absence of public subsidies to rehabilitate their homes. The results place pressure by displacement as one of the main mechanisms of dispossession in historic areas of Latin American cities and suggest that in cities configured from neoliberal urban policies the UNESCO designation acts as a device that strengthens this dispossession.