Tourist Go Home
in July 2024 Barcelona made international news some residents attending a protest against what has been referred to as over tourism in the city decided to squirt some of those tourists with water guns it was filmed and posted online and while it did prompt some genuine reporting on the issue of over tourism faced by the city that didn't get nearly as much attention as the original video or as images of anti-tourist graffiti which were posted and reposted in the following weeks the message was and still is very clear many residents of Barcelona are fed up with the level of tourism in their city and to me that seemed like something worth taking seriously even if honestly I wasn't quite sure exactly how to feel about it right away however the general reaction to that message online was overwhelmingly dismissive and hostile and more than anything else mostly about money I think these comments are fascinating and when I was first seeing them I knew they didn't sit right with me but I wasn't able to fully articulate why I think in large part because even at a surface level the issue of Tourism is genuinely kind of complicated on the one hand I care about the concerns and frustrations of the people protesting I believe that communities should have a high level of control over what goes on in their neighborhoods it also genuinely worries me to think that some of these iconic places and cities around the world might lose whatever character made them iconic in the first place if they're overrun with tourists but on the other hand sometimes I want to go see those iconic places I really enjoy traveling and so does basically everyone else I know I believe that seen other parts of the world experiencing different cultures is a good thing for people to be able to do and I guess I'd like to think that even if it goes a little too far in some cases tourism itself can't be inherently bad right seeing the public reaction to the protests in Barcelona I wanted there to be a better response than just pointing at the money as if it is a justification in and of itself but I never really saw one there were some com comments arguing that governments and policies are to blame for over tourism not individual tourists themselves but these comments weren't ever really defending tourism they were just trying to assign blame for the problem even reputable news sources reporting on the issue would almost always include a section in their articles about the money in tourism framed as if that is the other side of the story and So eventually without anything better being offered I started breaking down why that argument feels so inadequate and wrong and I want to take you through the same layers of that Journey because it ended up being a really effective way of actually engaging with the question I glossed over as rhetorical just a moment ago tourism itself can't be inherently bad right let's start by following the money the obvious assumption Behind these kinds of comments is that more money coming into a city for any reason is unquestionably a good thing but to start breaking this argument down I think we do actually need to question that assumption and look at what actually happens when money from tourism starts showing up in a neighborhood when Defenders of rampant tourism bring up the money they talk about it almost as if the tourists are simply walking around handing out cash directly to Residents but of course this is not actually what happens the money from tourism doesn't go directly to Residents it goes to businesses now most people's assumption is probably that when tourists spend money on tourism most of the money they spend goes to people in the places they're visiting and on a surface level that seems like how it should work right you're paying for goods and services in that area and of course there are some costs that extend beyond the immediate physical location but everyone you see working while you're there is a local the goods and services the things you're paying for are being delivered to you in that area surely most of the money has to stay in that economy well actually no now the exact numbers here very widely depending on the specifics of different destinations but almost always a significant chunk sometimes most of the money that tourists will spend on travel does not stay in the local communities they're visiting the term for this is leakage referring to that money that does not stay in the local economy but instead leaks out to other parties this happens in a variety of ways and I'll list some sources that go much more in depth on this issue if you're curious but a major underlying cause is simply ownership as very often the resorts hotels and other attractions that tourists will spend money at when they're visiting somewhere are not actually owned by locals but instead by International corporations who export their profits internationally for example all the way back in 1996 one study reported that destinations in the Caribbean had an average leakage rate of 70% with some like the Bahamas had having a rate as high as 80% meaning that only a fraction of the money in tourism is actually going to the communities affected by that tourism now like I said leakage varies a lot depending on specific destinations for example the UN environmental program in the past has cited a 70% rate for Thailand but only a 40% rate for India which is obviously much lower than that of Thailand or the Caribbean but still a very significant portion of the overall Revenue now there are so far as I've been able to find after months of looking into this topic no actual studies on the rate of leakage for Barcelona specifically or even Europe more generally however it is safe to assume that those numbers would probably be on the lower end of the spectrum as more diverse and to be frank less exploited economies are generally better able to capture revenue from tourism also the kinds of international corporations that contribute to leakage in places like the Bahamas or Thailand are almost always based in Europe or North America however even for destinations in Europe the point still stands that we should at least be skeptical about how much the money in tourism is actually going to the communities affected by that tourism there are certainly large corporations in Barcelona that do take in a lot of money from the tourism in the city but how much of that money actually goes to Residents in the most impacted neighborhoods of the city is not something that's yet been measured as far as I can find I'm pretty certain though if you were to ask the people living in those neighborhoods in Ral or aamp or bti they probably tell you the answer is not enough now here proponents of Tourism would probably argue that even if not all or even most of the money from tourism actually goes to the local economy some still does and that's got to be a good thing even if they could perhaps be getting a little bit more of it and here I want to push back further on a more fundamental level and ask whether small businesses really need tourist money at all and if they do why is that I want us to imagine a small business existing in a community this business provides goods or services which which the people who live in the area need or want and which they're willing to pay reasonable prices for the people who work at this business including the owner or perhaps owners all live in the local economy and they recirculate the money they get at their shop to other small businesses in the area this is roughly the ideal small business that liberals want us to believe all small businesses are and one thing we can say about this business is that it doesn't need tourism money it's already getting along just fine because it offers something of utility to the people who actually live there on the other hand if a business is in fact struggling to survive in an area and is in a position where it needs tourism money to stay aoat well then I think one of two things must be the case either the business is not providing something of value which the people in the neighborhood want and are willing to pay for in other words it's not a good fit for the area or capitalist economies might not be perfect meritocracies and there could be other things causing a small business to struggle even if the people in the area do actually want it around it can only be one of these two things so it turns out it can actually be both of those things and the money in tourism exacerbates both of those problems simultaneously by a driving up prices and making it harder for truly small local businesses to stay afloat and B by fueling the propagation of businesses which aren't actually a good fit for the area instead catering explicitly to people who don't actually live there one of the main things tourism does to an area is to drive up prices as capitalists and corporations look to make money off of the influx of people who are both willing and able to spend more money on vacation than the locals normally would in their day today lives it is obviously true that there are a lot of places around the world with economic woses but just as a healthy small business doesn't need tourism money to survive a healthy local economy shouldn't either it is true that tourism can bring some amount of money into a struggling economy although like we just talked about not as much as most people would think but it can also come along with a lot of negative exter alities not only does it become harder for truly small local businesses to survive as the cost of living in an area goes up the people who have historically lived there start to be forced out the businesses they frequent are becoming more expensive and overrun with people they don't know and the cost of housing is almost certainly going up as well one study of Barcelona showed that since the turn of the century rent has more than doubled in the city well GR gross disposable household income has only gone up by 25% in the same period and well of course tourism is not the only thing driving those numbers a different study from 2020 also of Barcelona showed that over just a 4-year period from 2013 to 2017 short-term rentals like airbnbs directly contributed to an estimated 177% increase in posted rent prices in some of the most popular neighborhoods of the the city every apartment listed as an option on Airbnb or VRBO is another apartment off the market for actual residents people are struggling to stay in the cities they call home and tourism is indisputably a driving Factor so I imagine at this point if you care about people's quality of life at all and perhaps depending a little bit on your politics you might have a nitpick you might say well sure that all sounds bad but it's pretty obviously corporate greed you might even say capitalism generally that's the problem not tourism itself if this is you then I'll tell you now there is something there and we will do more systemic analysis later but ultimately no matter how we analyze it it doesn't change the reality of what's happening on the ground in other words saying that tourism is causing harm because of capitalism doesn't change the underlying fact that tourism is causing harm f it is and the people who live in these cities are currently experiencing it I think before we go further we need to acknowledge that for most people leaving these kinds of comments in North America probably everyone leaving these kinds of comments What the residents of cities like Barcelona are going through is an entirely foreign concept because they don't live in cities like Barcelona the kind of cities that are experiencing over tourism like Barcelona or Amsterdam or perhaps one of the most severe examples of all Venice these cities are struggling with this problem because they are dense vibrant unique Metropolitan centers with compelling architecture interesting history and Lively public squares around basically every corner in other words they're places worth visiting by contrast just statistically speaking most people leaving these kinds of dismissive comments almost certainly live in the suburbs or one of the very very many North American cities that have been redeveloped over the last century or so to be largely indistinguishable from the suburbs the idea of mass groups of people from all around the world descending upon any suburb anywhere and aing taking photos trying to find souvenirs for their friends back home is an absurdity sub subbs are designed in cookie cutter fashion to be as cheaply and easily reproducible as possible they are by Design physically separated from anything that might be considered even remotely culturally interesting for people who live in the suburbs anything noteworthy or worth visiting in their metro area exists a safe distance away at least half an hour drive probably more and importantly these things exist in areas specially zoned for interesting things to exist in separate from areas that are zoned for people to live in or at least people who can afford single family homes I.E the suburbs the reality that in many places around the world this kind of zoning does not exist and the places with interesting things to see and do are also neighborhoods where people live this is an entirely foreign concept to many many people I think pretty obviously if you were to ask the people leaving these comments about the money in tourism how they would feel if every day thousands of people started showing up outside their house posing for photos by the mailbox loudly asking for directions in a language they don't understand aimlessly Milling about the Street Reading copies of Lonely Planet Pasadena well then obviously they'd be appalled at the idea in fact suburbanites at large are Infamous for opposing in new developments anywhere near them complaining that they don't want to change the character of their neighborhood and well in a Suburban context that sentiment is usually not actually Justified and often based in some thinly veiled xenophobia still at a gut level an emotional level they do at least understand the desire to not see the neighborhood they live in change in a way they don't want the reason they don't recognize that same core desire in people fighting over tourism or extend any empathy to those people is that they don't view Barcelona or cities like it as places that people live they view them first and foremost as experiences for them to consume so before moving on this is probably a good time to briefly address something that I kind of touched on just a moment ago a lot of the criticisms that I'll be making of tourism in this video could in a slightly different context the context of immigration sound rather xenophobic now I am not going to do a complete comparative analysis of the similarities and differences between tourism and immigration uh firstly because that's just not what this video is about but also more so because I don't think I really need to they are on the face of it entirely different things I suppose there is some level of overlap in the sense that they both involve people traveling from from one place to another but immigration is people moving from one place to another in order to actually live there to become residents themselves there is an investment both material and cultural involved in actually moving to a place that is entirely absent from tourism because once again it's a fundamentally different thing the power dynamics are different the economics are different and the cultural implications are different as well unlike immigrant tourists do not travel somewhere to contribute to the culture of that place more often than not they travel there to consume it advertising for travel is everywhere Airlines hotels cruises credit cards travel shows influencers most governments even run their own tourism marketing campaigns in coordination with business interests in the popular media of Western culture traveling abroad in particular is depicted as one of the coolest things anyone can do it's portrayed alternatingly as a status symbol a luxury Escape or perhaps most insidiously of all as a means of finding oneself most importantly though it's portrayed as something you can buy not just the plane tickets or the hotel rooms but the places themselves now I feel like I should warn you for the next couple minutes I'm going to get just a little bit abstract but if you'll bear with me I think this is genuinely one of the most useful lenses for truly understanding this issue so with that disclaimer out of the way here's just a little bit of marks finally there came a time when everything that men had considered as inalienable became an object of exchange the very things which till then had been communic ated but never exchanged given but never sold acquired but never bought virtue love conviction knowledge conscience Etc when everything in short passed into Commerce Marx theorized that in the later stages of capitalism everything would be turned into a commodity in other words something that is bought and sold and I think it's hard to understate how much in recent decades this cultural understanding has seeped over from simple goods and services to The Human Experience itself increasingly businesses don't just offer the goods or services they actually offer in order to advertise effectively they have to offer a story as well something their customers can feel like they're a part of from the shoes you wear to the app you find them on to the credit card you use to pay for it all for a very large and growing subset of people Nothing is just the thing it is is anymore when it comes to Commerce the whole process is part of their identity and so when they're repeatedly told through ads and media generally that these other places in the world are experiences they can buy that elevate who they are as people of course they show up to those places looking for that looking for an experience centered around them and honestly it's hard to blame them because this is how consuming things has been portrayed in media for decades in the age of social media this trend has only accelerated as influencers cultivate personas for their followers which are meant to be simultaneously inspirational and relatable but also entirely attainable through the right series of consumer lifestyle choices I don't mean to claim that people who take part in tourism intentionally or even consciously approach traveling with this mindset but in an underlying World viw kind of way I do think it's very safe to argue that most tourists bring some version of this commodification mindset with them when they travel on a global scale this not only affects how tourists behave themselves in the places they visit it can also literally transform those very destinations as we discussed earlier when more and more tourists start showing up to a place the the businesses that were there that used to be for locals are slowly but surely replaced by businesses that cater to the tourists and for this reason it's essential to understand that most tourists don't want to engage with the city as it actually is they want the quintessential aggregate commodified version of that place that they've been advertised and so as a neighborhood changes this is what's reflected eventually becomes a place not for the people who actually live there and contribute to the culture but rather for people who are visiting and looking to consume their idea of the culture as a commodity as one academic Christopher randow wrote on the topic back in 2021 the place in itself once discovered by enough tourists becomes a place for others the outcome is that entire neighborhoods end up feeling like some kind of cross between a theme park and an outdoor mall dressed up to evoke the memory of the authentic culture that used to be there but isn't really anymore this effect is already extremely noticeable in major destinations around the world and if you've been to these kinds of places you'll know what I'm talking about every other storefront is either a chachki shop an international chain themed with a little bit of local flare or a restaurant serving authentic local Cuisine that just happens to have the exact same menu printed in English as every other restaurant in a half mile radius the culture that was once there has been homogenized the edges sanded away distilled down to an easily recognizable caricature that can be conveniently packaged up and sold to tourists as an authentic insert city name here experience it might be useful to briefly look at what I think of as a harmless yet very closely related cousin of this effect that we're all probably familiar with roadside attractions the kind you might see in Middle America in States like Kansas or Wyoming the world's largest ball of twine for example in passing we might call these places tourist attractions and the people who stop at them tourists but in a more serious light I don't think those terms really apply at least not in the sense I'm using them in this video no the people who stop at them don't actually live there and yes they are just passing through but in doing so they're engaging authentically with these places as they were meant to be engaged with there is no other original culture that the largest ball of twine in the world is pretending to be its true culture is to be a place for people to stop a Whimsical Oddity between somewhere and nowhere a chance for people to stop and stretch their legs and go huh ain't that something they don't tell themselves that they're there to witness the authentic culture of American twine rolling they understand that they're there as consumers consuming a product a presentation that has been contrived for them and since that's truly all it is and these things are usually Far From Any locals who might complain the commodification in this case is fine there's no one around to be hurt by it if all the tourism in the world took place mile off the interstate in the middle of Nebraska that would probably be fine and I probably wouldn't be making this video but that's not where most tourism in the world takes place and I would argue that's not even really what we're talking about when we talk about tourism when we talk about tourism we're talking about that kind of commodification being imposed on a place where there is still organic culture alive sometimes struggling to survive and that's struggle happens necessarily in places where people live Barcelona Amsterdam Venice yes but also very very often the global South at this point it needs to be acknowledged that over the course of the last century tourism has in almost all cases involved a massive power differential between the tourists and the people who live in the destinations this Dynamic very much persists to this day but it's perhaps a little bit easier to recognize if we focus on the way that in the past in many destinations around the world tourism developed directly out of actual explicit colonialism now to be clear people traveling to experience other cultures as a general phenomenon has been going on for a very long time hundreds perhaps thousands of years however in the past it was both restricted to a much smaller group of wealthy Aristocrats and also usually understood as primarily a religious or educational Pursuit not a recreational one this is obviously not what it means today and most of the earliest instances of mass recreational tourism as we would now recognize it involved countries that were formerly colonized by European powers today when tourists visit they're told that the locals are glad to have them that they need the money that they're contributing to the economy in an important way and unfortunately despite the problem of leakage which we talked about earlier for many of these countries tourism is an important economic Lifeline the part that goes unsaid though is how these countries ended up in this position where they need an economic Lifeline at all the answer in most cases is some cocktail of military subjugation genocide and ensl enslavement followed by years of hostile economic policy designed to keep fledgling colonies turned countries dependent on and subject to European Capital interests this progression directly led to the rise of some of the first modern tourist destinations where the tourists often citizens of the former colonizing power would travel to the former colonies to be treated to a luxury getaway provided by the labor of the formerly colonized people who were perhaps no longer technically enslaved but who still had very few if any rights as workers the imposed economic power differentials always meant and still do mean that European tourists get a huge bargain on everything compared to what they pay at home and the local workers are usually desperate to accept anything they're offered what the people in these countries deserve is economic Justice in the form of debt forgiveness better rates from the IMF some would even say reparations what they get instead is the opportunity to work in the service industry to this day the top Nations ranked by tourism as a percentage of total GDP are all former colonies Aruba the Maldives maau St Vincent and the Grenadines the Bahamas the list goes on it is impossible to ignore the irony in the fact that we are only seeing this critical discussion of Tourism get even a sliver of mainstream attention now that it's affecting cities in Europe but even within Europe this power differential between tourists and locals is still very much present there are a lot of factors that go into it but overall the trend is this tourists obviously prefer to travel places that they can afford preferably places they can comfortably afford it is no secret that globally there is a massive wealth disparity between people who live in the Global North and people who live in the global South but this north south Dynamic is also usually true even on smaller scales people who live in Berlin make notably more than people who live in Barcelona people who live in New York make notably more than people who live in New Orleans now there are a few notable exceptions to this trend such as Amsterdam or Tokyo but overall globally tourists travel from the north to the South and when they get there they have more money to throw around than the locals often this carries the expectation of luxury treatment to be facilitated by the locals who labor while the tourists relax and spend their money in this context the money in tourism primarily enables this exploitative subservient power dynamic in fact the academic Tammy Ronique Williams argued that tourism in its very Nature has perpetuated the legacy of colonialism so much so that it may be conceptualized as a neocolonial phenomenon I would go further and argue that we can see this Dynamic not just in places that used to be literal colonies but also anywhere tourism crosses a threshold such that the local economy is unable to absorb it and local residents are unable to escape it over the last half century in particular more and more cities around the world are crossing that threshold and the people who live in those places are saying they've had enough so at this point it's probably fair to ask where am I going with this I've obviously painted a very critical perhaps daming picture of Tourism as a whole am I advocating that everyone should stop doing tourism am I suggesting that people should stop traveling entirely well yes and no and to explain what I mean by that I think it's time to talk about what makes a tourist a tourist so far I've really only been critiquing tourism at a macro level as a general phenomenon and this is largely because when it comes to the worst effects of Tourism the problem is to a very large degree about scale however if we zoom in a little bit we're forced to acknowledge that any of the negative effects we can talk about do require individual people to perpetuate them and I think it's also pretty obvious at that point that there are concrete things people can do to set themselves apart as not just people traveling who happen to be incidentally at times taking part in tourism but rather as tourists with a capital T I don't believe that everyone who travels is necessarily a tourist with a capital T and I have to admit part of that may be my own bias as someone who does travel but also cares about these issues it's nice to think that there might be things I can do to be less a part of the problem and for that reason especially I want to really unpack this belief and lay out some specific behaviors and choices that can cause people to have an outsized negative impact on the places they visit in other words when I say that it's possible at least in theory to be a traveler without being a tourist how am I making that distinction well first of all I think there are a number of behaviors that we can call out because to some degree or another they reflect the kind of entitlement I've been describing in this video thus far the entitlement of believing that your desire to have the experience you want to have in the place you're visiting is just as if not more important than the right of people who actually live there to be comfortable in the place that they live here's a short list of a few things I think fall into that category number one expecting residents to speak your language English probably even if it's not a native language in the area you're visiting this hopefully sounds insane to you but this is a very real thing that people very commonly do I myself personally have witnessed this on numerous occasions while traveling where someone will confidently try to order a coffee or ask for directions in English and when the person they're talking to doesn't understand them they'll just try repeating themselves but louder and slower it's agonizing to watch do not do this number two taking photos of people without their permission and or taking photos in a way that inconveniences everyone around you now I understand that taking photos is for almost everyone myself included a huge part of traveling but it's also very important to have a of common sense about when and where it's appropriate to do so have some self-awareness and discretion if you're for example in the middle of a busy street filled with people who maybe don't want to make room for your group photo shoot in other words just be respectful about it which unfortunately for a lot of people is a standard that goes entirely out the window when they're traveling there was a really horrible example of this that came out of Kyoto Japan just earlier this year so I'm just going to roll that clip now you can't do that you can't do that oh my good that's so rude so that's obviously horrible and that might seem like an extreme example but just last year the city of Kyoto decided to ban tourists from certain parts of the city because of how common that behavior is number three being too loud I feel like this one seems silly to even say because of how simple it is but this is truly a very common problem when people are visiting neighborhoods that people live in and acting like they're at a theme park instead just because you're traveling does not mean the whole world is a club this is such a problem that it's one of the most complained about issues by residents of places struggling with over tourism and some cities such as Barcelona have started finding people hundreds of Euros for this Behavior there are a lot of variations of behaviors like this which clearly display a very high level of disrespect for and sense of entitlement to the place you're visiting I'm guessing these are the kind of things most of us think of when we think of a stereotypical obnoxious tourist however because so many of the problems with tourism are about scale even if you don't do any of these things you can still very much be having an outsized negative impact on the place you are visiting based on choices you make about how you travel here's a short list of some things that fall into this category number one taking a cruise if you arrive somewhere via a cruise ship it does not matter how respectful you might try to be when you get there you are from the moment you show up part of the problem the average cruise ship can carry roughly 3,000 passengers and larger ones can carry more than twice that combine this with the way that cruise companies advertise like we talked about earlier as if the destination is part of what their customers are paying for and a single cruise ship docking at a city can mean a massive influx of people all at once many of whom are going to be on their absolute worst behavior major destinations around the world can average more than 10 Cruise arrivals a day even if you really think that you personally are going to be chill and not entitled when you show up you're still financially supporting that business model honestly this is a bit of a tangent from just the issue of Tourism but the problem with cruises are so extensive and so well documented at this point that I'm honestly kind of surprised they haven't been more generally culturally cancelled so to speak from labor rights issues to environmental issues to tax evasion issues to the tourism issues we're talking about here if you're at all curious go look it up it's absurd number two staying in an Airbnb or other short-term rental now this one is perhaps a little bit more nuanced because there are different types of air bnbs and there are also some areas where Airbnb taking housing off the market is a huge issue and others where it's not quite so much however in the places where it is a problem it's really a problem the most cut and dry worst case here would be staying in a short-term rental that takes up an entire unit apartment condo whatever in a densely populated area that is struggling with the cost of housing however even in less cut and dry cases I would still say it's best to avoid short-term rentals like Airbnb when you can because of the way that these companies profit off of these harmful Trends in housing markets everywhere number three and the final thing that I'm going to put on this list is perhaps the most obvious but I still want to explicitly call it out do not travel somewhere if you know that a large portion of the population is explicitly asking you to not come sure there are probably also people there who don't mind and there are almost certainly business interests that would like you to come no population is a monolith but in this situation enough people are opposed to you coming that it made the news or into that travel blog you read or whatever and you heard about it in the place that you live and here's the thing listening to those people is literally free it costs you nothing to not go to book a trip somewhere else where people aren't explicitly asking you to not come I think this final choice is kind of a combination of the two categories we've talked about because it's both about the choices you make leading up to traveling but also very clearly shows a high level of disregard for the feelings of people in the place you're visiting in the real world the question of when exactly someone is or isn't a tourist isn't ever going to be quite as clearcut as it is talking about it in abstract like this and trying to assess the harm you might have on a place based purely on how many of these boxes you do or don't check isn't ever going to give you the whole picture for example we can imagine the most obnoxious disrespectful stereotypical tourists imaginable but if only three of them show up to a very large city they're not really going to have much impact at all on that place and on the other hand if we imagine the most well intentioned respectful Travelers possible but 3,000 of them all descend at once on some Tiny Town well they're still going to have a really big impact on that place I think we do need to acknowledge that the Dynamics of scale go both ways in this video I've obviously been focusing on cities that are on one end of that Spectrum struggling with over tourism but to be even-handed I have to acknowledge that there are also a lot of other cities out there which do at the moment have a more sustainable level of Tourism where you can go and be a tourist for a while without having the same kind of intense negative impact that I've been talking about in this video at least not as significantly in that different context however I also don't think we can say that context is the only thing that matters because of the way that any level of Tourism does to some degree ree take space and resources away from locals in cities that aren't struggling with over tourism that Dynamic is still true it just doesn't reach the threshold that I talked about earlier where the locals are unable to escape it the intersection of individual Behavior with problems of scale means that realistically there are a lot of different Shades of Gray to this issue but that doesn't mean that we can't talk about it meaningfully at all it doesn't mean we have to pretend that all ways of traveling are the same either equally benign or equally harmful even if you don't view all of the six specific things I've just called out in exactly the same light as I presented them it's impossible to deny that there are things we can look at to differentiate people who are more harmful when they travel from people who are less we can meaningfully even if perhaps not precisely differentiate tourists with a capital T from Travelers in a more generic sense when I said earlier that yes I think people should stop taking part in tourism but also that I don't think everyone needs to stop traveling entirely this is largely what I was getting at an acknowledgement that tourism itself does yes in most contexts around the world entail some degree of commodification and consequently harm but also a recognition that not all traveling has to be tourism as we understand it today so I'd like to go on a very slight tangent and ask the question why do we want to travel in the first place I've spent this whole video obviously being very critical of Tourism but here I want to try to offer a defense not of Tourism exactly but rather of traveling more generally when it's decoupled from the harmful aspects of Tourism can we still explain why traveling on its own is so important to so many people is almost universally regarded as a good thing I think we can and I think the most satisfying answers might also be some of the most obvious and perhaps cliche but just because they might feel a little bit cliche doesn't mean there's nothing to them the first thing that comes to mind for me is that traveling is undisputedly one of the best ways to broaden your perspective on the world and hopefully to grow as a person I think it can be kind of easy to forget when you've already traveled a lot but when you haven't traveling somewhere truly different from where you've grown up is very often a lifechanging experience when you've spent most of your life in one setting it can be genuinely hard to understand how much of the world you know is socially constructed is a built environment influenced by culture it can be very hard to believe that things could be meaningfully different from what you're used to and one of the easiest ways to pull back that Veil and shatter that illusion is by traveling and seeing other parts of the world where things already are very different travel in and witnessing other cultures sharing ideas and perspectives with other people from other parts of the world can and should be a very positive thing for everyone I think another really important Baseline we can point to is the deceptively simple idea that people should be able to move freely from place to place as they want of course in the modern world this ideal is largely an illusion as the movement of people across borders is very strict ly regulated and enforced by nation states in order to cross most borders in the world you need to show official state sanctioned identification and answer at least a couple questions in the right ways in order to get the go-ahead and even then once you're through the amount of time you're allowed to stay in a place is also regulated this doesn't constitute free movement but it does usually result in permitted movement and most people aren't honestly concerned about the difference between the two details aside though I think almost everyone would agree that free movement or at least something like it should be a right afforded to basically everyone arguing against this idea in principle goes to some very dark places very quickly I think on a more grounded level though we can also just talk about the way that free movement when you put it into practice feels really really good if you've ever taken a long road trip or gone back back packing or flown somewhere just on a whim to get away for a while then you almost certainly know what I'm talking about it feels good to pretend at least that we can go where we want in this world personally I feel this the most strongly in my own life when I'm bike touring going from one obscure little town to the next seeing all the weird twists and turns along the way traveling just for the sake of traveling via my own two legs and a very simple machine there are few things that make me feel that genuinely free as a person and I think that feeling is something that everyone should have access to I think any strong argument for traveling as a practice probably consists of some combination of these two ideals cultural exchange and freedom of movement and I do think that together there is a very compelling case to be made there un fortunately though when that argument is contextualized in the material reality of places struggling with over tourism it doesn't come across as an argument for cultural exchange and free movement but rather as a defense of cultural exploitation and unregulated consumption regardless of how much we individually might try to not be a part of that Dynamic until the material reality changes and the harm is stopped or at least meaningfully mitigated any argument we might make for traveling to those places is going to carry that same Insidious undertone the reality is tackling this issue at any kind of scale is going to require systemic change there is actually a lot of money in tourism and that means there are also powerful capitalists who want that money who do not want things to change people who don't care about communities being turned into theme parks because it turns out theme parks make a lot more money than regular old neighborhoods why would they care about the human concerns when there's profit to be made earlier in this video I brought up and also dismissed a hypothetical objection to my anti- tourism stance the objection being that even if my critiques of Tourism are real and valid the underlying socioeconomic system capitalism is the real cause of that harm not tourism itself at the time I pointed out that even if capitalism is the reason that harmful tourism is happening it doesn't change the fact that in our current reality tourism is doing harm and I want to expand on that just a little bit here there is this very common Trend among liberals who like to Des describe themselves as anti- capitalist but who really only mean that in a very superficial surface level kind of way to simultaneously invoke capitalism in an abstract sense as being the underlying cause of all of our societal ills but then at the same time use it as an excuse to continue engaging uncritically in any one of the many many ways that capitalism actually m ially manifests in the world in other words they basically want to say I'm not the problem the system is the problem and since I personally don't have direct control over the system I am absolved of any moral responsibility for how I do or don't engage with it I wholly reject this line of thinking well it's true that it can be challenging at times to entirely avoid taking part in harmful systems it's very rarely entirely impossible and it's almost always possible to at least mitigate the harm you're doing by making informed choices about how you interact with those systems when you actually do have to the reality is the systems we talk about in this regard these specific manifestations of capitalism are social systems which only exist at all because enough people keep turning a blind eye to their negative impacts we can and should both push for systemic change and also be critical about how and when we engage with exploitative systems as they currently exist I've already discussed and advocated for some specific ways that we can do the latter but now I want to talk about the former and shine a light on a couple of bigger picture policy changes that some cities have made to push back against over tourism on a systemic level first earlier this year the mayor of Barcelona announced plans to entirely ban short-term rentals like Airbnb by the year 2028 it's estimated that this would return roughly 10,000 units of housing stock to the market for locals to live in simultaneously helping to alleviate the housing crisis and also reducing the sheer number of tourists In the City by tens of thousands on any given day Barcelona is not the only city that's made these kinds of moves Amsterdam Berlin and even New York have also all made moves to severely restrict airbnbs and we can hope that these examples might set a precedent for other cities to push back in the future secondly Barcelona has as of last year heavily restricted cruise ship access to the city entirely banning all Cruise traffic from its northern Pier the closest to the city center and announcing plans to do the same for the southern Pier the next closest by 2026 this will make it significantly less convenient for tourists to get from ships to the most congested destinations in the city and should hopefully significantly reduce the sheer number of tourists flooding in on any given day once again Barcelona is not the only city taking these kinds of measures Bora Bora in Tahiti and Key West in Florida have both heavily restricted the level of cruise traffic they allow and Venice has outright banned cruise ships from their historic Lagoon we can hope that this precedent might be applied elsewhere in the future I think these measures are a great start but ultimately if we're ever going to get to a truly sustainable place with this issue what's really called for in my opinion is direct community control over places affected by mass tourism in order to undercut the commodifying influence of large corporations and capitalists generally for a really interesting example of what this might look like I want to now turn to the city that I call home Seattle if you've ever been to Seattle there's a very good chance you've been to Pike Place Market Pike Place Market may very well be our most Historic Landmark and probably our most popular tourist destination it's either that or the Space Needle but personally I'm guessing it's the market what most people people don't know is that since the early '70s Pike Place Market has been governed by a public nonprofit corporation the Pike Place Market preservation and Development Authority if you've ever been you may have noticed what I think is one of the most notable features of Pike Place compared to most other similar tourist destinations around the world which is that there are almost no chain stores the only truly large chain present is Starbucks and that's only because the location in Pike Place Market was actually the very first location this is because one of the things the market Authority does is to make sure that the historic businesses that have always called the market home are able to stay there if they want to retail locations at the market aren't free but in some cases what the market Authority charges is so little that they may as well be most importantly the real estate at Pike Place is not on the General market available for capitalists to swoop in and jack up prices trying to profit off of The increased foot traffic from tourism instead it's in the hands of the market Authority a nonprofit public corporation which includes Representatives elected by a public constituency group that is open to the general public now it is definitely not a perfect organization nor is it even 100% Community controlled since there are also representatives appointed directly by the mayor of Seattle but it is something far better in my opinion than just leaving the whole place open to capitalist exploitation and I think that difference really does shine through when you're on the ground at Pike Place it is well known among residents of Seattle that of all the tourist destinations we have in our city the market is the only one that actually residents actually go to with any sort of regularity because it still has a lot of its original character yeah it attracts a lot of tourists but it also still has things that are relevant to us reasons that we the locals still want to go there the community control aspect of the market Authority as imperfect as it is is in my opinion very largely to thank for that and I think we can look in a a small but tangible realworld way at Pike Place as a potential starting point for more expansive true community control of spaces elsewhere so I don't have a nice tidy bow to wrap this video up but I guess this feels like as good a place to end it as any I've said most of what I've wanted to say and I don't think with a topic this large and complex there really is a totally concise way to wrap it all up anyway I hope I've convinced you that this is a problem that we should all care about it and try our best to at the very least not make things worse perhaps when we're able to make things a little bit better if that's all you've taken away from this video then that's enough for me but I also hope that on a deeper level this might plant a seed for you to change the way that you think about traveling in the first place I talked earlier about how we are so encouraged to think of traveling as a status symbol or an expression of luxury or as a means of self-fulfillment or as some combination of all three and all of these mindsets carry with them a strong underlying element of commodification and objectification both of the Places You'll travel to and also of the people who live there if you go in with that mindset you are never going to experience the places you go as they actually are instead you will always be seeing the world through a projection of what you personally are hoping to get out of it if you want to see the world as it actually is to engage genuinely and authentically with the places you go eventually you'll need to come to terms with the fact that anywhere where you can go in this world is just somewhere else in the same world you've been in this whole time the people you'll meet there are just people ultimately probably not that different from the ones you know back at home the magic of travel is not some mysterious mythical thing you can't buy it in a chachki shop in fact you can't buy it at all it's something you have to negotiate with the living breathing places that you get the privilege to visit if you want that process that conversation that relationship to be a healthy one then you need to engage with those places and with those people on their own terms even if sometimes those terms might be don't come at all hey y'all if you have uh watched all the way to the end of this video then uh oh my God uh thanks for watching this was by far the longest video project I've ever done um and even with that being the case uh I still got to the end feeling like there were more things I could have talked about and and elaborated on further um but you know at at some point uh I had just been working on it for long enough that I felt like I needed to you know call cut it off at some point and get something out there but uh yeah comment your your uh ideas for other things I should have talked about you know in in the comments below I'm sure I'll agree with most of them um but yeah I had a lot of fun making this um it took uh you know honestly even more effort than I was kind of expecting it to going in um but I feel pretty good about the way that it turned out and if you would like to support me doing more of this Con this kind of content in the future then um you know first of all you can uh you know smash that like And subscribe um you know if you want uh or not do you know do you um but I also do have a a patreon um which I set up a while ago and and then never really promoted at all um back when I was doing more stuff on Tik Tok um so I've got you know four patrons at the moment uh with which I'll put on screen now but if you would like to join them um that would honestly be like a you know a great way to encourage me to to do more of this kind of content which is is something I would like to do um but yeah anyway uh thanks for watching y'all bye
2025-01-07 07:20
