“Something went wrong”: Introduction to the special issue on gentrification and touristification in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula

When Google cannot find something or there is an error, the sentence “something went wrong” prompts. That also happens when browsing through Google Maps, which has become a fundamental app for travelers worldwide. Tourists increasingly rely on Google Maps for directions, places for eating or shopping, or even hospitality businesses; we could say that there is a virtual factor for touristification that the company facilitates. Yet the reliability of Google Maps depends, paradoxically, on your location when you ask the app, and we do not mean the difficulties you may find in remote rural areas. If you come to, say, Buenos Aires, chances are that Google mistakes the schedule for the subway or the routes for certain buses (or bondis, in the lunfardo local jargon) lines. What goes wrong in those cases is not the city but Google’s inability to understand and adjust to the place’s idiosyncrasy, which, in the example, contains an extent of informality even if we talk about the Argentinian capital. However, as many Western people visit Buenos Aires—or any other large city in Latin America for that matter—they expect to find a similar, if not the same, standard of punctuality for public transit or precision in traveling apps, which not even Google can reflect. There is a homogeneous Western vision of how things should work that does not apply everywhere because mindsets, traditions, beliefs—in short, cultures—are different. This is as obvious as it is sometimes overlooked in many spheres, including academia. Using it as an introductory metaphor, we wonder, how does this vision affect the urban studies discipline? What would it entail to change it, and how could we move toward that goal?

By the mid-20th century, Latin American political economists developed the dependency theory to understand the uneven conditions between geographies in the post–World War II context. It posits that the dependent nature of countries in the capitalist periphery had less to do with their internal political, economic, or social conditions than with their subsidiary role in the global economic order (Furtado, 1974; Prébisch, 1949/2012). In contrast, core countries (i.e., Western) enjoy their privileged position through colonialism and imperialism—that is, at the expense of the lagging peripheral subaltern countries, accumulating advantages that improve their economic and social development conditions. The dependency theory has been reworked ever since, and it has been crucial for the enlargement of decolonial and postcolonial studies in Latin America (Castro & Grosfoguel, 2007; Quijano, 2014). The central-periphery relationship still exists and is reproduced in different arenas, among them the academic world. While from the south, we make the most extraordinary efforts to participate in the global conversation; in the north, the interest in learning from what happens in other latitudes is sometimes weak when not inexistent. Following the contributions of dependency theorists, we suggest that in order to understand what happens in Global North cities, it is equally necessary to comprehend what occurs in the urban south, breaking the dualism and thinking in a dialectical sense. However, still today, there is a general lack of knowledge about the epistemologies, experiences, or practices in theorizing the urban from Latin America in Western academic institutions, with some remarkable exceptions like those captured by Harvey (2012). Raquel Rolnik is probably the only well-known urban theorist in the Global North from this part of the Global South, and although she is brilliant (and, we should point out, most likely the best; see, for instance, Rolnik, 2019), she is not the only one. If you are reading us from the north, chances are that you have never heard of Samuel Jaramillo, Hilda Herzer, Milton Santos, or Emilio Pradilla Cobos. Calls for contextual analysis (Peck, 2017) and the rise of comparative urbanism (Leitner & Sheppard, 2022; Robinson, 2016) have been crucial to advance in this matter. But it is ordinary to see special issues published by the most important (Western and English-dominated) journals on urban studies in the past few years dealing with theoretical questions where there is any substantial contribution from the South, or if it is, it is a minority (and, sometimes, it feels forced).

This special issue results from the 2nd International Colloquium on Urban Conflicts organized by the Iberoamerican Network of Researchers in Politics, Conflicts, and Urban Movements (within the Iberoamerican Association of Postgraduate Universities, or AUIP), where researchers from Portugal and Spain also participated (this is why it includes the Iberian Peninsula). Continuing with the scholarly debates we had then, this issue’s rationale is to keep contributing to reducing academic gaps and fostering the exchange of ideas across geographies in the urban field, especially between English- and Spanish-speaking contexts. Therefore, it aims to add to the current debates around an essential challenge in contemporary social sciences: to explain global processes without losing scientific rigor and validity to understand specific local contexts everywhere. We also wanted to answer a fundamental question: As Spanish speakers, how do we overcome the void between the north and the south? A couple of papers on this issue give a few hints about it. We feel that the language divide conditions the dialogue—something we cannot stress enough. We have adopted English as the internationally accepted academic language to communicate, yet we cannot force people to learn English. How do we navigate this? Basically, with more professional effort, time, and money—i.e., by paying for translations, corrections, or simply figuring out how to express ideas that do not have an automatic translation in English. All this results in disadvantages when producing and communicating our work. In that vein, our colleagues from the Radical Housing Journal have recently initiated a conversation that will surely be fruitful (Rivera Blanco et al., 2021). In a similar line, we have humbly edited the issue so that the specialized English audience has access to ways of thinking, political experiences, and study cases from Spanish-speaking cities, enriching the current debates at the crossroads between urbanization and tourism.

Tourism has become essential for many urban economies in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. Because of that level of importance, we decided to focus on touristification vis-à-vis gentrification, which has conditioned recent debates in the Iberian Peninsula (Cañada & Murray, 2019; Sequera & Nofre, 2018). In Latin America, urban scholars have not generally engaged with tourism as directly, even though it appears indirectly, for instance, when dealing with recent urban transformations in historic city centers like Quito or Mexico City (Durán, 2015; Delgadillo, 2016, respectively). Tourism has thus significantly impacted urbanization, constituting part of increasingly global processes in the interplay between economy and culture. Moreover, tourism has been preceded and followed by capital realized in the built environment, as Lefebvre noted already in the 1970s (Lefebvre, 1973), and today that translates into real estate investments of different sizes and scales (Jajamovich, 2018; Jover & Cocola-Gant, 2023). However, theoretical formulations around planetary claims have often failed to include these nuances fully (Katz, 2021). Beyond the universalization versus particularities divide, these works have stirred debates and highlighted the role of cities under the current historical phase of neoliberal capitalism sustaining and reproducing uneven development, focusing on essential issues such as social inequalities, the global division of labor, the commodification of space, or housing dynamics. But, in the former case, for example, analyses have overlooked the Latin American context, where financialization has developed its own path (Nascimento Neto & Salinas Arreortua, 2020; Socoloff, 2019), public housing provisions are almost non-existent in many countries, and potential beneficiaries of those include large sectors of the population living in under-housed conditions. Insofar as urban scholars have arrived at generalizations through researching cities in the Global North, their Global South counterparts have proposed making critical and situated use of these concepts without discarding them (Lerena-Rongvaux, 2023). This is why gentrification has sometimes been doomed as an imperialist concept, like in Jaramillo’s (2009) work in Bogotá (see also Delgadillo, 2013; Díaz-Parra, 2020, for a discussion) or reworked to include culture-oriented, heritage-based nuances (González Bracco & Jover, 2023; Janoschka & Sequera, 2016). Again, when researching housing in Latin America, it is important to understand the state’s role in gentrification (López-Morales et al., 2021) or urban renewal (Herzer, 2008; Vera Jiménez, 2023), its lack of involvement in public housing, and thus consider the importance of housing co-ops in some latitudes (see Benjamín Nahum’s extensive work in Uruguay, for instance: Nahum, 1999). Likewise, it is crucial to look at access to land, including land rights and occupations (Freitas, 2017; Venturini et al., 2021) or informal settlements such as villas and favelas (Zapata, 2020). Alternatively, when studying cities across Latin America or the Iberian Peninsula, the spatialization mind-set has to change from the Burgess-like Anglo-Saxon concentric model to cities that usually have a historic district still functioning as a city center, where tourism typically concentrates vis-à-vis heritagization processes (Jover, 2023; Sánchez-Carretero, 2012), and peripheries that are not exclusively low-density suburbs but also vibrant medium- to high-rise buildings housing diverse communities along class and racial lines where use-hybridization in zoning usually is stronger. That said, in these cities, precarity, unhoming, and insecurity are frequent, and populations also suffer from segregation, gentrification, and marginalization (Arbaci, 2019; Ruiz-Tagle & López-Morales, 2014).

With these ideas in mind, Díaz-Parra and Cordero advocate tearing down the Global South and North academic blocs, which they think dilutes the capacity to engage in insightful comparisons in urban studies. To do so, they undertake a comparative literature review on gentrification studies in Mexico and Spain. Their position is somewhere between planetary or universal claims and those upholding particularities: they see the conceptualization of gentrification as non-colonial, although intrinsic to imperialist logic and hierarchical relations, as it is the case of other key concepts shaping academic fields and debates nowadays. They also recognize the heavy English-related load of the concept, but that does not mean or work against its validity or capacity to explain unjust urban transformations. Instead, they highlight the need to examine historical, cultural, or economic frameworks when analyzing gentrification. For instance, in many cases in the UK or the U.S., they acknowledge how Mexican and Spanish cities have managed to preserve residential uses in their historic city centers, where state-driven investment in urban renewal first triggered a gentrification wave that has currently met with tourism pressures in the housing markets or public spaces. Even recognizing the different trajectories between cities across these geographies, they believe gentrification’s theorization and methodologies are still valid to give answers to socio-spatial processes and, even though they do not refer to it, the legitimation to gentrification’s validity is that social movements from all over the world—and also in the Iberian and Latin American context—have appropriated the concept and use it to defend their claims against socio-spatial injustices (see Mansilla, 2021). Javier Gil’s piece disagrees with them, though not explicitly. By studying the case of short-term rental increases in Valencia, Spain, through AirDNA and InsideAirbnb data, Gil suggests that the process does not exactly fit in the gentrification or touristification frameworks but that we face a similar but new process: housing assetization. This is because of the higher revenues landlords acquire from renting their properties to a set of tourists, i.e., the differences found in closing rent gaps; short-term holiday rental (or STR) expansion should be viewed as part of the financialization of the economy. Gil follows the line of previous studies that focused on STR professionalization vis-à-vis real estate investment (Clancy, 2022; Cocola-Gant et al., 2021), although, in this sense, urban geography—based explanations give way to economics. Gil’s thought-provoking piece adds to the debate between tourism, gentrification, and financialization (see Tulumello & Allegretti, 2021, on Lisbon), calling for more research into the articulation, not just in Spain or Portugal but also (and especially) in Latin America.

STRs have reshaped cities, especially their housing markets. Urban scholars have studied this extensively and from different standpoints in the West. For the first time, Lerena and Rodríguez’s analysis deals with the scale and depth of the process in Latin America, trying to comprehend how STRs have expanded in the continent. Through a literature review of what has been published on the topic within urban studies, they show that because of this early stage of analysis, academic concerns about the phenomenon in Latin America are more focused on a description of the process rather than analyzing its diverse effects, regulations, or socio-spatial effects. Most of these scattered publications use the transformations in the tourism industry as a starting point, adopting the (usually uncritical) approach from the new technologies’ business model, while none uses the concept of touristification. There are just a few articles that explore the Airbnb phenomenon from the point of view of the housing sector or regarding new trends in the real estate market from a critical urban perspective. They conclude with an outline for the research agenda for future investigations in Latin America, including a theoretical discussion around the nature of platform capitalism’s development in a continent that already experiences deep unequal geographies, the STRs’ territorial and urban impacts, and the regulatory mechanisms allowing them to grow over long-term traditional rentals.

Touristification, significantly the increase in STRs, serves as an entry point for Jover and Barrero-Rescalvo. However, they highlight the need to integrate the ways in which we look at the process. Through a street-focused micro-scale case in Sevilla, Spain, and based on critically engaged landscape research (Mitchell, 2008), they posit the term landscapes of touristification to understand the myriad ways tourism-induced development impacts urban life. Insofar as tourism transforms what is visible but also what remains hidden, the landscape emerges as an integral conceptualization to understand the process. They focused on four categories of landscape change, among them, changes in material landscapes, i.e., the most common for urban researchers because it involves STR-induced built environment renovations. Yet they identify different changes in material landscapes as well as in social, symbolic, and lived landscapes, including the integrated effect of the new STRs opening alongside new shops catering to tourists, a transformation in the ways neighbors appropriate or relate to public spaces, or the emotional aspects hidden behind the transformation. They mix different techniques to unpack the process, a methodology that could be useful for future scholars, not only in Spanish-speaking environments.

Martínez, Sequera, and Gil explore the expansion of STRs through a non-conventional case: a peripheral working-class neighborhood in Madrid, Spain. Whereas the STR demand and supply side has been widely researched within platform capitalism, scholars have often—and logically—looked into the areas where most STRs concentrate. The novelty is that they study demand and supply in Villaverde, a traditional working-class neighborhood in southern Madrid with a 15-minute train commute to the city center. By inquiring about a non-touristified area, they reveal the high dependence on the geographies of the tourist city, or the tourist bubble, as Judd (1999) put it 25 years ago, and how the expansion of the tourist city unwraps. Hosts in Villaverde, a high-density, modern, and non-authentic part of town in tourism terms, get creative to digitally marketize their properties and their neighborhood on Airbnb, symbolically expanding the frontiers of the tourist city, which not all guests understand, as they gathered in online fieldwork analyzing discourses on Airbnb. Their case shows how digital STR platforms like Airbnb work with landlords to push forward the physical and narrative borders of the tourist city, also illustrating how Airbnb does not only work closely with professional operators or corporate hosts (Cocola-Gant et al., 2021). In contrast, Cáceres’s work focuses on a traditional historic district in Valparaíso, Chile. He deploys thorough fieldwork with residents, mainly elder households, focusing on the changes that the hills (cerros) neighborhoods of Alegre and Concepcion have experienced since their listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003. The working hypothesis is that the UNESCO declaration has been uncritically welcomed by the authorities and some residents (something that has happened in other Latin American cases, for example, Durán, 2015; Santamarina & Del Mármol, 2020), especially those who have not felt the pressures of displacement as a consequence of tourism increasing due to heritage-based renovations and marketing. Cáceres alerts about many simultaneous processes happening at the UNESCO site, which the organization may not even be aware of, and that relate to the organization’s internal colonial contradictions. Among these processes, he notes the displacement of low-income local populations and the eviction of traditional retail shops, substituted for others catering to tourists—in a similar way that Jover and Barrero-Rescalvo find in Seville—and the vast divide between homeowners and tenants, given that the former have received subsidies for renovating their properties because of historic preservation, while the latter has been unprotected in the face of speculation. As he concludes, “Touristification in Latin America cannot be understood as unrelated to a framework of pro-business policies with a central state that uses the UNESCO declaration as a device to establish tourism renewal plans over housing programs that face the depopulation process in the historic area of the city.”

Although Cáceres does not consciously mention the literature on heritagization, he engages with it like Trivi, Moscoso, and Morales-Blanco do concerning touristification. Adopting a comparative urbanism approach, they analyze both processes in the historic city center of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, and Antigua, Guatemala, pointing out social conflicts as a result, which they frame in urban extractivism (see García-Jerez, 2019). This concept, inspired by Harvey’s (2004) accumulation by dispossession in a context of uneven development due to still-existing neocolonial relations, refers to the commodification of urban life (traditions, social relations, gastronomy, the built environment) in those cities by making profits through the tourist economy that do not stay in Colombia or Guatemala, but flow toward the capitalist corporations exploiting those tourism businesses, usually from the Global North. Extractivist examples are, within this framework and among others, large hotel companies, well-known coffee chains, Airbnb, or better-off international investors. Therefore, they talk about different types of tourism-induced dispossession: not only direct displacement by working-class residents in both cities’ central areas, as it has been common in the works we are describing, but also of cultures and the right to image other urban scenarios. They conclude that the only way to cope with these global dynamics is to be aware of the (neocolonial) unequal relations and reinforce identity as a way to resist. Similarly, Hernández-Escampa and Barrera-Fernández undertake a comparative study between two cultural-oriented touristic cities: Malaga, Spain, and Oaxaca, Mexico. They also start from a critical vision toward tourism as a domination strategy because it reproduces ethnocentrism and neocolonialism, as shown in the case of Guelaguetza celebrations in Oaxaca. However, their theoretical framework is theming, close to tourism-led city-branding, and dialoguing with heritagization, again, without referring to it. For Malaga, they take the rebranding strategy through Picasso’s artwork and heritage, which has been praised as a successful case in tourist forums (see Silva Pérez & Fernández Salinas, 2017). In Oaxaca, the mentioned event is said to uplift indigenous traditions, but as they point out, the state runs its organization, using it to manufacture the city’s tourist offer without any endeavor to analyze current unequal racial or gender relationships that still support the celebration.

This special issue introduction has aimed to provide a contextual and conceptual framing for the various case studies that follow, without trying to be exhaustive and give some hints to the reader about what is to come. We believe the special issue is a modest yet (we hope) significant attempt to bring together theoretical, methodological, and empirical research cultures and, in general, ways of doing, imagining, and thinking. Though we do not want to close without stressing that, even within Latin America, there are huge differences among countries; we need more urban research in Bolivian or Paraguayan cities, for example. Many urban transformation processes in Central America are also off the radar. That adds to other claims to know more about other Global South regions from which we know very little. In all Spanish-speaking academia, and especially in Latin America, urban scholars are usually aware of the conceptual debates that are going on in the north and the crucial cases that inform those discussions (commonly New York, London, or Chicago). As a way to close the introduction, we would like readers from and in English-speaking academic institutions interested in any of the topics covered here to be similarly attentive to the research outcomes from the Global South. And to break the norm and learn a language different from English, Spanish or any other. Only by fostering these kinds of connections and associations across geographies can we foster new debates and reach a more prolific understanding that will lead to our common goal: to have more socially and environmentally just, solidary, and democratic cities.

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to the Journal of Urban Affairs, especially the editor, Bernadette Hanlon, for encouraging and supporting us in the process of putting together this issue. We also want to thank all the participants at the round table about gentrification and touristification at the 2nd International Colloquium on Urban Conflicts and the follow-up we did during the 3rd International Colloquium on Urban Conflicts last year in Argentina. Finally, we are indebted to the AUIP for supporting the Iberoamerican Network of Researchers in Politics, Conflicts, and Urban Movements, and specifically for the funding granted alongside the Consejería de Transformación Económica, Industria, Conocimiento y Universidades de la Junta de Andalucía to Jaime Jover to join the Institute of Geography at the University of Buenos Aires as a visiting fellow this autumn (in the southern hemisphere).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).