A new kind of tourist economy

BOSTON — When I first began visiting Barcelona in the early 2000s, it was a dazzling metropolis — optimistic, lively, progressive, and teeming with young people from all over Europe. It balanced its Catalan pride with an openness to the world. The 2002 film “The Spanish Apartment,” a comedy about a group of exchange students in Barcelona, showed why it was considered the unofficial capital of Mediterranean Europe.

Unfortunately, in the years since, Barcelona has become a victim of its own success. But the COVID-19 pandemic might open new avenues for its future.

During Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, the city was considered a gray place that repressed both its natural beauty and its civic life. After Spain’s transition to democracy, Barcelona seized the opportunity to be reborn. Many say the turning point was the 1992 Olympic Games, which savvy local administrators leveraged to showcase the city internationally and transform it into an urban heavyweight.

With a limited budget, Mayor Pasqual Maragall capitalized on the Olympics to begin one of the most successful urban redevelopments in late 20th-century Europe. He enlisted the help of top local and international design professionals to create a municipal plan that ensured the city would benefit from the legacy of the Games long after they ended.

Beyond constructing sports facilities, the plan tackled two of Barcelona’s most profound urban challenges: its waterfront and its public spaces. The waterfront had long been cut off from the rest of the city due to myopic infrastructural and industrial development. Today, thanks to major work completed just in time for the Olympics, the port has been integrated with the city by road and public transport, and has become a lively district where swimmers swarm the beaches.

Projects to reclaim squares and parks reoriented citizens’ conception of their collective heritage and identity and helped to cultivate local architectural talent. Barcelona’s efforts at urban marketing, beginning with the 1992 Games, proved particularly successful. Since 2012, the city has attracted between 25 and 30 million visitors every year—an enormous number for a municipality of just over 1.5 million inhabitants.

Like many other hotspot destinations, Barcelona has suffered the negative consequences of mass tourism: strain on public goods, erosion of commercial services for residents, and indirect expulsion of the local population to make room for hotels and short-term rentals.

“Being a tourist means escaping responsibility,” as the novelist Don DeLillo put it. Tourists often travel with impunity, distorting local economies and moving on. Locals have responded with increasing anger. Anti-tourist graffiti and even petty violence against tour groups have made international headlines.

The COVID-19 pandemic turned Barcelona’s woes into a crisis. In 2020, the horde of tourists suddenly disappeared, leaving the streets empty and hundreds of shops on the verge of closure. Political, business, and academic leaders agree that the era ushered in by the 1992 Games — defined by the hit-and-run tourism that produced Barcelona’s success and became its undoing — is ending.

Perhaps it is time to consider an alternative model of travel — let’s call it “pace tourism” — that could be used to reinvent Barcelona and other cities around the world. Pace tourists would remain for weeks or months in a single place instead of constantly jumping from one city to the next, allowing them time to rediscover the meaning of concepts like integration and civic contribution.

The rise of remote work could make such timeframes accessible to many more people. Video conferencing already allows “digital nomads” to settle in places far from home without interrupting their professional lives. And the otherwise questionable flexibility of the so-called “gig economy” could create local job opportunities that swiftly adjust with shifting urban challenges. Cities like Barcelona could harness the power of online platforms to attract pace tourists. Governments could encourage hotels, airlines, and even restaurants to offer greater discounts for longer stays.

There are numerous, complex issues that would need to be resolved to realize these ideas. Catalan creativity and resourcefulness could contribute to solving the great urban conundrum — how to engage with global tourism without succumbing to it.

—Project Syndicate

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Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, is co-founder of the international design and innovation office Carlo Ratti Associati.