International Residential Mobilities: From Lifestyle Migrations to Tourism Gentrification (Geographies of Tourism and Global Change) 3030774651, 9783030774653

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Geographies of Tourism and Global Change

Josefina Domínguez-Mujica Jennifer McGarrigle Juan Manuel Parreño-Castellano   Editors

International Residential Mobilities From Lifestyle Migrations to Tourism Gentrification

Geographies of Tourism and Global Change Series Editors Dieter K. Müller, Department of Geography, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden Jarkko Saarinen, Geography Research Unit, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Carolin Funck, Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Higashi-Hiroshima City, Hiroshima, Japan

In a geographical tradition and using an integrated approach this book series addresses these issues by acknowledging the interrelationship of tourism to wider processes within society and environment. This is done at local, regional, national, and global scales demonstrating links between these scales as well as outcomes of global change for individuals, communities, and societies. Local and regional factors will also be considered as mediators of global change in tourism geographies affecting communities and environments. Thus Geographies of Tourism and Global Change applies a truly global perspective highlighting development in different parts of the world and acknowledges tourism as a formative cause for societal and environmental change in an increasingly interconnected world. The scope of the series is broad and preference will be given to crisp and highly impactful work. Authors and Editors of monographs and edited volumes, from across the globe are welcome to submit proposals. The series insists on a thorough and scholarly perspective, in addition authors are encouraged to consider practical relevance and matters of subject specific importance. All titles are thoroughly reviewed prior to acceptance and publication, ensuring a respectable and high quality collection of publications. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15123

Josefina Domínguez-Mujica  •  Jennifer McGarrigle Juan Manuel Parreño-Castellano Editors

International Residential Mobilities From Lifestyle Migrations to Tourism Gentrification

Editors Josefina Domínguez-Mujica Department of Geography University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Las Palmas, Spain

Jennifer McGarrigle Geography and Spatial Planning Universidade de Lisboa Lisboa, Portugal

Juan Manuel Parreño-Castellano Department of Geography University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Las Palmas, Spain

ISSN 2366-5610     ISSN 2366-5629 (electronic) Geographies of Tourism and Global Change ISBN 978-3-030-77465-3    ISBN 978-3-030-77466-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

From Lifestyle Migration to Tourism Gentrification. A Preface to International Residential Mobilities

Twenty years ago, Allan Williams and Michael Hall (2000) conceptualized the tourism-­migration nexus in five categories: labour migration, return migration, entrepreneurial migration, retirement migration and second homes. They echoed numerous publications in years previous conceptualizing migration and tourism (King, 1995; O’Reilly, 1995; Williams & Montanari, 1995; Williams et al., 2000) and laid a foundation for the discussion of lifestyle-led mobilities in the context of the wider mobility turn (Cresswell,, 2006; Domínguez-Mujica et  al., 2011; Hall, 2005; Hannam et al., 2006; Wright & Ellis 2016, etc.). Academic literature interpreting and reinterpreting the interrelations between different forms of mobility has responded to the sedentary bias within the social sciences and paid increasing attention to the patterns, effects and motivations of diverse forms of human mobility, in parallel with the increasing intensity of flows and wider processes of social transformation. As Dieter K. Müller points out in the last chapter of this book: “the emergence of new mobilities [is] a central aspect of societal change in the 21st century”. International Residential Mobilities: From Lifestyle Migrations to Tourism Gentrification1 pays special attention to the underlying structural conditions and changes fuelling new forms of international residential mobilities from the perspective of inequality in mobility regimes, coloniality and wider globalizing processes. The diversity of new international lifestyle mobilities and their spatial consequences is reflected in the different types of mobility explored in the book’s contributions, which include both temporary and permanent migration as well as transnational multi-residence dwelling, during both active and inactive ages as well as circular and return migration related to previous labour and leisure-led migration. This volume also brings case studies in the Global North and Global South into conversation, invoking reflection on the globality of the processes studied herein. 1  Published under the series of Springer essays dealing with the Geography of Tourism and Global Change and under the auspices of the Global Change and Human Mobility Commission (Globility) of the International Geographical Union (IGU). Framed within the R&D project VIMOISLAS (RTI2018-093296-B-C21) funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities; State Research Agency (AEI) (Spain) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

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While embedded within global processes of change, our understanding of these international mobilities is enriched with the particularities of the local contexts in which they unfold. The limits between lifestyle migration, residential mobilities and tourism mobility have been well theorized. However, recent processes of social transformation demand that we rethink the analytical focus that tended to blur the lines between lifestyle migration, residential mobilities and tourism. The increase in global tourism, the diversification of motivations, the proliferation of new destinations, the consolidation of a global economic scene, the rise of the global middleclass, increases in transnational property investment, the rise of platform capitalism and the growth of telework formulas, among other factors, necessitate new analytical work and critical framing. This is even more acute considering the global crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The distinguishing features of lifestyle migrants in comparison with other forms of migration relates not only to higher relative wealth but also to the ease with which they can relocate in line with privileges associated with having citizenship from advanced economies. However, such privileges have been temporarily curbed with mobility restrictions imposed by governments in the fight to control the pandemic. While at the time of writing we are still in a period of uncertainty in terms of what the future will hold, the immediate effects of the pandemic on mobility have been dramatic. Travel and mobility services are in low demand, greatly effecting the economies of the touristic destinations studied in this edited volume. Questions remain, however, on the long-term impact that the pandemic might have on migration desires and consumer preferences, not to mention government regulation of mobility. Destinations closer to home might be valued due to accessibility and security related with access to welfare, healthcare in particular. On the other hand, for migrants with more tightly regulated passports, holding residency in a powerful nation state within the international system may have even greater value given travel concessions granted by governments to residents during the pandemic. The clear acceleration in the remote working trend and the widespread use of technologies that make this attractive is transforming mobility. While the upsurge in digital conferencing will likely impact business travel negatively, it could have a positive impact on remote working abroad –and thus international residential mobility – as the possibilities for mixing lifestyle and work are normalized to a greater extent. Despite this, we are in a period of excess uncertainty and will only fully understand the effects of the economic and social crisis provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic with time. The consolidation and diversification of flows of international residential migrants have economic, social, cultural and environmental consequences as they are accompanied by flows of capital, social restructuring and cultural processes of broadening, particularly for peripheral economies, where spaces of tourism development coexist with emerging new residential destinations. These spaces of international residential mobility, especially in cities and coastal areas, result in frequent tensions, due to processes of appropriation that appreciate local housing markets, dissociating them from local demand and purchasing power, as well as processes of

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touristification and transnational gentrification that potentially displace local populations, to name a few. To the contrary, many such destinations are struggling to cope with the lack of tourists and international investors in light of the current pandemic. Consequently, new patterns of human mobility and tourism as well as refreshed interpretations of the nexus of these processes overlap in the various chapters, which are presented as follows. The book begins with two conceptual chapters, which intend to open up a new space for interdisciplinary dialogue, in response to the boundary-crossing processes that underpin the mobilities and tourism geographies that are traced throughout the book. In the first chapter, “A Global Sociology on Lifestyle Migrations”, Matthew Hayes picks up strands of the transnational approach to migration studies and asks what other concepts and concerns emerge when lifestyle migration is added to the picture of global migrations with particular attention to the concept of the “colonial traces” in lifestyle migration. He argues that the differentiated regulation and experience of migration for different groups invokes a critical reflection on how global society might be organized in a manner that distributes citizenship rights and resources more equally. Thus, relating lifestyle migration to global frames of migration and capital accumulation. The latter is complemented by Geoffrey DeVerteuil’s analysis of the globalization of real estate markets, which provides an important explanation for globalized residential mobilities and enriches the traditional focus on coastal or rural destinations with an urban perspective. In “Overseas Investment and the Real Estate Market: Global and Local Frictions and the Great Acceleration”, the author discusses new conceptual perspectives on the co-incidence of global and local factors from the experience of large, globalized cities, in the wake of the 2008 global recession, that are directly impacted by overseas investment. He traces the consolidation and eventual acceleration of these trends to other cities lower down on the urban hierarchy over the past decade. Both chapters provide an important backdrop for the mobilities studied herein through foregrounding the processes structuring international residential mobilities and their spatial impacts. The five chapters in the second part of this volume, Global Processes of Multi-­ residence and Local Impacts, focus on the changing dynamics of lifestyle migration in Southern Europe and Latin America in urban, costal, rural and island settings. In Chap. 3, “The Sea as a Lifestyle: (Im)mobilities, Liminality, and Life Course Transitions Among Permanently Settled Sailors in the Azores (Portugal)”, Dora Sampaio, based on qualitative work conducted in the islands of the Azores with a group of older foreign sailors, develops an analytical lens based on a life course perspective that captures the malleability and liminality of lifestyle migration projects. Meanwhile, Raquel Huete-Nieves and Alejandro Mantecón, in Chap. 4, “The Reconfiguration of International Residential Mobility Flows in Post-crisis Spain: The Case of Costa Blanca-Alicante”, contrast the effects of the 2008 economic crisis on leisure-oriented mobility flows towards Alicante (Spain), both on the tourism sector and on the real estate market. They conclude the latter suffered more than the former, and without the burden of the real estate sector, the tourism economy of Costa Blanca could transition to a more competitive but sustainable and just tourism model hinged on an innovative political and cultural context.

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Chapters 5 and 6 examine locations in Latin and Central America. Susana Sassone and Myriam González in Chap. 5, “Global Mobility and Migration in the Cities of the Patagonian Andes (Argentina): Emerging Diversity”, analyse the increasing diversity in these cities, in demographic, social and cultural terms, due to the coexistence of labour migrants, investors, tourists and amenity/lifestyle migrants. As such, they highlight the need to design intervention practices based on the governance of urban diversity. In the case of Chap. 6, “International Mobility: An Approach to the Imaginaries of Residential Tourism from the Northern and South-­ Eastern Borders of Mexico”, Nora Bringas-Rábago, Ana P.  Sosa-Ferreira and Maribel Osorio-García contrast the practices of international mobility in two different locations, drawing attention to the importance of local contexts in understanding the profile, motivations and transnational practices of residential tourists. Their findings reiterate the imaginary return to nature and rural life of these lifestyle migrants and the importance of symbolic conceptions of community through the ideal of spatial imaginaries. The part concludes with the case study of Lisbon. Jennifer McGarrigle in Chap. 7 “The Locational Choice of Urban Lifestyle Migrants in Lisbon: Beyond Tourism Imaginaries”, brings discussions on the city as a lifestyle destination to the fore. The life history interviews with intra-EU lifestyle migrants allow her to relativize economic concerns, such as the pull of fiscal benefits and to explore the emotions and mechanics of locational choice. While reiterating the overlaps between tourism and lifestyle mobilities, her findings highlight the need for analytical distinctiveness between the two given differences in the way they are governed and embodied. In the third part, Transnationalism, Return and Circular Migrations, five contributions are compiled, three from Europe (Budapest, Riga and Rome), one from Africa (Cape Verde) and another from the Caribbean (Cuba). In Chap. 8, “The Residential Mobility of Hungarian Nationals and Foreign Citizens: The Case Study of Budapest”, Sándor Illés analyses how short-distance residential mobility in the city of Budapest can be conceptualized as the common continuation of previous internal and international migration, where transnational and translocal movements are interconnected. In Chap. 9, “Patterns of Transnational Urban Drift to Latvia”, Zaiga Krišjāne, Māris Bērziņš, Elina Apsīte Beriņa, Jānis Krūmiņš and Toms Skadiņš explore the attraction of cities over more remote, sparsely populated and lagging regions. By studying residential patterns and life preferences of Latvian return migrants and arriving foreigners, they explore the effects of migrants’ transnational lifestyles. By diminishing solely economic factors, they demonstrate the importance of social and cultural motives, and family-related moves as well as the role of nostalgia. In Chap. 10, “International Mobility and Its Spatial Impacts in the Rome Metropolitan Area: An Analysis of the Last Two Decades”, Gerardo Gallo, Armando  Montanari, Barbara  Staniscia and Enrico  Tucci move the focus to the intensification of international and internal migrations and temporary mobility in the city of Rome, due to the growth rates of the resident population in the Rome Metropolitan Area, in the inner ring, and in some coastal and lake municipalities. The findings demonstrate severe changes in the real estate market, because of

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non-rigid division between housing used mainly for leisure purposes and for those whose primary need is still that of working and producing. Chapters 11 and 12 offer a very different context, given the importance devoted to the diasporic linkages conditioning not only tourism development but current human mobility in the islands of Cape Verde and Cuba, with an important history of former and present emigration. In “Diasporic Links and Tourism Development in Cape Verde. The Case of Praia”, Juan Parreño-Castellano, Claudio Moreno-Medina and Judite Medina Do Nascimento conclude that the complex migration processes of Cape Verdeans and their related flows of investment are an asset in the development of the country, through the tourism sector, but not without generating important economic and social imbalances. A similar standpoint characterizes Chap. 12, “The Contribution of International Residential Mobility to Tourism Development: Cienfuegos City, Cuba”. Manuel González-Herrera, Mercedes  RodríguezRodríguez and Cecilia  Santana-Rivero study international residential mobility towards family-owned houses (hostales). This mobility promoted by Cuban residents abroad and other foreigners has encouraged residential real-estate investment for tourism purposes in Cienfuegos city, enhancing the supply of an alternative type of accommodation in private rental houses. The fourth part of the book is entitled Migrations and Tourism in Urban Spaces: Processes of Gentrification. In this part, consolidated urban tourism destinations as Barcelona (Spain) or Reykjavik (Iceland) are analysed in light of the social and economic transformations motivated by tourism specialization. Dolores Sánchez-­ Aguilera and Jesús González-Pérez in “Geographies of Gentrification in Barcelona. Tourism as a Driver of Social Change” show how tourism has become a critical element in most modes of gentrification to which the Catalan capital has been exposed. Specifically, its historic centre, subject to the strong pressures of tourism and the housing market, emerges as an inescapable point of reference in the nexus between tourism and geographical and social mobility. In the case of Chap. 14, “Tourism Development and Housing After Iceland’s 2008 Crash”, a socio-economic perspective guides the reflection of the authors Már Wolfgang Mixa and Kristín Loftsdóttir. In this study, the economic recovery due to tourism activity after the collapse of Iceland’s banking system is presented in opposition to increased housing prices, which are causing unequal effects in the local population and affecting those who lost their livelihoods and homes or who cannot afford home ownership. In the same part, in “Gentrification, Social Activism and Contestations in Cape Town (South Africa)” (Chap. 15), Sibonakaliso Nhlabathi and Brij Maharaj address the same issue of market driven gentrification development processes as set in opposition to local interests. However, they propose that if locals mobilized their economic, social and cultural forms of capital, gentrification would not be a zero-sum game and could generate a win-win situation, ensuring local flexibility while exploiting the benefits of global integration and efficiencies. To end this part, Chap. 16, “Local Economies and Socio-spatial Segregations in the Aegean Islands: Touristic Development Versus Refugee Arrivals and Ghettoization? The Case of Lesvos Island”, offers an original perspective on the interplay between, on one hand, refugees, humanitarian and policy personnel and

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tourists and, on the other hand, the local economy. By focusing on the island of Lesvos, this chapter tries to understand the transformations in the economy of the island and its socio-spatial segregations from a critical approach. To conclude, as mentioned previously, Dieter K. Müller summarizes the main findings of the book in “Tourism and Lifestyle-Led Mobilities” (Chap. 17). Bringing together the main theoretical contributions of the volume, such as global processes of multi-residence and local impacts, transnationalism, postcolonialism, and return and circular migrations, as well as transnational gentrification and urban tourism, the chapter proposes future direction for research on this topic. Using Müller’s own words: “it is acknowledged that residential mobilities and multiple dwelling are not only signified by stretching over temporal and geographical scales; instead, even regarding motivations and space-time use, lifestyle mobilities contest traditional ideas of migration and tourism”. It is to this endeavour that we hope this volume will contribute. Department of Geography University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Las Palmas, Spain Geography and Spatial planning, Universidade de Lisboa Lisboa, Portugal  Department of Geography University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Las Palmas, Spain

Josefina Domínguez-Mujica

Jennifer McGarrigle

Juan M. Parreño-Castellano

Contents

Part I Theoretical Approaches 1 A Global Sociology on Lifestyle Migrations������������������������������������������    3 Matthew Hayes 2 Overseas Investment and the Real Estate Market: Global and Local Frictions and the Great Acceleration����������������������   19 Geoffrey DeVerteuil Part II Global Processes of Multi-residence and Local Impacts 3 The Sea as a Lifestyle: (Im)mobilities, Liminality, and Life Course Transitions Among Permanently Settled Sailors in the Azores (Portugal) ������������������������������������������������   33 Dora Sampaio 4 The Reconfiguration of International Residential Mobility Flows in Post-crisis Spain: The Case of Costa Blanca-Alicante��������������������������������������������������������   51 Raquel Huete and Alejandro Mantecón 5 Global Mobility and Migration in the Cities of the Patagonian Andes: Emerging Diversity��������������������������������������   67 Susana M. Sassone and Myriam S. González 6 International Mobility: An Approach to the Imaginaries of Residential Tourism from the Northern and South-Eastern Borders of Mexico��������������������������������������������������   87 Nora L. Bringas-Rábago, Ana P. Sosa-Ferreira, and Maribel Osorio-García 7 The Locational Choice of Urban Lifestyle Migrants in Lisbon: Beyond Tourism Imaginaries������������������������������������������������  105 Jennifer McGarrigle xi

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Part III Transnationalism, Return and Circular Migrations 8 Residential Mobility of Hungarian Nationals and Foreign Citizens: The Case Study of Budapest������������������������������  127 Sándor Illés 9 Patterns of Transnational Urban Drift to Latvia����������������������������������  145 Zaiga Krišjāne, Māris Bērziņš, Elina Apsīte Beriņa, Jānis Krūmiņš, and Toms Skadiņš 10 International Mobility and Its Spatial Impacts in the Rome Metropolitan Area: An Analysis of the Last Two Decades��������������������������������������������������������������������������  163 Gerardo Gallo, Armando Montanari, Barbara Staniscia, and Enrico Tucci 11 Diasporic Links and Tourism Development in Cape Verde. The Case of Praia ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  191 Juan M. Parreño-Castellano, Claudio Moreno-Medina, and Judite Medina Do Nascimento 12 The Contribution of International Residential Mobility to Tourism Development: Cienfuegos City, Cuba ��������������������������������  215 Manuel R. González-Herrera, Mercedes Á. Rodríguez-Rodríguez, and Cecilia Santana-Rivero Part IV Migrations and Tourism in Urban Spaces: Processes of Gentrification 13 Geographies of Gentrification in Barcelona. Tourism as a Driver of Social Change����������������������������������������������������  243 Dolores Sánchez-Aguilera and Jesús M. González-Pérez 14 Tourism Development and Housing After Iceland’s 2008 Crash��������  269 Már Wolfgang Mixa and Kristín Loftsdóttir 15 Gentrification, Social Activism and Contestations in Cape Town (South Africa)������������������������������������������������������������������  291 Sibonakaliso S. Nhlabathi and Brij Maharaj 16 Local Economies and Socio-spatial Segregations in the Aegean Islands: Touristic Development Versus Refugee Arrivals and Ghettoization? The Case of Lesvos Island��������  311 Christy (Chryssanthi) Petropoulou 17 Tourism and Lifestyle-Led Mobilities����������������������������������������������������  339 Dieter K. Müller

Part I

Theoretical Approaches

Chapter 1

A Global Sociology on Lifestyle Migrations Matthew Hayes

1.1  Introduction This chapter discusses lifestyle migration from the vantage point of a global sociology of migration—that is, a sociology that views migration not from the vantage point of nation-states, but of transnational ties and global networks (Castles, 2007). Lifestyle migration has long engaged with migration approaches that have sought to transcend “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2003) in order to reflect how migrants themselves view their lives between spaces, and through the experience of migration itself (for instance O’Reilly, 2000, 2017). It is a privileged site for empirical study of global migration, perhaps in part because its research object (e.g., its ‘subjects’ or ‘participants’) so often see themselves as living outside the nation-state itself, as “global citizens,” moving easily between national units and belonging, perhaps, to nowhere in particular. This chapter reflects on the linkages between global inequalities and lifestyle migration, especially since migrants within this scholarship so often move from core regions of global capitalist accumulation towards former colonies, or more peripheral spaces, zoned for leisure. Lifestyle migrants often reflect on their lifestyles as auto-poetic products of their own daring and willingness to seize opportunities others might not. They are individualistic life projects (Korpela, 2014; Oliver, 2007). Yet, they remain embedded in social relations of inequality inherited from complex histories that shape the lived experiences of migrants, as well as longer-term residents of receiving communities (Hayes, 2018a). In what follows, I argue that lifestyle migration is not a distinct category, separate from other forms of migration, but rather an epistemological frame for migration scholarship writ large, which has important contributions to make both to the M. Hayes (*) Department of Sociology, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_1

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expert fields migration studies and global sociology, as well as to public discussion and debate about the type of global society currently coming into being. Lifestyle migration scholarship developed in relation to ethnographic studies of relatively privileged migrations (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009; Croucher, 2009; Knowles & Harper, 2009; Korpela, 2009; O’Reilly, 2000). The relatively light regulation of this type of migration is reflected in its key objects and concerns—privilege, identity, lifestyle—which also speak to broader structural issues, grounded in theoretically rich traditions (Benson & Osbaldiston, 2014; O’Reilly, 2014). When lifestyle migration is added to a global frame of migration, what the experiences of relatively privileged migrants enable us to see are the historical social relations that govern transnational movement at a global scale. Contemporary transnational mobility remains deeply embedded in the “global designs” (Mignolo, 2000) of world-forming commercial networks of surplus accumulation, networks organized and protected by core nation-states, but which also escape their bounds. Just as labour migration is related to global designs and transformations of production, trade and surplus accumulation (Castles, 2010), so too are leisure migrations, including tourism, which reflect the subjective experiences of social classes who have benefited from unequal global accumulations and some of their permutations. The exclusion of relatively privileged migrants from our epistemological frames of migration scholarship distort the global picture of migration, and what it is about. This chapter is an attempt to show what becomes visible when lifestyle migration is inserted within a global sociology of migration scholarship. The paper proceeds in three parts. The first section discusses how lifestyle migration emerged around a particular type of migration, one of relatively privileged migrants. This shaped the main objects and concepts developed within this field. Thereafter, a second section discusses how global inequalities and how they are interpreted are increasingly important for a growing number of scholars of this field, in part no doubt due to the political importance that migration has taken over the last decade or more. Lifestyle migration offers a useful empirical site for exploring global inequalities, and I attend in this section to some key structural concepts that lifestyle migration scholarship “fills out” through ethnographic research, focusing on global mobility regimes and on coloniality. Finally, a concluding section reflects on contributions lifestyle migration makes beyond the academy. Not only does this scholarship potentially correct warped views of global migration, but it also speaks to us of how global inequalities are currently understood and interpreted, and importantly, how lifestyle migrants act on them. I suggest ways in which this scholarship may continue to develop in relation to outstanding research questions in a critical, public sociology.

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1.2  What Is the “Lifestyle” of Lifestyle Migration? Scholarship on lifestyle migration grew up around studies of relatively affluent, privileged middle-class people, relocating across borders mostly to other countries within Europe (O’Reilly, 2000; Benson & O’Reilly, 2009; Benson, 2011). As Benson and O’Reilly (2016) point out, lifestyle migration was developed through interpretivist ethnographies, which attended to the self-definitions and narratives of migrants themselves—many of whom didn’t consider themselves migrants at all (see also Knowles & Harper 2009). It was an approach that attempted to understand the way that cultural codes (Hayes & Carlson 2018) and “social imaginaries” (O’Reilly, 2014) shaped the desire to migrate and the practices of being a migrant, such that migration was seen less as a “one-off” event, and more as an ongoing process. Lifestyle migration, therefore, is less a category of a separate type of migration than it is a way of accounting for the subjective aspects of migration—subjective aspects that nonetheless also shape material and social relations, often in unequal and uneven ways (Benson, 2015; Benson & Osbaldiston, 2014: 11–12; Spalding, 2013). As Benson and O’Reilly (2016: 25) pointed out, lifestyle migration is more of “a lens rather than a box.” It is a lens that explores how people imagine life in other places and cultures, but also how they perform or “operationalize” (Knowles & Harper, 2009: 11) the motivations for migration upon arrival. Perhaps the experiences of relatively privileged migrants offer themselves more easily to ethnographic studies that prod the self-understanding of migrants powerful enough to define the meanings of their migrations for themselves, relatively unencumbered by nation-state regulations or by exclusionary politics of receiving communities (which is also not to say that such exclusionary politics is always absent). These are migrants who are often very willing to speak about their migration experiences, their idealizations of place, and their construction of new lives for themselves, facilitating ethnographic contact, especially with researchers who often also share many of their cultural referents. The construction of a new way of life in idealized foreign spaces appears unchecked by serious structural impediments to their integration. This is not to say that they always succeed, or that their integration projects—where these exist—are not sometimes frustrated (Benson & O’Reilly, 2016; Lawson, 2017). Yet, their ability to carry out imaginings of another way of living in more meaningful spaces or cultures often reflects relative material privilege in relation to receiving communities, where incomes are often lower (see Benson, 2013, 2015; Croucher, 2009). These material differences are the source of distinctions between categories that concepts such as “lifestyle” migration can serve to perpetuate. Yet, rather than building discrete categories, lifestyle migration scholars have most often sought to collapse them, in the name of an egalitarian politics of transnational movement. The distinction between different types of migration, and a focus on “lifestyle migration” which has emerged at the margins of migration scholarship is to some degree a reflection of material differences between the transnationalism of relatively affluent, middle class migrants (usually from higher-income countries) and that of

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migrants seeking economic, social and political security through relocation to those countries. Lifestyle migration focuses on the consumption-driven, voluntary mobilities of privileged groups, rather than on the “production and involuntary nature of many migrations” (Benson & Osbaldiston, 2014: 3). In this respect, lifestyle migration has often focused on the experiences of “white migrants” (Lundström, 2017), potentially perpetuating distinctions between categories of migration, rather than focusing on how migration is regulated and organized differently by powerful nation-states. Certainly, the modifier “lifestyle” may reproduce the political work of these states, who have shaped migration research around their interests (see also Castles, 2007; Kunz, 2016). But use of the modifier is also justified, in that there are real material and symbolic differences between different groups who meet the definition of “migrant.” Lifestyle migration research has focused on the experiences of migrants whose “global social position”1 enables them to define their migration on terms of their own choosing, independently of national states and the exclusionary logics of nationalist movements who would assign other, hegemonic meanings to their settlement. The focus, therefore, on what Benson (2012) calls “cultural imaginings” –that is, the idealizations of transnational mobility to more meaningful places– appears more self-evident and is justified because it is so prominent in the way that migrants themselves talk about their migrations. Lifestyle migration can look at the cultural imaginings of any migrant group, but it has developed as an epistemological lens primarily amongst groups who experience greater agency and autonomy in relation to borders and receiving communities, in large part because their racialization as white or European signifies wealth and modernity, and because they enjoy access to greater resources. These inequalities are also the focus of a great deal of lifestyle migration scholarship. White migrants must negotiate new meanings for their whiteness, and the apparent meanings (their own as well as those of others) attached to their origins (Fechter, 2005; Lan, 2011; Lehmann, 2014; Kordel & Pohle, 2018; Walsh, 2010). As Benson and O’Reilly (2018) point out, the stories that the field has attended to contain within them ‘colonial traces,’ which are also the object of meaning making for the people who perceive them. This is an important contribution to migration scholarship as a whole. Lifestyle migration is an empirical site for observing how “global transformations” (Castles, 2010) also influence the material practices and moral dispositions of relatively privileged migrants. These practices are in dialogue with longer histories inherited from a colonial world order—that is, an order in which claims to property were deliberately tied to race. In the colonial context, ownership regimes as well as stewardship of private property itself were placed

1  For lack of a better concept, I wish to extend the notion Bourdieu developed in terms of a social space to the global level, by bringing into the frame a global history of unequal distribution of the rewards (material, symbolic) of collectively produced surpluses. Though the working classes of postwar France occupied low status and economic positions in the French social field, this latter was configured in relation to French colonies, and the ability of French consumers to acquire objects that were produced with the labour power of low-paid, racialized workers.

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under the purview of white, Europeans, while non-whites were often deliberately excluded from it (Abu-Lughod, 1980; Bhandar, 2018). These colonial hierarchies also shape the material practices of lifestyle migrants, even as global inequalities continue to be reconfigured through the emergence of new regions of global accumulation. Material practices include the material lifestyles of relatively well-off global classes, who are able to relocate to lower cost locations, taking with them citizenship rights and accumulated capital, where it is able to purchase greater quantities of labour power than in other areas of the world system. These rights are also secured by international institutions, which powerful nation-states shaped, often in the interests of high-income networks of accumulation. The accumulation of wealth for some exists in dynamic relation to opportunities to exploit the productive labour of others—a salient theme in the history of labour migrations. Similarly, the material lifestyles of North American migrants in Costa Rica, for instance, draw attention to leisure practices, such as frequent eating out, that exist in dynamic relation to other practices, such as serving food, that imply global social relations of power and subordination. These material practices are also the object of everyday scrutiny on the part of lifestyle migrants whose geographical mobility is paralleled by social mobility, upward in social class systems. As Benson (2013) points out with respect to North Americans in Panama, lifestyle migrants adjust to local class hierarchies, and the moral dispositions that are imposed on them if they wish to “integrate” and be accepted by local middle and upper middle classes, with whom they may share certain forms of privileged capital, including the symbolic capital of whiteness to the extent that it represents modernity, wealth, and an allegedly more efficient work ethic. These are also part of the social imaginings of lifestyle migrants, and they reference moral dispositions that lifestyle migrants from Global North to Global South develop in the process of migration. These imaginings help make sense of the global structural inequalities migrants face every day, and which they may have inherited from histories that individuals rarely see and for which they are scarcely responsible for creating.

1.3  Situating the Self in Global Social Space While many scholars of lifestyle migration have focused on the self-understanding of migrants in territories of the Global North, I attend here primarily to the understandings and interpretive frames of migrants from Global North to Global South, which as noted in the last section, open interesting empirical windows for studying global inequalities and their effects. This section explores some structural concepts that draw attention to global inequalities, and that lifestyle migration scholarship can build around in a fuller engagement with a global sociology of migration.

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1.3.1  Transnationalism Interpretivist sociologies in lifestyle migration attend to structural forces that stratify global society, especially in scholarship on transnational whiteness (Lehmann, 2014; Lundström, 2014), and in work on the concept of privilege (Benson, 2013; Croucher, 2012). In this respect, lifestyle migration is drawing attention to a sociology of global inequality, which has garnered attention from scholars of world-­ systems theory (Boatca, 2015, 2016) as well as transnational approaches to global migrations (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004; Weiß, 2005). Lifestyle migration helps fill a gap in global sociology by attending to migrations from global social positions that are otherwise under-studied in other branches of transnational sociology. As transnational approaches to migration point out, social fields are not merely national, and also not static. Lifestyle migration draws attention to areas where quantitatively and qualitatively different types of social fields come into being. While the concept of transnational fields focused on connections between national fields, we may also be seeing the emergence of an increasingly global social space—that is, a qualitative transformation of transnational networks due to their quantitative multiplication and densification. A global social space is organized by nation-state jurisdiction (as noted below), but it captures the subjective experiences of living beyond the state, in which globally shared references and experiences connect people in specific local places that also organize and represent the lifestyles and tastes of “frequent flyer classes” (Calhoun, 2002). While Bourdieusian field theory conceptualizes the field as a national space of social positions, it is often a clunky apparatus for conceptualizing global inequalities (Weiß, 2005, 2017). National social space has a history of integration that is at once economic and cultural, under the mediation of powerful institutions, most especially the nation-state. At the global scale, social space may initially appear more as an amalgam or interaction between these national social fields, yet it also contains transnational flows that change the qualities of these national fields. As the concept of “cosmopolitization” (Beck, 2011) suggests, we are living through a moment in history in which these national fields are being transformed, not only by economic globalization but also by cultural contact and increased mobility. This transformation in global culture is noted by transnational scholars of other types of migration (Glick Schiller & Irving, 2015), who attend to the subjective interpretations of “cosmopolitanism from below” (Kurasawa, 2004). Time-space compression (Harvey, 1989) increasingly inflects national fields with something qualitatively different than merely new forms of cosmopolitan cultural capital or the symbolic and economic benefits of transnational networks and connections. It brings individuals into a global space of positions in which opportunities and lifestyles vary in patterns that are both observable across national spaces, and that are attributable to shared global processes and interconnections. This global social space is, like Bourdieu’s field theory, also a field of forces, of individuals held together and related to one another by forces that differentiate and unequally distribute opportunities for movement of wealth and political rights, as well as

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opportunities to acquire new experiences and dispositions that reflect contact with cultural difference.

1.3.2  Regimes of Mobility Geographic movement is generative of capital in a global social field. But how these movements are regulated remains the purview of nation-states, which are not all equal to one another. The economic inequalities linking a global division of labour are, thus, central to global mobility rights, as well as to the different subjective understandings different types of migrants have pertaining to their mobility. One of the primary gravitational forces of a global social field is what Glick Schiller and Salazar (2013) call “regimes of mobility”, that is, the pattern by which nation states regulate the movement of people across borders. The mobility of citizens of some states are facilitated by border regimes, such as the Schengen border area in Europe, designed to promote inter-EU mobility. Similarly, The US Customs and Border Protection Agency’s Trusted Traveler program facilitates rapid entry and pre-­ inspection for international travelers to the United States. At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security is building a wall to prevent informal workers from Latin America from reaching higher-income labour markets in the United States, where their labour is nonetheless in demand. At this moment in history, the patterns of transnational movement are influenced by territorial demand for specific types of skilled and unskilled labour power Aihwa Ong (2006) points out, the global division of labour is striated by ‘latitudes’ composed of skills that are in greater or lesser demand, and which therefore reward certain types of migrant with greater freedom of movement. Certainly, unskilled workers also move across borders, as in the case of participants in the Canadian Temporary Foreign Workers program (see Horgan & Liinimaa, 2017), but their ability to access rights across borders is circumscribed. Freedom to move across borders and claim citizenship rights, however, is not merely tied to demand for rare skills or educational capital. As Manuela Boatcă (2016) points out, inclusion into citizenship depends on holding the right passport, and several jurisdictions will sell rights to passports to high income foreigners, often through investment schemes that benefit the passport-emitting jurisdiction. Indeed, passports are one of the key legal objects of global regimes of mobility, regulating passage between latitudes and spaces. The accumulation of wealth in the weaker nation-states of the Global South gives access to citizenship and mobility rights commensurate with ‘higher latitudes.’ The unequal experience of mobility is one of the taken-for-granted material practices that shape the interpretations of North-South migrants. Their mobility rights are much broader owing to the higher incomes of their national economic space. Often, lifestyle migrants inherit citizenship rights, but also educational capital that is concentrated in high-income national spaces, rich in institutions that organize the transmission of educational capitals essential to entry into the higher latitudes of the global division of labour. Migrants from high-income countries are, therefore, seen

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as an asset to the countries that attract them—a means of redistributing economic and cultural capital, a form of redistribution often part of the self-understanding of North-South migrants themselves. Moreover, the leisure- and consumption-oriented migrations of lifestyle migrants from the Global North to the Global South are considered as less likely to compete for local employment, or become a drain on public resources, such as health care, since their wealthier nation states can provide better for them at home. There is, within contemporary institutions governing mobility, an assumption that citizens of the Global North remain tethered to their territories of origin, despite lifestyles that are increasingly more vulnerable and precarious as a result of austerity and welfare state retrenchment (and which may in the near future change the way regimes of mobility are organized in relation to latitudes of the global division of labour). Citizens of the core capitalist countries of the Global North experience light regulation in their transnational relocations to lower income spaces (Knowles & Harper, 2009), and often understand their movements in relation to categories other than migration, such as tourism or expatriation (Kunz, 2016). These self-­ understandings also mirror border controls and regulations of migration, which prevent the movement of (especially racialized) citizens of less wealthy nation states towards core countries of global accumulation. These patterns, of course, also reproduce the coloniality of rights of movement, since the citizenship rights of colonized peoples were restricted in expanding European empires from the 16th to the 20th centuries. European colonial regimes produced racialized regimes of citizenship, providing differentiated rights to different ethnic groups in relation to their apparent assimilability to European values, and relegating others—especially ethnicities deemed non-white and un-European (Arab Muslims in the French colonies, for instance, see Katz, 2018)—to a lesser grade of humanity, with far fewer citizenship, labour, or mobility rights than white Europeans. While these colonial regimes of citizenship may seem distant to some, it is worth recalling the racial patterns of labour in contemporary “multicultural” states, like Canada, remain hierarchical along racial and citizenship lines. As Horgan and Liinimaa (2017) point out, the Canadian government organizes a labour regime permitting low-skill migrants from Jamaica and Mexico to perform essential agricultural labour on private Canadian farms, but extends no citizenship or social rights to them, such as employment insurance or public pensions, to which they nonetheless must contribute. These workers essentially lack citizenship rights in transnational contexts, while Canadian tourists in Mexico may expect to be treated better, or to have better access to social services, security, and judicial institutions than local Mexicans due to their citizenship of a ‘First World’ state.

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1.3.3  Coloniality of Power The pattern of mobility rights referred to above illustrates the coloniality of power at the heart of the modern world system. As Aníbal Quijano points out (2000a), the pattern of rights and material privileges in the global system intersects racial formations, which organize human populations and labour exploitation on the basis of racial categories. The unequal global economy we currently live in may appear quite distant from colonial times, and no doubt, there have been important modifications to it, not least as a result of the emergence of new centres of global accumulation in East Asia. The emergence of China as a global power is producing new global ethnic and racial hierarchies, built on Chinese and East Asian histories of somatic differentiation to be sure, but ones also constructed in deep dialogue with European colonial racial categories (Dikötter, 2017). The global control of labour power, therefore, can be said to reflect coloniality in the sense that supposedly biological differences are used to explain differences in economic development. While racial formations (Omi & Winant, 1994) have changed since 1945, and especially since formal political decolonization and the American civil rights movement, the pattern of racial hierarchies remains, producing spaces and material conditions of labour and leisure that are often highly segregated along racial lines. This is most clearly visible, for instance, in the ability of American and European capitalists to command the world’s labour power on terms favourable to ensuring high levels of consumption and political stability in the core capitalist countries. The availability of inexpensive textiles, consumer non-durable goods, and even plentiful and inexpensive food for the labouring classes of the core capitalist states is a reflection of an unequal global division of labour that is highly beneficial to the former imperial heartlands of global accumulation, and especially to its elite social classes. For several generations, global elites in core states have benefitted from domestic political stability maintained by an organized redistribution towards working classes of the spoils of an imperial, global economy. The highly unequal division of global surpluses distinguish working lives in core capitalist countries from those in the periphery, where labour remained outside the redistributive mechanisms of welfare states. Access to cheap credit for mortgage lending enabled many North American, North European and Japanese workers to live far beyond the lifestyles of workers in other territories, and even to acquire property wealth (acquisitions dependent, however, on maintaining an imperial economic relations with the rest of the world).2 It also enabled those workers to devote themselves to “lifestyles” that privilege the accumulation of consumer items that served as outward signs of successful living and social advancement.

2  It is also important to note how racial hierarchies affected the redistribution of surpluses within core regions of the global economy. As only one example, in the United States, mortgage lending practices such as “red-lining” discriminated against African Americans and prevented the accumulation of wealth for many black workers (see Gotham, 2002).

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From the vantage point of a global field theory, the unequal distribution of global surpluses produces a “vertical mosaic” of unequally integrated groups. U.S. financial hegemony over the world system of trade, and the seignorage rights of the American state are the institutional gravitational forces that held the global social field together—institutions that were the product of North European and North American colonialism, and the narrow control of these countries’ industrial elites over a large, global workforce (Arrighi, 2010).3 While substantially modified from the settler colonialism of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the ability of citizens of core nation-states to command labour power constitutes a powerful extension of the late Victorian global project of European technological modernization. Eurocentric notions of modernization and modernity (for a critique see Santos, 2014; Quijano, 2000b) reorder global space as well as social space, and impose conditions (of living and working) on non-white workers in lower-income, former colonized countries across the globe. In many respects, we are not living in a postcolonial moment, but in a moment of coloniality, representative of the anti-colonial and anti-imperial countermovement, which crystalized in new global institutions (the G7, the WTO, the Washington Consensus of the IMF, World Bank and US Treasury, itself largely controlled by New York-based global investment banks) between the 1970s and the 1990s (Prashad, 2007). The social structural transformations of the global economy influence global hierarchies and are observable in the everyday lives of transnational migrants, regardless of points of origin and destination. This is perhaps most clear in relation to the North-South migrations studied by lifestyle migration scholars. As several studies have pointed out, North European and North American migrants experience considerable structural advantages from their global social position. They have access to higher-incomes on average. Moreover, while not all North-South migrants are white, the racialized whiteness of many North Europeans and North Americans grant them access to symbolic privileges that most other migrants from the Global South do not enjoy. However, North-­ South migration is also tied up with global economic transformations. The globalization of real estate markets since the 1990s has facilitated North-South property investment and development of lifestyle communities in developing countries. Moreover, the economic crises of 1987, 1997–98, 2000–2001, 2008 and now 2020 has crippled the pension savings of many middle-class members of the baby boomer generation in North America, Japan and Northern Europe, and deprived younger generations of stable employment. The result has been an apparent increase in North-South migrations undertaken for economic reasons (Bender et al., 2018; Hayes, 2015; Lardiés, 2011; Toyota & Thang, 2017).

3  Whether this continues beyond 2020 is very much up in the air in light of the ongoing coronavirus emergency in much of the world at time of writing.

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1.3.4  Interpreting Global Dispositions The ‘downshifting’ (Hoey, 2009) of these migrants effectively constitutes a sudden change in class position, which is the source of reflection and interpretation. Receiving communities perceive lifestyle migrants from the Global North as relatively wealthy, which is a source of ambivalence for many, even when they identify with the economic privileges of moving to a lower-income country (see Hayes, 2018b). As Michaela Benson (2013) points out, lifestyle migrants’ experiences in former colonies are influenced by access to new class- and race-based privileges or advantages that they interpret and in some ways, must digest. “Digestion” takes various forms which also structure global social space. Benson describes how some North Americans in Panama initially try to compensate for their economic advantages by over-paying local service workers. Yet, they eventually become accustomed to local norms in regards to treatment of employees and acquiesce in order to fit in better with local upper classes. My own work in Ecuador demonstrates a similar process, in which globally privileged social classes police one another’s interpretations of privilege, and try to enforce adherence to local price levels as a sign of cultural respect (Hayes, 2018b). In other cases, lifestyle migrants seek to volunteer and “give back,” a form of moral labour (Fechter, 2016) which is also shaped by material inequalities. In other cases, however, these inequalities are the object of active work of disregard (Stoler, 2009). Yes, as one French man told me in Morocco, he benefits from retiring to a low-­ income country, whose economy was structured largely to serve France. “But what am I supposed to do about that?” This question and how lifestyle migrants attempt to answer it is worthy of additional research because it helps elucidate how different dispositions and moral codes help shape global inequalities, just as they are also produced by them. Material inequalities between lifestyle migrants and the communities they go to live in are embodied and inherited social structures. These embodied and inherited structures shape our moral and affective dispositions towards the signs of material differences at global scale. For instance, as I point out in my work on Cuenca, Ecuador (Hayes, 2018a), North American idealizations of Ecuadorian urban space, and of apparently tight Ecuadorian families are reactions to North American modernity. They are nostalgic longings for apparently more authentic bonds which modernization disrupt. These emotions are critiques of modernity, but also exist in relation to global relations of domination and subordination, since the process of modernization relies on globally accumulated surpluses that are concentrated in (often) urban spaces in core countries. The Berlin Hauptbahnhof subjectively feels like the future (at least it did to me) because it represents the historical concentration of wealth and technical knowledge that was accumulated in relation to other spaces, where the funds for modernization and material upgrading were lacking. The wealth of Berlin exists in historical relation to its East European hinterland, from whence its workforce and many of its raw materials came.

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Similarly, the financialization of housing in the Global North (Aalbers, 2008), which has so reshaped peoples’ lives as well as the suburban landscapes of cities in Europe, Canada and the United States since the shift to neoliberalism, are a product of the way the 1982 debt crisis forced banks in Latin America, Africa and South Asia to repay loans to the Global North, lubricating northern banks and priming them for new forms of high-leverage finance. Subjective interpretations of the material consequences of global power relations often leave out complex histories for which sociological cartographies and theoretical apparatuses are required (for a critique of such sociologies, see Boltanski, 2011: 18–23). While global justice movements have begun to shape these interpretations in relation to historical social relations of exploitation, they are also often resisted by lifestyle migrants who sometimes prefer to understand their travel and adventure in auto-poetic terms, as a libertarian creation of the self. Lifestyle migrants often come from countries at the centre of colonial economic integration. These countries are not all equal, and contain within them the consequences of their own colonial histories. These histories are part of a shared global heritage, which contextualize individual identities, projects and ways of seeing. How lifestyle migrants and others make sense of their global political, economic, and environmental inheritance is consequential to what will be bequeathed to others. Rather than being part of a distant past, sociology can help show how the consequences of the coloniality of power remain a live and urgent political and moral problem. The everyday lives of North-South lifestyle migrants are important places to study how these problems are dealt with (or not dealt with) by members of an emerging, global civil society.

1.4  Conclusion: Colonial Remainders in Lifestyle Migration Lifestyle migration scholars have highlighted the importance of individualism and projects of the self, and have attended to the ways that representations of place effect material social relations in those places. Can it also be part of a reflexive, public sociology that would shine a light on what Benson and O’Reilly (2018) call the “colonial traces” in our collective present? Its interpretivist approach to migration, and its focus on migrants from the Global North help address the cultural frames and boundary work underpinning much global inequality. These migrations become an empirical site for studying colonial dispositions, and what happens to them when relatively privileged people are confronted with new material contexts through North-South migration. Perhaps critical reflection on how migration is experienced and regulated differently for different groups might broaden public interest in how our global society can be organized differently, on the basis of greater solidarity and a desire to share resources and citizenship rights more broadly. Rigorous description, however, may not lead to normative solidarity. Lifestyle migration need not merely describe global inequalities. Its interpretivist focus can also attend to the justification’s lifestyle migrants make in defence of their relative

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privilege and global position. These justifications imply different forms of emotional and moral labour. As Anja Weiß (2017) points out, normative discourses of inequality often fall between kind-hearted but paternalistic charity and self-­ interested disregard. These dispositions reflect a specific stage of global integration, one in which bonds of solidarity remain relatively weak, and institutions appear unable to address structural imbalances. As global inequalities change and transnational mobility shifts in relation to new economic dynamics—after the coronavirus epidemic, who knows, perhaps as part of ageing strategies that attempt to avoid precarity and lost pension savings (Bender et al., 2018)—it cannot be assumed that all lifestyle migrations are merely “neocolonial.” In many cases, new forms of North-South “precarity migration” (Bender et al., 2018, see also Botterill, 2017; Toyota & Thang, 2017) suggest new strategies for coping with the effects of a maturing neoliberal society, which privileges youthfulness, competitiveness and productivity above values that are also often important to people in core capitalist countries, such as the wisdom of life experience acquired through ageing, care for others, and solidarity. The imaginary that these values might exist in former colonial countries speaks to the colonial traces of social imaginings, but they also speak to real social structural changes that are transforming global hierarchies. North-South lifestyle migrations may occur in post-colonial settings, and as numerous scholars have pointed out, may also reproduce elements of the colonial encounter, but they are also more often different in ways that suggest how global hierarchies are shifting, and which a global sociology of migration that includes lifestyle migration might help to capture. By drawing attention to the self-­ understanding of migrants’ sense of global social mobility, privilege and inequality, lifestyle migration scholars can contribute to understanding how these shifts interact with the global political narratives of inclusion and exclusion. In the wake of the current Coronavirus pandemic, it is quite possible these narratives will participate in constructing new transnational and global hierarchies.

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Hayes, M., & Carlson, J. (2018). Good guests and obnoxious gringos: Cosmopolitan ideals among north American migrants to Cuenca, Ecuador. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 6(1), 189–211. Hoey, B. (2009). Pursuing the good life: American narratives of travel and a search for refuge. In M. Benson & K. O’Reilly (Eds.), Lifestyle migration: Expectations, aspirations and experiences (pp. 31–50). Ashgate. Horgan, M., & Liinimaa, S. (2017). The social quarantining of migrant labour: Everyday effects of temporary foreign worker regulation in Canada. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43(5), 713–730. Katz, E.  B. (2018). An Imperial entanglement: Anti-semitism, islamophobia, and colonialism. American Historical Review, 123(4), 1190–1209. Knowles, C., & Harper, D. (2009). Hong Kong: Migrant lives, landscapes, and journeys. University of Chicago Press. Kordel, S., & Pohle, P. (2018). International lifestyle migration to the Andes of Ecuador: How migrants from the USA perform privilege, import rurality and evaluate their impact on local community. Sociologia Ruralis, 58(1), 126–146. Korpela, M. (2009). When a trip to adulthood become a lifestyle: Western lifestyle migrants in Varanasi, India. In M. Benson & K. O’Reilly (Eds.), Lifestyle migration: Expectations, aspirations and experiences (pp. 15–30). Ashgate. Korpela, M. (2014). Lifestyle of freedom? Individualism and lifestyle migration. In Understanding lifestyle migration: Theoretical approaches to migration and the quest for a better way of life (pp. 27–46). Palgrave Macmillan. Kunz, S. (2016). Privileged Mobilities: Locating the expatriate in migration scholarship. Geography Compass, 10(3), 89–101. Kurasawa, F. (2004). A cosmopolitanism from below: Alternative globalization and the creation of a solidarity without bounds. European Journal of Sociology/Archives européennes de sociologie, 45(2), 233–255. Lan, P.-C. (2011). White privilege, language capital and cultural ghettoisation: Western high-­ skilled migrants in Taiwan. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37(10), 1669–1693. Lardiés Bosque, R. (2011). A pocos kilómetros, pero en otro país. El retiro de jubilado estadounidenses en Baja California, México. Geographical, 59-60, 183–197. Lawson, M. (2017). Narrative positioning and ‘integration’in lifestyle migration: British migrants in Ariège, France. Language and Intercultural Communication, 17(1), 58–75. Lehmann, A. (2014). Transnational lives in China: Expatriates in a Globalizing City. Palgrave Macmillan. Levitt, P., & Glick Schiller, N. (2004). Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society. International Migration Review, 38(3), 1002–1039. Lundström, C. (2014). White migrations: Gender, whiteness and privilege in transnational migration. Palgrave Macmillan. Lundström, C. (2017). The white side of migration: Reflections on race, citizenship and belonging in Sweden. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.1515/njmr-­2017-­0014 Mignolo, W. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton University Press. O’Reilly, K. (2000). The British on the Costa del Sol: Transnational identities and local communities. Routledge. O’Reilly, K. (2014). The role of the social imaginary in lifestyle migration: Employing the ontology of practice theory. In M. Benson & N. Osbaldiston (Eds.), Understanding lifestyle migration: Theoretical approaches to migration and the quest for a better way of life (pp. 211–234). Palgrave Macmillan. O’Reilly, K. (2017). The British on the Costa del Sol twenty years on: A story of liquids and sediments. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 7(3), 139–147.

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Oliver, C. (2007). Imagined comunitas: Older migrants and aspirational mobility. In V.  Amit (Ed.), Going first class? New approaches to privileged travel and movement (pp. 126–143). Berghahn Books. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1994). Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (2nd ed.). Routledge. Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Duke University Press. Prashad, V. (2007). The darker nations: A People’s history of the third world. The New Press. Quijano, A. (2000a). Coloniality of power and eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology, 15(2), 215–232. Quijano, A. (2000b). Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina. In E. Lander (Ed.), Colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales (pp. 201–246). CLACSO-UNESCO. Santos, B. (2014). Epistemologies of the south: Justice against Epistemicide. Routledge. Spalding, A. (2013). Lifestyle migration to Bocas del Toro, Panama: Exploring migration strategies and introducing local implications of the search for paradise. International Review of Social Research, 3, 67–86. Stoler, A. (2009). Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton University Press. Toyota, M., & Thang, L.  L. (2017). Transnational retirement mobility as processes of identity negotiation: The case of Japanese in Southeast Asia. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 24(5), 557–572. Walsh, K. (2010). Negotiating migrant status in the emerging Global City: Britons in Dubai. Encounters, 2, 235–255. Weiß, A. (2005). The Transnationalization of social inequality: Conceptualizing social positions on a world scale. Current Sociology, 53(4), 707–728. Weiß, A. (2017). Soziologie Globaler Ungleichheiten. Suhrkamp Verlag. Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2003). Methodological nationalism, the social sciences, and the study of migration: An essay in historical epistemology. International Migration Review, 37(3), 576–610.

Chapter 2

Overseas Investment and the Real Estate Market: Global and Local Frictions and the Great Acceleration Geoffrey DeVerteuil

2.1  Introduction: Global Real Estate in the Post-2008 World The 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing global recession represented a pivotal moment for the global real estate market, which had hitherto enjoyed a massive mid-decade boom. While this global recession was largely real-estate driven, particularly in countries such as Ireland, Spain and the United States, it also sowed the seeds for a more thoroughly globalized real-estate market, in which the very precarity generated by the financial crisis spurred the increasingly aggressive seeking of safe-haven investments in so-called ‘safe cities’ (Ley, 2010; DeVerteuil & Manley, 2017). These safe cities were, at least at the beginning, very much at the upper echelons of the global city hierarchy – places such as London, New York, Paris and Hong Kong – and represented a clear consolidation of pre-existing trends in overseas investment. But as the recession’s effects began to wane in the early 2010s, safe-haven overseas investment began to filer downwards to many other cities (e.g. Sydney, Vancouver, Auckland), as well as some of which were clearly well-­ established on the tourist map (e.g. Barcelona, Venice). This is what I mean by the ‘great acceleration’, which will form the conclusion of the chapter and its periodization. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the induced demand for safe-haven investments was very much geopolitical in nature, feeding off uncertainly in financial markets in the Southern EU (e.g. Spain, Italy, and Greece), the Middle East, Russia and China. In these ‘sending’ nations, it was initially the 1% which sought places to park their money, favouring the most expensive yet secure cities (Henry, 2012). What began as a trickle in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis became a flood by the mid-2010s, in lockstep with the global increase in the G. DeVerteuil (*) School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_2

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super-rich and the number of billionaires (Knight Frank, 2014). As DeVerteuil and Manley (2017: 1310) noted, these investments are intimately related to the notion of excess capital sloshing around the globe, seeking the guaranteed tangible returns that high-end property in established niches of global cities offer within the uncertainties of the post-2008 capitalist order. Indeed, if even a small amount of “missing” private financial wealth (Henry, 2012), estimated in 2010 between $21 and $32 trillion and protected from taxes by an entire global offshore industry, were spent on overseas real estate, it would have enormous impacts on particular cities, neighbourhoods and urban development. This quote suggests a key focus for the chapter – the localized impacts of a more thoroughly globalized real estate market. This runs in parallel with the emerging literature on the super-rich and overseas investment (e.g. Pow, 2011; Henry, 2012; Heywood, 2012; Paris, 2013; Hay, 2013; Dorling, 2014), which has also made some allusions to the overlap with other kinds of international residential mobilities, including investor migration programmes, amenity-driven migration and second-­ home seekers. The increased mobility and globalization around international residential decision-making also overlaps with the boom in international tourism and retirement mobilities, part and parcel of a new, more mobile global upper class in the post-2008 world. In this chapter, I wish to conceptually clarify these post-2008 shifts, and subsequently suggest their impacts upon urban spaces within a particular periodization. I am particularly interested in the frictions with the local population as house prices become disconnected from local demand and recast directly from and to global flows. My conceptual approach is heavily influenced by the concept of ‘pied-à-­ terre’ urbanism (DeVerteuil & Manley, 2017), which attempted to bundle together the various social and economic processes and impacts of more globalized residential mobilities, particularly at the top end, and the frictions at the local level that these mobilities may engender. This chapter is also embedded in larger concerns around prevalent international residential mobilities. In particular, the recent emergence of lifestyle-led and second-­home patterns of residential mobility contrast sharply with older models of immigrants pouring into global cities to work in precarious labour markets in places like Hong Kong and London (Jordan et al., 2017). Although I do not focus on gentrification in this chapter – pied-à-terre urbanism very much builds on pre-existing wealth, rather than involving reinvestment – there is no doubt that these new international residential mobilities are destabilizing previous patterns of incumbent upgrading, threatening to overwhelm them in certain cases. Increasingly, international flows of investment are touching down in particularly favoured sites. The blurring of national boundaries is a cornerstone of international relational mobilities during the past decade, but not without local impacts that I explore in the next few subsections.

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2.2  Pied-à-Terre Urbanism DeVerteuil and Manley (2017) developed the concept of ‘pied-à-terre’ urbanism to frame the increasing global-local frictions that pervade ‘safe-haven’ cities for overseas investment in the post-2008 period. The authors argued that overseas investors were “opportunistic in their search for safe-haven investments when faced with uncertainty at home, including political instability, currency devaluation, more onerous taxation or capital restraints” (2017: 1311). This opportunism grew appreciably in the post-2008 period, as traditionally favoured destinations for excess capital became even more attractive within a context of pervasive economic uncertainty (Ley, 2010). For those cities at the top of the urban hierarchy, pied-à-terre urbanism became deeply entrenched in the post-2008 period. In this respect, Ley (2010: 150) contended that “as economic and demographic pressures move around the world, global cities and their property markets can be expected to be particularly sensitive to these ebbs and flows”, effectively becoming bolt-holes in times of deep precarity and uncertainty. Taking London as an example (Massey, 2007; Atkinson, 2016; DeVerteuil & Manley, 2017), we can identify some key aspects to the process. First, the flow of overseas investment is particularly focused on areas of established wealth, rather than disinvested or ‘up-and-coming’ areas. The investors are not looking for bargains here, but rather for stability of prices and while guaranteeing a respectable return over the long run. As such, these ‘super-prime’ areas received the lion’s share of investment; in London, these areas include Kensington, Chelsea, Belgravia, Mayfair and Knightsbridge. That these ‘WC’ (West Central postcodes) areas already featured conspicuously luxurious built environments, combined with amenities that blatantly cater to the 1% (e.g. hotels, restaurants, department stores, specialized services), was crucial to their attractiveness. Second, the overseas investors fit into Vertovec’s (2009: 3) concept of transnationalism, as a “condition in which, despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of international borders… certain kinds of relationships have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-spanning yet common arena of activity”. Few investors were looking for a permanent move to London, but rather a second- or third-home as a safe-haven investment as well as a place to spend some time away from their native countries. This was particularly true for investors from the Eurozone, who were looking to ‘park’ their money in super-prime London real estate as a safe way to transfer at least some of their Euros into Pounds. Third, the (indirect) role of the state is absolutely crucial in guiding overseas investment to certain countries and cities. In the case of London, the state was largely hands-off, with no mansion tax and low council taxes that indirectly encouraged overseas investment to flood certain parts of the city, at least in the initial wave of investment in the early 2010s. Fourth and finally, pied-à-terre urbanism creates synergies with parallel investment in tourist-heavy cities. In other words, overseas investment is not only connected to cities with high profiles at a global scale – these same cities must also be

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readily accessible to a large number of destinations and must generate conspicuous tourist interest, especially among well-off tourists. London is among the most visited places on earth, and as such attracts tourists who may decide to move there on a semi-permanent basis. Of course, this overlaps with seeking a safe-haven investment, but further overlaps with the seeking of particular amenities – climate, education, health, shopping, architecture – that the 1% are quite particular about, and that they could identify by visiting a city first. Interestingly, many overseas investors do not rent out their safe-haven properties when they are away – and so do not further abet the ‘AirBnB’ tourist economy that is wreaking havoc in many cities of the world. Rather, they leave the properties empty for most of the year, which as we will see in the next section creates its own set of social and geographical issues. What pied-à-terre urbanism is not, however, some turbo-charged version of gentrification (Reese et al., 2010; Lees et al., 2016; DeVerteuil & Manley, 2017). While certainly producing exclusionary displacement and bringing in a more affluent incoming group, pied-à-terre urbanism does not depend on a traditional rent gap, given that the areas receiving investment were never disinvested in the first place. Further, the agents of the process are not attached to particular places like gentrifiers are; rather, they are relatively footloose and focus on those super-prime areas that are spatially separate from gentrified neighbourhoods (DeVerteuil & Manley, 2017). Finally, pied-à-terre urbanism is rigorously transnational, lacking the grounded and dare I say place-bound nature of gentrification that manifests itself in strong, daily place-based attachments to the built environment and local amenities. As DeVerteuil and Manley (2017: 1319) argued, “pied-à-terre urbanism is entirely independent of homegrown gentrification, as it operates through different circuits of capital entirely and impacts different areas”. All of this is not to say, however, that pied-à-terre urbanism is not grounded to particular places – it is, just not to those gentrifying places and not to the same day-in-and-day-out degree. However, the local frictions arising from overseas investment can be just as damaging.

2.3  I mpacts of pied-à-terre Urbanism: Local-Global Frictions To understand the local-global frictions of pied-à-terre urbanism, I must first qualify how the local and the global interact, a topic of much debate within geography (e.g. Swyngedouw, 1997; McCann & Ward, 2010). In their reckoning of the urban/global nexus of urban governance and policymaking, McCann and Ward (2010) underlined the importance of being sensitive to the tensions between relationality and territoriality, of flow and fixity, “of global contexts and place-specificities (and vice versa), of structural imperatives and embodied practices” (175). This goes against the hyper-globalists who sought to abolish territory; rather, McCann and Ward only wish to abolish its bounded nature. Referring to the local-global nature of policy mobility, they argued that “while motion and relationality define contemporary

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policy-making, this is only half the picture. Policies and policy-making are also intensely and fundamentally local, grounded and territorial” (175). MP Smith’s (2001, 70) transnational urbanism covers similar ground, moving beyond global-­ local binaries, of the “fruitfulness of viewing cities as sites where national and transnational practices become localized; local social actions reverberate transnationally, if not globally”. In effect, it is not possible nor preferable to separate the local and the global – they are intimately related and mutually constitutive (Mitchell, 1997). Beyond the process, this bolt-hole version of global capitalism produces distinct localized impacts, including an uprooted social geography that captures the inherently fraught contradictions between the local and everyday versus the global and spectacular (see also Zukin, 1993 on the distinctions between vernacular and global landscapes in global cities). At least four distinct impacts can be suggested, using the existing literature on the super-rich and their attendant geographies (e.g., Beaverstock, 2004; Beaverstock et al., 2004; Ley, 2010; Pow, 2011; Henry, 2012; Hay, 2013; Short, 2013; Dorling, 2014; Sayer, 2014; Atkinson, 2016; DeVerteuil & Manley, 2017). The first is an obvious lack of place-attachment among overseas investors, given the lack of belonging that comes with footloose capitalism (Ong, 2007). This creates local frictions because long-term residents do feel a certain belonging to the area, even to the extent of being rather parochial about it (Marr et al., 2009; DeVerteuil et al., 2019). This more place-bound sense of belonging – of being invested in the local environment and amenities  – necessarily clashes with more short-term and sporadic attachment to the particular exchange value of a certain locale set within a certain top-tier city. Locals who have invested in their areas feel left behind by the sometimes-­bewildering pace of change as residences are increasingly (and sometimes exclusively) sold to overseas investors, and sometimes with substantial changes to the built environment, particularly when exclusive homes are rebuilt at a much larger scale. Indeed, while place-based belonging can be depicted as essentialist, anachronistic, and reactionary, [it can] can also be seen as…embracing the local scale and the idiographic nature of place as a quiet bulwark against all-­ embracing notions of hyper-globalization. In this way, the parochial is not inherently pejorative – it is as much about the persistent and deep-seated importance that most people bestow to place-attachment, the ontological security of home and boundary-making (Devine-Wright, 2013; Tomaney, 2015), and that these modest actions are always partial and complex. (DeVerteuil et al., 2019: 67). As a consequence, and second, pied-à-terre urbanism produces a devitalization process in the areas it touches. By this I mean the lack of 24-hour presence of residents equals less demand for local services, schools, and shops. In turn, this creates a ‘ghost-town’ effect (Clerval, 2013; Cumming, 2015), whereby many of the residential properties are empty for most of the year. In turn, this creates an eroded sense of citizenship, as parts of major cities become mere playgrounds for the global elite while enhancing the exchange value of their property, but without local vitality. This devitalization becomes a vicious circle, as property prices become too high for anyone but overseas investors.

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Third, pied-à-terre urbanism produces a city that is very much like the touristified city, in which transience reigns supreme. This rootless vision is in many ways a superficial version of cosmopolitanism. To Ley (2004: 159), “cosmopolitans think globally, aim to exceed their own local specificities, welcome unfamiliar cultural encounters and express the wish to move toward a true humanity of equality and respect”. Further, as Featherstone (2002: 1) noted, “in the recent phase of globalization … in the wake of expanding marketization and reactive nationalisms, there has been a revival of interest in cosmopolitanism”, setting the stage for an “alternative to patriotism and nationalism and … critical of parochial attachments to place” (Binnie et al., 2009: 307). However, this cosmopolitanism is superficial in that it does not allow for the chance encounters and social bonds that create a more globalized, de-bordered state of mind. For instance, New York City under Mayor Bloomberg (2002–2013) welcomed an important inflow of super-rich investors from across the world, most of whom buying apartments in new-build towers and spending precious little time in them. This superficiality is compounded by a sense of that at least some of the overseas investment is laundering criminal activity and corruption in the sending nation (Kuper, 2011; Neate, 2011, 2013, 2019). Fourth and finally, there is no doubt that overseas investment indirectly contributes to higher housing prices overall in these target cities. By placing pressure on the top-end, higher prices are then filtered down to contiguous areas and eventually down to cheaper, disinvested areas, as well as to commuter belts around the city. This certainly was the case in Greater London: the 2015 report Housing in London (Mayor of London, 2015: 60) found that prices had quintupled between 1970 and 2014, when adjusted for inflation. More specifically relating to the more recent booms, “between 1970 and the mid-1990s London’s house prices moved in strong boom-and-bust cycles, with particularly large cycles peaking in 1973 and 1988. But the long boom that lasted from the late 1990s to 2007/08 ended with a relatively small price ‘correction’ before very rapid price growth began again in 2013” (Mayor of London, 2015: 60). This rapid price growth is very much linked to an important influx of overseas investment (DeVerteuil & Manley, 2017). In effect, between 2004 and 2013, prices in the ritzy Kensington and Chelsea borough, a key focus for overseas investment, increased at a faster rate than for Greater London overall (66%), with many wards seeing at least a doubling of value. This further translated into decreasing ownership rates for the younger age groups across London as a whole – in 2014 the 35–44 age group had an ownership rate of only 47% compared to 69% in 1990, while for the same period the 25–34 age group saw their rate decline from 57% to 26% (Mayor of London, 2015: 29). Not surprisingly, the ratio between median housing prices and income grew into a chasm by the 2010s: over nine times in 2014, compared to just over three times in 1995 (Mayor of London, 2015: 67). Rents in Greater London are also over double the average for England as a whole, and homelessness also grew continuously since the 2012 Olympics (Mayor of London, 2015: 76). All of these impacts are particularly evident in top-tier global cities, further consolidating their attractiveness to global capital – and shoring up a certain fixity, if

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not resilience, to their position. Building on Harvey (1996), Elwood et al. (2017: 750) underlined that “fixities are important because they produce political identities, constituencies and struggles…” This emphasis on fixity and resilience may seem unfashionable when compared to the current celebration of mobility, unboundedness, and movement within social and cultural geography (e.g. Cresswell, 2010). However, fixity and resilience are important concepts when grasping both the persistence and consolidation of certain top-tier global cities. While much effort has been dedicated to giving resilience greater precision (e.g. Cutter et al., 2008; Hall & Lamont, 2013; Bristow & Healey, 2015; Meerow et al., 2016), the fact remains that the term encapsulates a myriad of conceptual directions and methodological applications. At the bare minimum, resilience invariably involves a particular shock  social, ecological, political, or economic - to a system that benefits from a certain measure of stability, joined to a capacity to “bounce back” to some degree in the post-shock period while evidencing adaptability and elasticity (DeVerteuil, 2014, 2015; DeVerteuil & Golubchikov, 2016). This necessarily moves us away from risk and vulnerability to a more proactive and future-oriented approach, underlining the capacity of people and places to anticipate, endure, adapt to, and ultimately minimize the damage from inevitable threats such as climate change, economic shocks, and political upheavals (Hall & Lamont, 2013; Brown, 2014; Andres & Round, 2015). By the same token, resilience is never about radical transformation, but rather is incremental in nature, the ‘getting by’ when transformation is neither possible nor desired (Katz, 2004). I can apply these notions of fixity and resilience to post-2008 real estate, in which certain top-tier global cities (as well as the 1%) took an initial hit with the financial crisis, but then quickly bounced back to their original positions, and then went on to supersede them quite comfortably (Raco & Street, 2012). Raco and Street (2012) examined the cases of Hong Kong and London to show that in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, city and business leaders were quick to shore up the largely neoliberal structure of real estate-based capital. This was designed to ‘bounce back’ as quickly as possible and minimize the fallout, but also reinforcing the very same structural imbalances that had led to the financial meltdown in the first place. What was perhaps surprising was not so much the resilience of the top-­ tier cities, as it was the spread of this pied-à-urbanism to cities lower on the global hierarchy, as I discuss in the next and final section.

2.4  Coda: The Late 2010s and the Great Acceleration Up to this point, I have mostly focused on the process of (re)consolidation of top-­ tier real estate markets in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, with an emphasis on overseas investment and its pernicious local impacts via pied-à-terre urbanism. And yet, the late 2010s have been increasingly marked by an accelerated disruption, displacement and creative destruction of long-held social contracts, labor arrangements and urban landscapes. The urban landscape has been characterized,

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especially in large cities, by the speeding up of gentrification, touristification and pop-up urbanism that has rapidly upgraded neighbourhoods from Barelona to London to San Francisco (Harris, 2015; Cocola-Gant, 2016; DeVerteuil & Manley, 2017). The 2016 voting for Trump and Brexit threatens to further erode the already-­ threadbare welfare support systems in the US and UK. Companies such as AirBnB and Uber have upended the hotel and taxi industries. This broader context suggests to me that we are now well beyond a consolidation of the top-tier cities – that in fact the end of this past decade saw a ‘great acceleration’ of the over-valorization of particular urban spaces and places and its spread downwards to second-tier cities. This great acceleration may seem at first counter-intuitive, given all of the predictions around the deconcentration of jobs via technology, as well as the supposedly crushing costs of doing business in the large, expensive core of cities that would drive jobs to smaller centres. And yet some key, and very resilient, forces ensured that certain cities not only consolidated and flourished in the immediate post-2008 context, but actually expanded their power and attractiveness by the end of the 2010s. The first is the geography of labour markets – given the highly precarious nature of much current employment, particularly in high-tech, the chances of regaining a similar job in a large, complex city are far higher than in a smaller, less dynamic place. The recent locational decisions by Amazon to expand its headquarters within the United States is instructive – while many cities competed, it was never in doubt that places like Washington DC and New York, with their dense job geographies, would eventually win out. This aligns with the increasingly urban focus of high-tech employment, rather than its more suburban version that dominated in the 1980s (Scott, 1988). The second is the highly-connected nature of certain cities to other cities, thereby maintaining and expanding their international profile. For example, the large amount of Pacific Rim capital exported over the past decade – most of it from Mainland China- only settled in certain cities that were already firmly ‘on the map’. These included places like Hong Kong and Singapore, but also further afield to include Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco and Los Angeles. These cities are well known to Chinese investors, have many direct flights to China, and feature large and longstanding Chinese diasporas. In the 2010s, the excess of Chinese overseas capital helped fuel real estate speculation and over-valorization in all of these cities, extending from the suburban ‘ethnoburbs’ (Li, 1998) to downtown regeneration. The third factor is very much linked to the unique nature of certain cities’-built environments, which make them ripe for hyper-exploitation if certain pro-tourist policies are promoted. Taking the examples of Barcelona (Cocola-Gant, 2016) and Venice, I can suggest that technologies such as AirBnB have enabled, along with lax policies and cheap airfares, the over-valorization of tourist cities, and have produced results not dissimilar to those produced by overseas investors. More to the point, this process accelerated in the 2010s with a pervasive ‘Instagram’ culture, which promotes a very superficial understanding of the materiality of cities, all surface and no appreciation for the negative outcomes that unfettered tourism promotes (Boy &

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Uitermark, 2016). As Koens et  al. (2018) noted, we are now in an era of ‘over-­ touristification’, in which certain cities experience even more intense pressure placed upon their centrally-located neighbourhoods, part of a post-2008 policy drive to increase tourism. This over-touristification produces similar outcomes as overseas investment and pied-à-terre urbanism and constitutes the bulk of this book’s chapters. In conclusion, I can use the concept of pied-à-terre urbanism to structure the sense of heightened mobility of both people and investments at the global level over the 2010s. The concept also structures the sense that these global mobilities and investments can create friction at the local level, and these frictions are co-produced in particular places but also at particular times. On this last point, the emergence of the global Covid19 pandemic in 2020 directly challenges some of the precepts of the ‘great acceleration’, acting more as a decelerator on the concentration of jobs in top-tier cities, the hyper-connectivity among certain cities, and the trend towards over-touristification. The hyper-mobility of the 2010s dramatically slowed to a crawl, both of people and of investments, yielding an important (yet perhaps temporary) unravelling in favour of the local and the parochial. The near future promises to be a tumultuous time, in some ways very similar to the immediate post-2008 period, in that there is currently a lot of excess capital building up and an accelerated demand for second homes near, but perhaps not in, major cities.

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Part II

Global Processes of Multi-residence and Local Impacts

Chapter 3

The Sea as a Lifestyle: (Im)mobilities, Liminality, and Life Course Transitions Among Permanently Settled Sailors in the Azores (Portugal) Dora Sampaio

3.1  Introduction Well, we didn’t intend to settle here but we were sailing from the Caribbean to England and we had to stop on the way. We liked it here, and it was the wrong time of the year for doing this crossing. It was December. The weather was awful and so we decided to just stay until the weather got better. But we liked it here and we made friends. By the time the winter was over we bought a house and there you go (laughs). It was as simple as that. (Evelyn, mid-50s)

Evelyn’s recollection of settling in the Azores echoes many other stories of sailors who, by chance and by choice, decided to settle in the archipelago. More generally, Evelyn’s account draws attention to life transitions and fluid decision-making that takes place over the life course in regards to moving and settling down. The life paths and (im)mobility choices of a group of older sailors who have settled in the Azores seem to challenge dichotomous views and binary analysis of migration and settlement. While definitions of ‘home’ and ‘host’ countries are useful to understand migration projects that extend between two points, by overly focusing on mobility dichotomies scholars have stalled productive debates that consider the multiple entanglements, malleability, and multifaceted nature of ‘movement’ and ‘stasis’. Drawing on qualitative research with a group of older foreign sailors who settled in the Azores archipelago, this chapter argues that to improve our understanding about (im)mobility and settlement choices we need an analytical lens that captures the fluidity and liminality of these migration projects. This allows, in turn, to foreground the role of transitions, disruptions, and decision-making over the life span. In so doing, I suggest that a life course perspective is essential to illuminate the D. Sampaio (*) Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_3

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fluidity of these lifestyles, how they are constituted over the life course, and the decision to settle in the Azores upon long periods living on the sea. Conceptually, I build on the strength of work on ‘regimes of mobility’ (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013) and the notion of liminality (Van Gennep, 1960) to shed light on the intersections and entanglements between (im)mobility and settlement in transnational context and in liminal phases of life. The research takes place in the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago and autonomous region in the North Atlantic. The Azores, and the town of Horta in Faial Island in particular, constitute a strategic and well-known stopover for sailors crossing the Atlantic. Located in the North Atlantic Ocean, about 1600  km (995 mi) west of continental Portugal and about 2454  km (1525 mi) southeast of Newfoundland, Canada, the nine islands represent a geographical meeting point between continents, and in fact the only available stop over for sailors crossing from the Caribbean or the East Coast of the United States to Europe and beyond. The chapter weaves together narrative and visual materials collected in 2014 and 2016 in the Azores archipelago. The key focus of the research was on the experiences of ageing and later life of three groups of older migrants living in the Azores – labour, lifestyle and return migrants. Amongst the lifestyle migrants, I found an interesting group of sailors, particularly in Faial Island, who talked about their experiences of living on the sea and later deciding to settle in the Azores. Their migration projects seemed to complicate normative binaries of ‘movement’ and ‘stasis’. Moreover, they invited further inquiry about how ideas of (im)immobility are produced and negotiated over the life course; as my interlocutors grew older and bodily changes prompted thoughts about putting down roots, but ideas and imaginaries of freedom and autonomy demanded proximity to the sea and possibilities of mobility. Aided by a life narrative methodology, I sought to capture my interlocutors’ migration trajectories, (im)mobilities and life negotiations. In this chapter, I explore the liminal and fluid nature of these life and migration projects in relation to the island geography, both a place of mooring and a liminal site between the sea and the land, symbolically enacting both feelings of ‘attachment’ and ‘freedom’. The remainder of the chapter is organised as follows. I start by bringing together debates on lifestyle-driven (im)mobilities and liminality. I then present the research site and the data and methods used. The third section discusses narrative and visual materials collected in the field so as to draw connexions between the data and wider conceptual debates. It develops two main analytical points: the first focuses on the decision to settle down, namely in relation to the experience of growing older and the ageing body; the second examines the role of friendship, community and place-­ identity in the decision to put down roots. The final section of the chapter offers a summary of the main findings.

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3.2  ( Im)Mobilities, Liminality and the Life Course: Ageing on an Island The last decades have witnessed a renewed interest in mobility within and across borders, focusing on its magnitude, intensity, diversity, and unequal rights and access to it (Basch et al., 1995; Sheller & Urry, 2006). For some, mobility itself has become a lifestyle, a life strategy, and a way of forging new social identities (Torkington, 2012). The late John Urry (1999) described this ongoing pursuit of mobility as a ‘compulsion for mobility,’ referring to both a desire and necessity for travelling, for corporeal presence but also distance and separation. International migration as a lifestyle is deeply embedded in relative economic privilege and unequal power relations (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009; Hayes, 2014). It has been facilitated by, among others, ease and affordability of mobility (Amit, 2007; Sheller & Urry, 2006), processes of globalisation and individualisation, flexibility of forms of work and job opportunities, and commodification and privatisation of retirement and older age (Bender et al., 2014). Recently, a flourishing body of scholarly work has critically examined established migration concepts and categories. In particular, Glick Schiller and Salazar (2013) draw attention to the need to create a dialogue between ‘migration’ and ‘fixity,’ breaking with binary analysis (see also Salazar & Glick Schiller, 2014). This call for a more critical understanding of (im)mobilities resonates with earlier work on transnationalism and transnational connections (Levitt, 2001; Basch et al., 1995). A separate field of research on liminality, temporariness and individual reactions to liminal phases (Van Gennep, 1960) has provided useful insights for understanding how migrants adapt, make mobility-related decisions, and strategise according to critical life events. Within this body of work, less has been written on transnationalism and (im)mobility over the life course, particularly in older age. In addressing this, this chapter seeks to contribute to broaden such debates by building a conversation between (im)mobility decisions, liminal stages, and the life course. Within the mobilities literature, three interrelated strands of scholarly work are particularly useful for the discussion presented in this chapter: i) lifestyle migration, ii) maritime mobilities and iii) the so-called ‘marginal’ mobilities. The first is by now a well-established field of research. Key conceptual and empirical discussions focus on lifestyle-driven mobilities as economic and health care strategies (Hayes, 2014; Sampaio, 2020), a platform for social and identity creation (Oliver, 2008), spiritual pursuit (Korpela, 2017), and rural immersion (Kordel & Pohle, 2018). These migration projects tend to be continuously redefined and often take shape in a fickle equilibrium between choice and necessity. Whereas ideas about taking back control of one’s life, escaping ‘the rat race’ and living a desired lifestyle permeate these migration stories, the desire to find financially favourable living conditions elsewhere and maximise economic resources are often present as well (Domínguez-­ Mujica & Parreño-Castellano, 2014). Ultimately, this scholarship shows, lifestyle, economic and other migration-related reasonings are deeply entangled (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009; Hayes, 2014).

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A variety of geographical settings and lifestyle trajectories have been documented, particularly those relocating to rural areas (Benson, 2011) and coastal resorts (O’Reilly, 2000), either as middle-aged or older adults (see, e.g. King et al., 2000, Korpela, 2017). Among these, maritime mobilities and lifestyle migration to insular places, particularly more remote ones, have remained largely understudied (notable exceptions include the work by Lazaridis et  al., 1999; Macleod, 2012; Waldren, 1996). Juntunen, Špela & Rogelja (2014) describe the migration projects of those sailing as a lifestyle as ‘marginal mobilities’ that are not entirely forced, nor entirely voluntarily, and which occur along loosely defined travel trajectories. These are migration projects marked by uprootedness, liminality, and constant negotiation. In a sense, then, these are lifestyles developed at a crossroads, where in-­ betweenness, ambiguity and uncertainty are mobilised to achieve ‘something new’. Whereas research has shown that the so-called lifestyle migrants often embark on geographical mobility relatively late in life as a means to cope with an important life-cycle transition (Amit, 2007), the majority of existing studies do not focus on life course transitions. Mobility decisions are, however, often linked to life transitions, critical junctures, liminal periods, and an overall quest or need for change (Hoey, 2010). Van Gennep (1960) describes liminality as a transitory phase in rites of passage, and a middle stage between separation from an old position and incorporation into the new one. In the specific context of migration, more than changing the existing structure, individuals find ways to reposition themselves within the system in a way that is beneficial for them. These are not necessarily vigorous acts of resistance, but rather acts of adaptation (see Rogelja, 2015a). The work of Rogelja (2015a, b), focusing on the lives of liveaboards in the Mediterranean, is particularly valuable for documenting in detail processes of in-­ betweenness, ‘temporary unbelonging’ and liminality in these migration journeys. The author describes such migration projects as lifestyle experiments within late modernity, where sea-related imaginaries and culturally relevant representations of the sea are central to the migrants’ mobility decisions (see also Benson, 2012). The sea symbolically represents crossings, movement, connection, but it also personifies fractures, hardship and disunity (Rogelja, 2015a: 190). Concurrently, western imaginaries of islands as mystical places of refuge and idyll (Péron, 2004) have contributed to a continuing lure for insular spaces, particularly small rural islands. For sailors, in particular, islands are more than merely physical surface, but deeply interconnected spaces in permanent connection with the sea and the world, but also geographically secluded and safe. They can be perceived as extensions of the sea and places where imaginaries of an active retirement can be enacted and achieved (see Rogelja, 2015ab). The migration projects of liveaboards fit into what Oliver (2008) describes as ‘flirting with freedom’ in the case of the British relocating to Costa del Sol. They are social constructs based on ideas of escapism, individual freedom, self-sufficiency and ability where contemplation, mobility and extrication from neoliberal, consumerism-­driven societies feature as centrepieces (Rogelja, 2015a). The choice of living on a boat is tied up to ideas of being capable, ‘hardening oneself,’ simplifying life, leaving behind all that is auxiliary, and starting afresh in a new setting. This

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position is, nonetheless, consequent upon privilege that allows free mobility and the possibility of uprooting oneself and settling in another place of one’s choice. Existing scholarly work has less frequently captured how such ‘lifestyle escapes’ can become a source of vulnerability over time (for exceptions see Botterill, 2017; Giner-Monfort et al., 2016). In this regard, Rogelja (2015a) documents her interlocutors’ changing narratives about living on the sea, which is often a temporary life project that becomes difficult to sustain long-term, either because of family obligations, changing individual biographies and circumstances, difficulties of living on a boat etc. Thus, living on the sea tends to be a transitional period of five to ten years followed by a return to a home country, or relocation elsewhere. The romantic and sanguine depictions of life as a liveaboard – the fresh air, a sense of freedom, the effect of sunshine in the body and mind – tend to be gradually replaced by more realistic and practical analyses. These are experiences of needing to be always attentive and responsive, never getting enough sleep, always being in motion, and never being able to stop or rest fully. As the author notes, living on a boat requires special practical bodily adaptations (to stand, to cook, to sleep on a moving object), and it can cause seasickness, produce special psychological problems (resulting from being constantly in an open space), and generate a desire for a perpetual quest for a better life. The restlessness of the sea is particularly unrelenting after long periods onboard, and tensions between imaginaries and reality tend to be accentuated by age (ibid, p. 190). Pondering to settle after years on the sea can be a daunting and ambivalent process. ‘Sailing away’ is often connoted with ideas of ‘escaping to the good life’ and reaching freedom, and mooring can be perceived as a failure to attain or keep such a lifestyle (Rogelja, 2015a). Islands, namely those where liveaboards anchor for longer period of time, may be viewed as ‘spaces of refuge’ or connecting sites between land and sea. Cultural narratives of islands as self-contained places of refuge (Péron, 2004) can play an important role in the decision to settle. Islands appear to act, in these cases, as liminal landscapes, where migrants can settle and yet keep the sea as a lifestyle. While islands, and remote islands in particular, keep their marginal positioning, they offer the possibility of putting down roots, cultivating a sense of place attachment, and belonging to a community. Ideas about ‘purity’, freedom, wellbeing and longevity are impressed into both imaginaries of the sea and rural island spaces. As migrants grow older, the sea becomes an unstable and unpredictable force, whereas islands can be perceived as places of stillness (Sampaio & King, 2019; Vannini & Taggart, 2014). The choice of settling down on secluded, small rural islands can be understood within a process of building an individual identity and forging a meaningful connection to place (Åkerlund & Sandberg 2015; Burholt et al., 2013). The ‘preservation of places as anchors to identity, as moorings to a sense of self’, plays a pivotal role in protecting oneself against the ongoing corrosion of the particular identities of places and of one’s own (Hoey, 2010: 256). Growing older abroad can in these cases be regarded as a way of enacting autonomy and retaining a positive self-image in a period when detrimental bodily changes may take place (Rubinstein & Parmelee, 1992). Remarkably, these are mostly third age, ‘young old’ migration projects,

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marked by a quest for freedom, spontaneity and self-fulfilment. Being active and healthy allows one to experience new things, being creative, and focusing on self-­ appraisal and self-actualisation in later life. In the next section, I turn to one such case of small rural islands that provide a sense of much desired settlement to liveaboards after years on the sea.

3.3  The Azores as a Place of Anchorage The Azores, a group of nine islands originally settled by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, remains largely an understudied geographical setting (Fig. 3.1). The unique geographical positioning of the Azores, situated at the crossroads of the European, American and African continents, has been key for the diversification of the social fabric of the islands (Rocha et al., 2011; Williams & Fonseca, 1999). For their location in the middle of the Atlantic, the Azores are an important stopover for transatlantic crossings. Yachting facilities are concentrated in the four main ports of the Azores: Horta (Faial), Ponta Delgada (São Miguel), and Angra do Heroísmo and Praia da Vitória (Terceira). The majority of yachts stop in Horta, the main town of Faial Island. This is one of the busiest marinas in Europe and has become, as a result, a cosmopolitan centre for transatlantic maritime traffic (Figs. 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4). Inaugurated in 1986, Horta’s marina can host up to 300 vessels and it is currently the fourth most visited ocean marina in the world

Fig. 3.1  Map of the Azores showing municipalities. (Source: Author)

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Fig. 3.2  View from Faial Island. (Source: Author)

(visitportugal.com). The fact that Horta’s marina is as an excellent shelter against winds from all quadrants makes it an almost essential stopover for the hundreds of yachts travelling across the North Atlantic, or between the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. It is also a more affordable option in comparison to the marinas in the Mediterranean coast. Horta’s marina is also distinctive for its colourful open-air murals where visiting sailors paint messages during their stay on the island. Whereas emigration, mainly towards North America, has historically characterised the archipelago, the islands have also become, more noticeably since the 1990s, an attractive location for growing numbers of migrants, namely lifestyle migrants who perceive the islands as a natural heaven and place of escape still largely preserved from mass tourism. The individuals relocating to the Azores for lifestyle purposes tend to be approaching or in their third age and are in search of a sense of belonging to a small community and a meaningful connection with the place. Living on small rural islands allows individuals to feel part of a tight-knit community and it provides an opportunity for bonding with nature, re-centring oneself, and keeping an adventurous outlook to life (Sampaio & King, 2019; for a parallel in mainland Portugal, see Sardinha, 2018). In one of the few comprehensive studies on immigration to the Azores, Rocha, Medeiros & Ferreira (2011: 86) show that almost 20 per cent of the immigrants moving directly to the Azores mentioned ‘better quality of life’ as the main reason for their relocation.

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Fig. 3.3  Peters Cafe Sport, Horta, Faial Island. (Source: Author)

The amenity-seeking migrants living in the Azores are mostly middle and older age adults from North-West Europe (especially Germany and Great Britain) and North America (SEFSTAT, 2017). Moreover, an analysis by age cohorts reveals that migrants from the European Union are typically older (Statistics Portugal, 2011). Among the group of lifestyle migrants relocating to the Azores, one can find a smaller group of sailors who used to do transatlantic sailing before deciding to settle in the Azores. In this chapter, I focus on this group’s experiences.

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Fig. 3.4  Sailors’ mural in Horta’s marina, Faial Island. (Source: Author)

3.4  Data and Methods This chapter is based on qualitative research conducted in the Azores in 2014 and 2016. The research design consisted primarily of life narrative interviews with different groups of older migrants (108  in total, of which 36 were with lifestyle migrants). It also included participant observation in local events, such as local festivities and activities relating to the migrant communities living in the Azores, focus groups and visual methods such as photography. The findings presented in this chapter derive from the large array of data collected and draw specifically on the stories of eleven interlocutors (five of which were couples) who shared their experiences as sailors prior to settling in the Azores and talked about their decision to put down roots on the islands. The great majority of the stories relayed originate in Faial Island, where the highest number of sailors can be found. The interviewees were mainly in their 60s at the time of the interviews and were settled in the Azores from as early as the 1990s. They were originally from the Netherlands, England, South Africa (British citizens) and the United States. The interviews were conducted in English and/or Portuguese depending on which language the interviewees felt more comfortable. The research drew on a life course perspective and a life narrative methodology (Andrews et  al., 2006). Such methodological approach enabled an in-depth

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understanding of how migration projects and related (im)mobilities are constituted and negotiated over the life span. Moreover, this allowed participants to develop their own, socially situated and subjectively formed, biographical narratives (Polkinghorne, 1995). Given that the research focus of the project was on older migrants and the life course, the interviews were conducted with individuals aged 50 years and older. They had to live in the Azores for at least half of the year to be included in the study. Upon collection, data was analysed with the help of a qualitative data analysis software (NVivo) in a way that elicited main themes.

3.5  ( Im)Mobilities, Liminal Spaces, and Life Course Moorings: Settling in the Azores as a Sailor In this section, I trace the migration trajectories and life course (im)mobilities of sailors who settled permanently in the Azores. In so doing, I reveal the intersections between (im)mobilities, life transitions and liminal stages, showing the complex negotiations that take place throughout the life course in relation to moving and staying put.

3.5.1  Serendipity, Intentionality and the Ageing Body I first met Sophie, a Dutch woman in her late 60s, in one of the snack bars in Horta’s marina. It was an early morning, and Sophie’s husband, Erik, wanted to come down to the marina for a quick set of repairs in their boat, which they still keep docked in the marina. Sophie and Erik’s decision to settle in the Azores in 2010 happened almost by chance. They were both teachers in a business school in the Netherlands. Sophie was recently divorced when she met Erik, a part-time sailor, and it was Erik who introduced Sophie to sailing. Tired of their lives in the Netherlands, they quit their jobs and decided to ‘sail away.’ Their initial plan was to take one year off and later return to their jobs, but they never did. ‘We liked sailing too much’ Sophie told me, ‘first we visited Europe; then we crossed the Atlantic from Cape Verde to Salvador, Brazil. We spent half a year there and then went north to the Caribbean Sea’. At that point, the couple found themselves at a crossroads with no money left. They could either return to the Netherlands to teach or start earning money with their sailing boat. They chose the second. They charted for 15 years, before settling in the Azores. As the couple grew older, Sophie recalls, ideas about settling down became more and more recurring in their life considerations. We thought, where should we settle? What could be a nice place to live? We looked at several islands in the Caribbean. We even bought a piece of land that we still keep. The main reason to look around was the climate. Before, I liked weather around 30 or 32 degrees [Celsius]. The older I am, the more the heat bothers me. So, we started looking at some

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places where the climate was milder. Our friends, Jack and Molly, they moved here and invited us to come to Faial. We booked a flight and came here for holidays. When we arrived, our first impression was: this is amazing, the nature. You can see the ocean everywhere. We spent 3 weeks, met people, heard stories. There is hardly any crime here. In the Caribbean, you have to lock all doors. Here you can leave the keys in the car. So, safety, nature and climate were the main reasons…also people are wonderful…friendly and welcoming. You don’t feel like a stranger or intruder.

This was also the case with Flip, a Dutch man in his early 60s, who settled in the Azores in 2002. For him, it was the separation from his long-term partner coupled with health issues (a chronic stomach disease) that sparked his decision to leave the Netherlands and start his sailing journey: ‘we split up in 2002 and then I left. I did not have anything else there, “bye-bye” […] and then I started a new life, with new possibilities, and the bad things stayed there…’. Flip’s case demonstrates the significance of critical life transitions in the decision to move and/or stay put. Personal life challenges are overcome by uprooting and repositioning oneself, and starting anew in a different context (Korpela, 2017). His account of leaving his hometown resonates with the experiences of other liveaboards in Rogelja’s (2015a) work. Namely, Ann and Dave, for whom leaving Wales at the age of 55 to go sailing ‘felt so good, so victorious’. With no more moorings to the Netherlands, Flip sold his house and ventured through the Mediterranean and Atlantic with his sailboat until he eventually settled in the Azores. I came here to know the Azores…and then I faced a storm just above Terceira [Island] and I went to Horta to repair things. I had to wait for the materials to arrive, and stayed there for nine months. After that, love. I came to Terceira, very beautiful […] so, I did not choose the Azores, the Azores chose me.

However, as time elapsed, dealing with a chronic stomach disease on the sea became more and more challenging. Flip still relishes living on a boat, even if anchored for most of the year. He also bought a plot of land and a house, where he likes to grow vegetables and, in his words, can feel a strong connection with the land. Correspondingly, for Sharon and Paul the feeling of living ‘in firm ground’ became increasingly important as the couple grew older. After living aboard for several years, this British couple – Sharon in her mid-50s, and Paul 10 years her senior – progressively felt the need to put down roots. As Sharon recalled: It was a nice life, living and working on yachts [charter boats]. But as you get older you want to change. We were at the top end of the age group and it is an energetic lifestyle. Our colleagues were younger. You work hard all day, you party at night. It is too much. You start thinking, financial security…there is no financial security with that style of life. We needed to go somewhere before we got old. Where we could establish something, an income or enough money to live later. Especially for Paul, he had been away from England since his mid-30s… We just sailed around, worked a bit… If you get older, and you don’t have the money, and you can’t work…. I remember Paul, the last trip from here to England, with a storm behind us, it was cold, wet, and he said: “I want a fire, a dog and slippers”. He could see himself in a nice, big sofa. That was the turning point for him.

For the couple, bodily changes, and the need for (financial) security and stability in later life were decisive factors in their decision to settle permanently in the Azores

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in 2001. This included reflections on capability and the ageing body, namely the fear of no longer being strong enough to manoeuvre the boat in the face of a storm at sea. After many years on the sea, Sharon described the transition from liveaboards to buying a house as ‘quite radical.’ As she recounted: ‘all of a sudden we needed a car…our life changed totally. Before, if you don’t like the weather, you change the scenery, but now it is cement…the house…we’re grounded now’. Sharon’s account, like those of other interlocutors, reveals imaginaries of a transition from third to fourth age, where the possibility of bodily impairment and dependency are contemplated (Gilleard & Higgs, 2011; Katz, 2005). Moreover, accounts such as this show that settling down after years as liveaboards is about negotiations and concessions, namely those that have to do with the experience of growing older and accepting what an ageing body can (and cannot) do. In such cases, putting down roots enhances feelings of security, capability and autonomy in later life. In face of critical life transitions and potentially detrimental health changes, the Azores represent a connecting platform that embodies freedom and rootedness. I turn to the latter next (Fig. 3.5).

Fig. 3.5  Sailboats (including Flip’s) docked in the marina of Angra do Heroísmo, Terceira Island. (Source: Author)

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3.5.2  Friendship, Community, and Place-Identity The desire to feel grounded and attached to a place featured centrally in the accounts of my interlocutors. More precisely, friendship and the social ties developed on the islands reportedly play a vital role in the lives the sailors settled in the Azores. Our conversations revealed that friendship gained significance over the period living on the sea. For the interlocutors, settling down in the Azores was situated within a quest for security and stability and this also included a desire to establish networks and be part of a community. In fact, most revealed feeling exhausted and isolated after years living a mostly uprooted life on the sea. Moreover, and resonating with seminal work on the importance of friendship in later life (Jerrome, 1981), my interlocutors also communicated the role of friendship as a coping mechanism and a way of coming to terms with life changes associated with later life. This included overcoming the loss of relatives and childhood friends, health concerns, and the greater availability of time for leisure activities and socialising. Sophie, for example, strongly articulates the importance of having a social network in older age, stressing the importance of friends in the Azores as a means of sustaining an active, interesting, and fulfilling later life. For her and her husband, who got to know the Azores by visiting friends who had relocated there, one the advantages of settling down was the proximity to friends as a support network. I hope to stay here for a long time. My husband and I. Here we have a ‘social net’. When we were sailing, we did not know when we would see our friends next, but here is different. Lovely in that sense.

Besides friends, the desire to belong to a close-knit island community was also commonly mentioned. This was often articulated in relation to the specific place-­ identity of Faial Island, where the small fishing community co-exists with a cosmopolitan feeling generated by the high number of sailors stopping over and living on the island. For Joanne and her husband, a couple in their late 60s and early 70s, originally from the United States (US), one of the main attractions of the Azores was indeed that it was ‘a small fishermen community, but it still felt very international.’ This was one of the main reasons why the couple, who had originally planned to sail for two years before returning to the US, decided to settle down in the Azores in 1991. Joanne had agreed with her business partner in Florida that she would return, but 26 years on she never did. We spend a lot of time with other foreigners, because a lot of us had lives in common because of sailing experiences. We are each other’s family. We don’t have a ‘standard family’ here. We have a range of local friends we met over the years… we connect better because of the lifestyle here. […] We are here because of the marina and sailing. We are here because it is an international environment. It’s just the right size. The sailors stop here, so that’s why we stopped. We felt very comfortable when we arrived here. A nice feeling, we felt welcome.

Sometimes the preference for the Azores was drawn in contrast with other places where sailors usually stopover for longer periods. Evelyn, a British-South African

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woman who earlier in our conversation alluded to the friendships she and her husband made in the Azores after stopping on the islands by chance, pitches the friendliness and hospitality found in the Azores against the tense relationships between the locals and the ‘tourists’ (to use Evelyn’s words) in Caribbean islands. Both sailors at heart, Evelyn and her husband sailed and worked in charter boats for 12 years in the Caribbean before considering settling down. As Evelyn recollects, it was on their way to England, where they had thought of settling permanently, that they stopped in the Azores. I had an idea on my mind of how the Azores would look like. I had seen photographs. But it was a lot friendlier than we expected, specially coming from the Caribbean where people were not so friendly. The locals don’t really like… there’s always a friction with tourists in the Caribbean. And so here it was so civilized in comparison (laughs) It was just so friendly and nice.

For Evelyn and other interlocutors, place-identity is a discursive tool to express their own sense of personhood and where they wish to belong (see Hoey 2010). In this regard, the islands of the Azores, and in particular Faial Island, tap into culturally significant imaginings converted into lifestyle-driven migration (see Benson 2012 for a parallel). Through their specific choice of mobility to small rural islands, these individuals seek to embody the natural exceptionality granted to such spaces and strive to ‘be(come) part of’ the islander community’ (Burholt et al. 2013). In so doing, they reproduce ideas about ‘uniqueness’ and attachment to a specific community that feels international and cosmopolitan but is still genuine and authentic. In their depictions of the community in the Azores as ‘interesting’ and ‘special’, my interlocutors create narratives that depict the place as ‘exceptional’ and, by extension, their own self-identity, and discursively construct ideas of a ‘glocal’ place-­ identity (Torkington 2012). In their depictions of the community in the Azores as ‘interesting’ and ‘special’, the interlocutors create narratives that identify the place as ‘exceptional’ and, by extension, their own self-identity. A sense of self is thus created through specific mobility practices and shaped by one’s positioning in the world, and what and who lies outside it (Åkerlund & Sandberg, 2015; Cresswell, 2006). Feelings of attachment to a ‘unique’ community that is international but not ‘mainstream’, where locals and ‘tourists’ (referring both to those holidaying and those settled permanently) coexist peacefully were repeatedly articulated. For Flip, unlike Madeira or the Algarve, where he stopped during his time on the sea, the Azores felt like home. This was also because he found the Azores a more ‘genuine’ place, still largely unspoiled by tourism, ‘where people still greet each other on the streets’ and one can blend into the social fabric. In Madeira, every 30 minutes an airplane full of tourists arrives there. It is full there, but not here. Here it is only ours, only for us Azoreans, or Portuguese […] people are happier here, more joyful, more open, more familiar…I don’t know, it’s a different way of living…it’s easier to make friends here.

After years on the sea, friendship and being part of a close-knit community become grounding elements and symbolise attachment to place and rootedness. The

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place-identity attributed to the Azores is used discursively to express one’s sense of identity and where one (wants to) belong.

3.6  Conclusions Mobility-related decisions are ongoing constructs, constituted in relation to liminal stages and life course transitions. Bringing together theories of mobility and liminality is fruitful for showing that movement and stasis are negotiated and tied in together during transitioning periods, namely in relation to life course and life-style. This evidences the vital role of life course transitions, critical life junctures and life discontinuities in the decision to move and/or stay put. In this regard, islands are a critical site for understanding such temporal and spatial fluidity, for that they represent intermediate spaces that embody feelings of freedom and rootedness. In a particularly relevant way for this case-study, islands allow a sense of connectedness and openness and building a meaningful physical and emotional attachment to a place and close-knit community. Examining the life narratives of sailors permanently settled in the Azores islands provides two main sets of findings. Firstly, it reveals the intertwined nature of serendipity and intentionality where ‘settling by chance’ and the pressures and limitations of growing older on the sea are deeply interconnected. Secondly, it evinces the vital role of friendship, belonging to a community and place-identity in the decision to settle. These findings resonate with earlier work on friendship and older age (Jerome, 1981) in that friends are an essential part of coming to terms with an end of a life cycle and related losses and changes. For example, living on the sea as an older adult and no longer feeling healthy or fit or acknowledging the gains associated with later life, namely more time for leisure, fulfilling activities, and investing in new relationships. The social relations created are significant for dealing with liminal and uncertain periods and present an opportunity to ‘start anew’ and experience self-actualisation. Efforts to meet friends and engage in new activities were depicted as a way to fulfil the time and emotional space that became available upon retirement or relocation away from ‘home’. Surely, finding news friends and meaningful relationships does not mean erasing old ones. Rather, this often comes in response to physical and emotional distancing from old friends who may be less supportive or understanding of new life endeavours, while new friends may enable the freedom and ‘clean slate’ to develop new identities. The experiences of (im)mobility, liminal stages and life course transitions documented in this chapter complicate linear views of ‘mobility’ and ‘stasis’. Moreover, a life course approach reveals the fluidity of such migration trajectories. The place-­ identity attributed to the Azores suggests a larger process of identity formation where settling on an island is about creating a place for personhood and embodying the place’s identity. In other words, individuals remain mobile yet fixed; they retain connectedness but feel rooted.

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Acknowledgments  This research was funded by the Fundação Portuguesa para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (SFRH/BD/87963/2012).

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Chapter 4

The Reconfiguration of International Residential Mobility Flows in Post-crisis Spain: The Case of Costa Blanca-Alicante Raquel Huete and Alejandro Mantecón

4.1  Introduction The aim of this chapter is to explain the residential tourism development in Alicante province, a 5817.5 km2 region located in Southeast Spain advertised in tourist markets as the Costa Blanca. In particular, we intend to understand the state of the relationship between tourism and urbanization after the international economic crisis that began in 2007–2008, and whose most severe effects took place up until 2013. In order to achieve this objective, we explore some of the relationships between tourist flows, migratory movements and urbanization processes in the province of Alicante. We go into depth in each of these aspects through a discussion of the basic tourist and housing statistics of the region. Finally, and in light of all that has been discussed prior, we propose a critical reflection on the existing links between the tourist sector and the real estate economy.

4.2  The Residential Tourist System in Alicante Province With 82.6 million international tourist arrivals in 2018, Spain is the third country in terms of tourism in the world, after France and the United States. Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, Andalusia, the Canary Islands, the Region of Valencia, and Madrid are – in this order- the primary tourist destinations in Spain. Alicante is one of the R. Huete (*) Tourism Research Institute, University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain e-mail: [email protected] A. Mantecón Department of Sociology I, University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_4

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three provinces that comprise the Region of Valencia, and without a doubt Alicante is Valencia’s primary tourist destination. In 2018, Alicante accounted for 55.4 percent of the 586,750 tourist accommodation places registered in the region. During that year, the Costa Blanca received 6.1 million international tourists and eight million domestic tourists according to Turisme Comunitat Valenciana (TCV, 2019). If we were to consider occupancy in private dwellings alone, the region of Valencia would rank first in Spain in 2018 in terms of reception both of domestic tourists (30 million overnight stays) and international tourists (20 million overnight stays). This fact helps us to understand the primary characteristic of the Costa Blanca tourist system: its intense penetration by the construction sector and the real estate economy. The province of Alicante has 6305 campsites; 69,380 hotel rooms (41,285 of which are concentrated in the city of Benidorm) and 215,969 rooms officially registered in tourist apartments. If informal accommodations (not registered) are considered, these numbers are much greater (TCV, 2019). In fact, it is estimated that almost three out of four overnight stays registered in the province occur in unregulated accommodations (houses and apartments that are rented outside of the traditional tourist market and do not meet the requirements that the tourism law requires for tourist accommodations). Although they would apparently not be part of the tourist accommodation offer in the strict sense, there are also thousands of homes that have been built over the past decades with the sole objective of being sold to Spanish and foreign citizens with an interest in the leisure activities – as opposed to the productive activities – of the Costa Blanca (Huete, 2009). This is especially true if real estate speculation or rental of one’s own housing for tourist use is not considered a productive activity. In this regard, the high number of international tourists who declare that they chose accommodations with friends and relatives (2.1 million tourists in 2018) or in their second residence (1.5 million) is striking (TCV, 2019). According to the latest Population and Housing Census (2011), of the 1,274,095 homes registered in the province of Alicante, 535,730 (42%) were registered as secondary or vacant homes. In terms of the coastal and near-shore municipalities alone, for almost all, the percentage of non-main dwellings exceeds 50 percent (Morote & Hernández, 2016). Actually, Alicante is the Spanish province with the highest percentage of home purchases by foreigners, which is explained both by the number of resident foreigners and by the function of a second residence as a tourist accommodation. The main market for these residences is among Britons. The Brexit crisis,1 and its effect on the devaluation of the pound (which has depreciated by 13 percent since the referendum), has caused a decrease in demand. The political uncertainty associated with the departure of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) requires renegotiating the administrative situation of British citizens in Spain 1  On 29 March 2017, the United Kingdom officially requested to leave the European Union (Brexit), invoking Article 50 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. At the time of writing these lines, the last extension of the deadline for signature and ratification by the United Kingdom and the EU, agreed by the European Council is about to be met.

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and their access to different social and health services (Giner-Monfort & Huete, 2020). Political instability, the likely reduction of social rights and the loss of purchasing power discourage the purchase of homes2 and complicate the lives of thousands of British residents in Spain, both economically and emotionally (Miller, 2019). In a context in which the desires of “desertion” are mixed with deep-rooted feelings of belonging (O’Reilly, 2017), emotional costs are aggravated by the loss of the value of real estate. British residents approaching the life stage of dependency (the fourth age) may be prevented from financing a possible return to the UK and may be trapped in an environment that does not adapt to their new needs (Giner-­ Monfort et al., 2016; Hall & Hardill, 2016; Huete et al., 2013). Those aged 65 to 74 are the largest group of Britons registered in the province of Alicante: nearly 46 percent are in this age group. In this case, the challenge of the host society relates to the fact that ageing is associated with greater spending on health services. This implies that when there is a large foreign population that frequently uses the public health services of certain municipalities, administrations may produce significant budget deficits with respect to specific territories. Considering the transfer systems that exist between the different structures of social services in countries of the EU, the Spanish health system probably cannot recover all the costs of care of foreigners residing in Spain. As Giner-Monfort (2018) explains, Brexit could end up transforming migratory movements into something more like tourism, since displacements would be characterized by fewer administrative and residential links with Spain. This would also mean the enjoyment of fewer rights, which could result in a reduction in the arrival of Britons in the province of Alicante. Therefore, it is worth asking the question whether the real economic engine of the Costa Blanca is tourism or, rather, the real-estate market (Mantecón, 2017). The issue becomes even more pertinent given that before the crisis -with the exception of Benidorm- in the most significant tourist towns of the Costa Blanca, the percentage of companies and employees linked to the real estate and construction sectors was higher than that of companies and employees linked to the hospitality sector (OOA, 2006).

4.3  Leisure-Oriented Migration and Tourism Dynamics Conventional tourist flows intermingle and continuously overlap with other types of mobility patterns and closely resemble leisure-oriented migration (Parreño-­ Castellano & Domínguez-Mújica, 2016). The result is the configuration of a complex system of actors and relationships in which it is often difficult to specify the boundaries between different types of mobility and residential strategies

2  The purchase of homes by Britons in the province of Alicante was 18.3% of the total operations carried out with foreigners in 2018, when in 2015 it amounted to 27.6% (Ineca, 2018).

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(Giner-Monfort & Simó-Noguera, 2019; Huete & Mantecón, 2012). This situation creates challenges. The local administration of many municipalities is determined by the existence of a population that floats between conventional tourism, long-stay tourism in private accommodation and different types of seasonal and permanent migration (Gustafson, 2002; Rodríguez 2001; Salvà, 2002; O’Reilly, 2003). All of this allows to identify very diverse residential patterns. Administrative under-­ registration, a structural problem linked to these dynamics, makes it difficult to plan the resources to meet the needs of all residents: cleaning services, police, health personnel in hospitals and health centres, energy supply, etc. (Huete & Mantecón, 2012). Municipal management is further complicated by the peculiar socio-spatial distribution of the population and, in particular, the tendency of some nationalities to settle in urban-ethnic islands that are socially and geographically separated from traditional urban centres. This concentration in certain places that are somewhat distant from the historic centres of municipalities has not changed since the economic crisis (O’Reilly, 2017). Some cases are very striking. For example, the municipality of San Fulgencio accounted for 77 percent of the foreign population in 2005 and in which 52 percent of the population lives within a gated community located 5.5  km away from the town centre. Baptized with the idyllic name of La Marina-Oasis, this neighbourhood concentrates 6110 people out of 7943 foreign residents in the municipality. The same situation has occurred in many other towns and is often reported on by the Spanish local media, though such reports do not seem to generate much controversy (Huete & Mantecón, 2011).

4.3.1  Leisure-Oriented Migration Between 1998 and 2012 the population residing in the Alicante province from the EU15 (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and UK) increased by 182,996 people, from 57,156 (75.5 percent of resident foreigners registered) to 240,152 (74.7 percent of resident foreigners registered). The economic crisis of 2007–2008 interrupted this trend, with a decrease of 110,005 people between 2012 (240,152) and 2018 (130,147) (INE, 2019). The annual rates of variation in the foreign population were negative from 2013 to 2017. They did not become positive until 2018 (when it seems that a timid new phase of growth began). Figure 4.1 shows the pattern for all residents in the province of Alicante from the EU15 (excluding Spain). The pattern described by the graph was repeated, with small variations, in terms of European nationalities with a more significant presence. The data is shown in Table 4.1. Figure 4.1 and Table  4.1 show the decrease in nationalities related to leisure-­ oriented residential mobility flows after 2012. In the case of the Alicante province, these flows are made up primarily of people over age 55, retired persons, pre-retired persons and spouses (Huete et  al., 2013; Rodríguez et  al., 2010). In many

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Fig. 4.1  Population Trends of the EU15 (Excluding Spain) Resident in Alicante Province (Total). (Source: Official population figures from Spanish municipalities: Revision of the Municipal Register. Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE))

municipalities of the Costa Blanca, foreigners over age 65 account for over 50 percent of resident elders. This is the case in Calpe, L’Alfas del Pi, La Nucia and Teulada, where four in five people over age 65 are foreigners. The stark statistical variation identified by official registers is related to updates of the municipal register (the demographic database at the municipal level). On January 1, 2014, a data cleaning process took place of municipal registries that required the removal of thousands of people that had passed away or had emigrated, either to their country of origin or to another country.3 This caused concerns in the national and international press about a massive exodus of the population, when in reality it was no more than a statistical operation that had very important consequences in some municipalities, particularly those which had not paid much attention to removing people from the registries who no longer lived in the municipality. For example, Calpe decreased in population from 29,442 to 24,387, which has important consequences in terms of municipal income, but also in the number of council members that represent the population in city hall. Beyond these technical questions, the data show a change in the sociodemographic context. In 2005, the nationalities with the most numerous presence in the Alicante province were British (78,738 residents), German (29,448), Ecuadorian  The Municipal Register is the administrative register where municipality residents are recorded. Its formation, maintenance, revision and custody correspond to the respective Town Councils, who must submit the monthly variations that occur in Municipal register data to the National Statistics Institute (INE). By law, community residents must renew their enrolment on the register every five years, but not everyone does. 3

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Table 4.1  Trends in the Principal European Nationalities (Excluding Spain) Resident in Alicante Province Year 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998

United Kingdom 67,883 66,397 74,349 86,685 93,048 130,541 132,473 131,058 130,302 127,561 121,813 109,429 95,374 78,738 58,149 53,462 40,002 32,452 33,321 30,176 23,019

Germany 14,148 14,285 16,918 19,994 22,269 35,916 36,49 36,331 36,543 36,197 35,395 33,462 31,723 29,448 26,507 31,9 26,61 22,708 22,158 18,858 13,676

Netherlands 12,408 11,954 12,745 13,645 14,087 17,192 17,310 16,810 16,499 15,991 15,366 14,249 13,078 11,503 9900 11,007 9493 8341 8640 7642 5738

Belgium 8778 7957 7762 8137 8247 11,385 11,075 10,818 10,655 10,405 10,177 9640 9203 8528 7678 9099 8117 7066 7140 6235 4597

France 8164 7876 8237 8,55 9151 11,814 11,741 11,369 11,258 10,951 10,477 9607 9061 7887 6971 7936 7024 6258 6526 6052 4566

Norway 5697 5152 6929 7763 7957 10,486 10,308 9939 9693 9471 9212 8616 7985 7113 5843 6429 5048 3879 3611 3000 2303

Sweden 3385 3107 3502 3987 4410 6895 6723 6483 6200 6107 5927 5414 5016 4509 3847 4974 4235 3446 3218 2547 1877

Source: Official population figures from Spanish municipalities: Revision of the Municipal Register. Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE)

(26,531), Moroccan (21,548) and Colombian (19,859). This signalled the differentiation between the EU population who was primarily motivated by the search for leisure experiences- most were immersed in projects characterized by active ageing (and British and German people were the most numerous)- and the foreign population from outside of the EU, who were younger and mostly motivated by work opportunities (Ecuadorians, Moroccans and Colombians were the most numerous groups). In general terms, this bifurcation continued during the period of the economic crisis (Huete et al., 2013). However, some important changes occurred over time. The five most numerous nationalities by 2019 were the British (69,289), Moroccan (41,407), Algerian (16,586), Colombian (14,414), and German (13,794). The new top five reflect migratory movements structured by the dichotomy between leisure (Britons and Germans) and work (Moroccans, Algerians, and Colombians). There has been a significant decrease in the first group and a transformation in the composition of the second group in the sense that the presence of the North African population calls into question the relevance that Latin American migratory flows have had in the past.

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4.3.2  Tourism There has been constant increase in air traffic at the Alicante Airport, which ranked fifth in Spain in 2018 (after Madrid, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca and Malaga) (AENA, 2019). The stability of international markets has consolidated a trend by which, from 1991 to 2017, international demand in terms of the total flow of passengers increased by 20 points (from 70% to 90%). Thus, international demand is clearly responsible for the continuous increases in airport traffic (see Fig. 4.2). However, it should be noted that Spanish-origin tourism in the Costa Blanca takes place through other means of transport (private vehicles, bus, train) in which there is a minority presence of foreigners. Specifically, in 2013, a high-speed train route began operation between Alicante and Madrid, which considerably reduced the length of the train ride from Alicante to the centre of the country and drew Spanish passengers that would have otherwise travelled by airplane. Figure 4.3 shows the trend in tourism in terms of accommodation in hotels in the Alicante province. In this case, both domestic as well as international demand reflect similar behaviour. After a phase of growth in the years prior to the crisis, a period of decline later gave way to an immediate new phase of growth. This last phase reflects the more moderate rate of growth in the case of Spanish-origin demand and the most intense growth in the case of foreigners. Nevertheless, a similar trend in domestic and international hotel demand seems to support the idea that the lower flow of Spanish-origin passengers at the airport is being compensated for by the arrival of Spanish tourists via other means of transportation. If we look at the trend in accommodation units at hotels, both in the region of Valencia and the province of Alicante, there is moderate but constant growth. As shown in Fig. 4.4, the hotel industry was barely affected by the economic crisis. In any case, the problems experienced were not sufficiently serious as to de-incentivize investment in this type of business. Hotels, which are a traditional form of

Fig. 4.2 Trend in Passengers Arriving from International Airports at Alicante Airport. (Source: AENA)

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Fig. 4.3  Evolution of Tourist Demand in Alicante Province (Hotels Only). (Source: Tourism Statistics from the Government of the Region of Valencia. TCV)

Fig. 4.4  Trends in Hotel Units in the Region of Valencia and the Province of Alicante (2001–2018). (Source: Tourism Statistics from the Government of the Region of Valencia. TCV)

accommodation and representative of the tourist industry, have not been seriously threatened in recent decades, as shown in Fig. 4.3. Eventually, the consumption crisis that began in Spain in 2008 did not generate a crisis in the tourism sector; rather, it reinforced the relevance of the tourism sector compared to other sources of economic activities. Thus, tourism went from contributing 11.849 billion euros to the gross domestic product of the region of Valencia in

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2011 (11.8% of the total) to 15.929 billion in 2017 (14.5%). This impact has also been noteworthy in terms of employment, although it has not grown by the same proportions. According to data compiled by Exceltur and Turisme Comunitat Valenciana, in 2017 (the most recent statistical data available at the time of writing) there were 288,000 jobs linked to tourism (44,000 more than in 2011), which means that tourism went from accounting for 13.1 percent to 15.1 percent of total employment in the region of Valencia (Exceltur, 2018).

4.3.3  Real-Estate Market A comparison of the data on the dynamics of the Northern European population living in the province of Alicante with statistics related to air traffic, trends in hotel units, and hotel demand could warrant the following hypothesis: the impacts of the economic crisis on leisure-oriented mobility flows towards the Costa Blanca have been more concentrated in terms of the real estate sector than the tourism sector. This idea is supported by comparing trends in the construction of new homes (see Figs. 4.5 and 4.6). The slowdown in construction activity in the province of Alicante began earlier than in the broader contexts of the Region of Valencia and in Spain in general. However, as can be seen in Figs. 4.5 and 4.6, in the transition from 2006 to 2009 the construction industry experienced a collapse at all levels. The province of Alicante

Fig. 4.5  Total Housing Constructed in Spain (2001–2017). (Source: Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda. Estimate of the housing stock)

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Fig. 4.6  Total Housing Constructed in the Region of Valencia and in the Province of Alicante (2001–2017). (Source: Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda. Estimate of the housing stock)

began to recover in 2012, the Region of Valencia in 2013 and Spain in 2014, although they all registered construction levels far from those reached in the peak years of the real estate boom, which began at the end of the 1990s. In terms of the evolution of prices, real estate values began to recover stability in 2014, and only in some coastal municipalities that specialized in the construction of secondary homes (Santa Pola and Torrevieja in the South of the province and Denia and Jávea in the North). In fact, the possibilities of recovery of the real estate sector in the Costa Blanca traversed the demand for real estate by foreign residents in Spain who were interested in this type of housing. Because of the weaknesses in mortgage lending that persisted in the province since the collapse of the real estate sector and the beginning of the crisis, this was a market whose capital would come either from people’s own savings or from the financial resources brought from abroad. Therefore, the uncertainty generated by Brexit is not only concerning for British residents in Spain, but it also jeopardizes the future viability of the real estate sector in the province of Alicante, especially considering that Britons are the most numerous group of foreigners and, after the Spanish, the second largest housing market in the Costa Blanca. It is worth noting that, after the crises, the construction sector experienced a credit restriction that made it difficult for real estate developers to start new building projects. At the same time, access to housing financing levels that were normal before 2007–2008 are now limited. The result has been a reduction in market dynamism. In the case of the real estate market in the province of Alicante, which is so dependent on foreign demand, a contraction of consumption by British residents would be catastrophic.

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In one way or another, after five decades of massive construction, there is increasingly limited opportunity for the real estate economy to offer interesting products in the province of Alicante, since the land available for urbanization is running out in those municipalities that have spent years betting on residential expansion (Martí-­ Ciriquián et al. 2018). Releasing protected or non-developable land to continue with past actions would aggravate the degradation of natural resources that attract visitors. In addition, this refers to a geographical context that has already been subject to intense urban pressure for too long. Before the collapse of the real estate bubble, the region of Valencia had already constructed buildings on around 40 percent of its coastal strip (the area within two kilometres in proximity to the sea), with growth in the number of towns in which more than half of the land is urbanized or qualified as developable (OSE, 2006). Due to the crisis, the municipalities with the most marked tourist real estate expansion ended up with indebtedness and budget deficits, an unemployed population and a remarkably damaged environment. This reduced the ability of these localities to find alternatives for development. The decision of these municipalities to continue to promote urbanization and tourism is complicated, because although tourism is an economic activity that is based on private offerings, the quality assurance needed for infrastructure requires services normally provided by the municipalities themselves. Therefore, after the crisis, these municipalities encountered financing problems to cover the needs that had been created (Perles et al. 2018).

4.4  Is this a Win-Win Relationship? The strength of the tourist economy (both in Alicante and Spain) has allowed the province, and the whole country, to survive the most difficult stages of the economic crisis. While it is true that the economic crisis disrupted the growth of the tourism sector, it is also true that the sector suffered much less than the real estate sector, which experienced total collapse. During the worst times of the crisis, the tourist economy showed its strength, though there was a brief and recognizable break in the pattern of growth. It is precisely the strength of the tourism sector together with the increase in exports that has facilitated the beginning of a new stage of economic growth. The repercussions on the economy as a whole have also served to boost domestic consumption. Without a doubt, the most critical effects have been borne by the real estate economy. The confluence between the tourist economy and the real estate economy has served both sectors in their ability to obtain spectacular benefits during the past stages of expansion and wealth creation. However, during periods of crisis and economic recession, the construction sector is much weaker and tries to protect its interests by adhering to the tourism sector. Without the burden of the real estate business, the tourism economy of the Costa Blanca would be able to undertake more solid and sustainable socioeconomic development projects that would be aimed at consumers with greater purchasing power.

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For five decades, the real estate sector has presented itself to public opinion as a driver of residential tourism (Gaviria, 1974; Jurdao, 1979). This was an advertising strategy that was aimed at two basic objectives: a) to disguise as tourism development that which in reality is the construction industry and real estate business; and b) to hide the fact that most of the sector’s business initiatives have degraded the value of tourism, a product that the sector has an interest in supporting (by destroying the environment, saturating urbanized municipalities, overpopulating public spaces and favouring the expansion of a real estate market that is prone to informal economies, which generates problems such as tax fraud or lack of safety. Hosts, guests and neighbours are exposed to this lack of safety given that they reside in homes not designated to serve as tourist accommodations (Mantecón, 2017; Martí-­ Ciriquián et al., 2018). The acceptance of this situation is based on a latent consensus between politicians, businesspersons and some citizens that supports any action as long as it is economically viable and acquires value in the market. Thus, the protection of natural environments in places where there is potential tourist interest has remained subject to the interests of the real estate economy (González & Mantecón, 2014). This publicity strategy has been highly valued by those who benefit from its promotion. The strategy is based on mutual interests and historical relationships established between real estate businesspeople and local political elites. The connections prompted day after day of local newspaper articles during the years of the real estate boom, reflecting the controversial actions carried out by both parties in clear collusion. The media reported on suspicions that surrounded the approval of different urban development plans in environments that had been protected or in those in which real estate business people or local elites (or someone close to them) owned property (some of which were acquired just before the approval of the city councils for changes to the use of the land). Some of those complaints resulted in court rulings that ended with mayors in jail. The political and urban corruption scandals later prompted the power networks of politicians and real estate businesspeople to clean up their acts in the post-crisis stage. This was carried out in part through payments for publicity in media outlets and legitimization through financing seminars and “expert” talks at universities to sway public opinion and hide the fact that there are economic activities unrelated to tourism that operate behind the label of “residential tourism”. Beyond these questions, both the real estate sector and the tourism sector should support a truly sustainable economic development model. This model should improve labour conditions for workers and therefore the quality of life of the region. The province of Alicante continues to experience more intense economic growth than the rest of Spain (although the pace of this growth experienced a slowdown during 2017–2018), however, pre-crisis levels of employment have not been recuperated. The existing employment is of poor quality and is characterized by excessive use of temporary, short-term contracts. In addition, there are many part-time contracts of professional profiles that do not require a high level of qualification. The transition to a regional more competitive, economic model would require a political, social and cultural context that supports entrepreneurs having enough

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training and capacity for innovation. This would help to raise low levels of productivity without putting workers into precarious situations and without continuing to offer low-quality products destined for consumers with low expectations and low purchasing power. The results of the referendum held in June of 2016 in the UK served as a point of departure in the EU for the reinterpretation of tourism and post-Brexit travel. The existing uncertainty promotes all sorts of speculative discourses: there is mention of possible travel interruptions, of new types of border crossing between the UK and the EU, the introduction of visas and new bureaucratic requirements, the reintroduction of roaming service charges, and of serious impacts on the flow of travellers to second residences, etc. Nothing is a given in a world characterized by constant change, with continual reconfigurations in the dynamics of leisure-oriented migrations and in the tourism market. It is impossible to predict the future effects of global challenges such as climate change and the increase in weather extremes, a possible increase in the costs of oil and air transportation due to the pressure of environmental activists in Europe or the reappearance of political instability in tourist destinations that compete with Spain such as Turkey or Tunisia (which are currently gaining stature in the international tourism market). Furthermore, the global mobility system has been severely disrupted by the Covid-19 crisis. In the Alicante province, its most immediate effects differ from those of the 2007–2008 crisis. As is to be expected, mobility restrictions are initially more detrimental to the tourism industry than to the real estate sector. It is still early to understand the structural changes in lifestyles and consumer habits that this health crisis will bring about. We also do not know if in the coming years a majority of people will associate health risks with a particular period of time (already past), or if those risks will become a key factor that will influence our decisions. Thus, we indubitably find ourselves in an uncertain world marked by constant change in global mobility.

References AENA (2019). Relevant figures. Retrieved from: http://www.aena.es/en/corporate/relevant-­ figures.html Exceltur (2018). Impactur. Estudio del impacto económico del turismo sobre la economía y el empleo en la Comunitat Valenciana, 2017. Retrieved from: https://www.exceltur.org/wp-­ content/uploads/2018/12/IMPACTUR-­Comunidad-­Valenciana-­2017.pdf Gaviria, M. (1974). La producción neocolonialista del espacio. Papers. Revista de Sociología, 3, 201–217. Giner-Monfort, J. (2018). End to dream? British retired residents in Spain and their return patterns. Journal of Spatial and Organizational Dynamics, 6(4), 360–374. Giner-Monfort, J., & Huete, R. (2020). Uncertain sunset lives: British migrants facing Brexit in Spain. European Urban and Regional Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/2F0969776420972148

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Giner-Monfort, J., & Simó-Noguera, C. (2019). La intersección del turismo y la migración de población extranjera en la Marina Alta (Alacant). In A. Álvarez-Sousa, A.  Mantecón, & I. Puertas-Cañaveral (Eds.), Sociología del turismo (pp. 271–297). CIS. Giner-Monfort, J., Hall, K., & Betty, C. (2016). Back to brit: Retired British migrants returning from Spain. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42(5), 797–815. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1369183X.2015.1100068 González, R., & Mantecón, A. (2014). Turismo y negocio inmobiliario: la crisis de un modelo de desarrollo. Tres estudios de caso de Canadá. Argentina y España. Estudios y Perspectivas en Turismo, 23(4), 685–705. Gustafson, P. (2002). Tourism and seasonal retirement migration. Annals of Tourism Research, 29(4), 899–918. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0160-­7383(01)00084-­6 Hall, K., & Hardill, I. (2016). Retirement migration, the ‘other’ story: Caring for frail elderly British citizens in Spain. Ageing and Society, 36(3), 562–585. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0144686X14001342 Huete, R. (2009). Turistas que llegan para quedarse. Una explicación sociológica sobre la movilidad residencial. Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante. Huete, R., & Mantecón, A. (2011). Más allá del turismo: movilidad residencial europea y nuevos núcleos urbanos. Boletín de la Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles, 56, 111–128. Huete, R., & Mantecón, A. (2012). Residential tourism or lifestyle migration. Social problems linked to the non-definition of the situation. In O. Moufakkir & P. Burns (Eds.), Controversies in tourism (pp. 160–173). CABI. Huete, R., Mantecón, A., & Estévez, J. (2013). Challenges in lifestyle migration research: Reflections and findings about the Spanish crisis. Mobilities, 8(3), 331–348. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/17450101.2013.814236 INE – National Statistics Institute (2019). Official population figures from Spanish municipalities: Revision of the Municipal Register. Retrieved from https://www.ine.es/dynt3/inebase/es/index. htm?type=pcaxis&file=pcaxis&path=%2Ft20%2Fe245%2Fp05%2F%2Fa2019 INECA  - Instituto de Estudios Económicos de la Provincia de Alicante (2018). El Brexit y el alcance económico sobre la provincia de Alicante en 2018. Retrieved from: https://ineca-­ alicante.es/wp-­content/uploads/2018/09/201809-­estudio-­brexit-­completo-­web.pdf Jurdao, F. (1979). España en Venta. Compra de suelos por extranjeros y colonización de campesinos en la Costa del Sol. Ayuso. Mantecón, A. (2017). The residential tourism does not exist. A concept review and critique of its ideological function. Cuadernos de Turismo, 40, 693–696. https://doi.org/10.6018/ turismo.40.310041 Martí-Ciriquián, P., Nolasco-Cirugeda, A., & Serrano-Estrada, L. (2018). Estrategias de ocupación territorial en áreas turísticas consolidadas de la Costa Blanca (España). Boletín de la Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles, 76, 430–454. https://doi.org/10.21138/bage.2529 Miller, R. G. (2019). (un)settling home during the Brexit process. Population, Space and Place, 25, e2203. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2203 Ministry of transport, mobility and urban agenda (2019). Estimate of the housing stock. Retrieved from: https://apps.fomento.gob.es/BoletinOnline2/?nivel=2&orden=33000000 Morote, A.  F., & Hernández, M. (2016). Población extranjera y turismo residencial en el litoral de Alicante (1960-2011): repercusiones territoriales. EURE - Revista de Estudios Urbano Regionales, 42(126), 55–76. O’Reilly, K. (2003). When is a tourist? The articulation of tourism and migration in Spain’s Costa del Sol. Tourist Studies, 3(3), 301–317. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797603049661 O’Reilly, K. (2017). The British on the Costa del Sol twenty years on: A story of liquids and sediments. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 7(3), 139–147. https://doi.org/10.1515/ njmr-­2017-­0017 OOA  - Observatorio Ocupacional de Alicante. (2006). Mercado de trabajo de la Provincia de Alicante 2006. Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales e INEM.

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OSE - Observatorio de la Sostenibilidad en España. (2006). Cambios de ocupación del suelo en España. Ministerio de Fomento. Parreño-Castellano, J., & Domínguez-Mújica, J. (2016). Working and retiring in sunny Spain: Lifestyle migration further explored. Hungarian Geographical Bulletin, 65(4), 407–420. https://doi.org/10.15201/hungeobull.65.4.8 Perles, J. F., Ramón, A., Vera, J. F., & Ivars, J. (2018). The end of growth in residential tourism destinations: Steady state or sustainable development? The case of Calpe. Current Issues in Tourism, 21(12), 1355–1385. https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2016.1276522 Rodríguez, V. (2001). Tourism as a recruiting post for retirement migration. Tourism Geographies, 3, 52–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461668001000870 Rodríguez, V., Lardiés, R., Rodríguez, P. (2010). Migration and the registration of European pensioners in Spain. ARI 20/2010. Retrieved from: http://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/wps/ portal/rielcano_en/contenido?WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT=/elcano/elcano_in/zonas_in/ ARI20-­2010 Salvà, P. (2002). Foreign immigration and tourism development in Spain’s Balearic Islands. In C. M. Hall & A. M. Williams (Eds.), Tourism and migration. New relationships between production and consumption (pp. 119–134). Kluwer Academic Publishers. TCV (Turisme Comunitat Valenciana) (2019) Official tourism statistics from region of Valencia government. Retrieved from: https://www.turisme.gva.es

Chapter 5

Global Mobility and Migration in the Cities of the Patagonian Andes: Emerging Diversity Susana M. Sassone and Myriam S. González

5.1  Introduction In this liquid world, following Zygmunt Bauman (2000), recent mobilities contribute, for example, to the displacement of both workers and refugees, tourists and travellers, middle- and high-class skilled migrants, among others. In addition, there are people who look for new places to live, where they can enjoy a quiet life and be in contact with nature, qualities offered by mountain cities in Patagonian Andes in Argentina. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, this country has received international migration flows and in this second millennium, the origins have multiplied as a result of globalization. If we consider all the regions in Argentina, the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires and the Patagonia are those that show the greatest presence of both migrants and diversity of origins. While the former is identified as a Latin American metropolis in which socio- spatial inequalities and complexities are typical (Sassone & Matossian, 2014), the latter is a vast region in which the percentage of foreigners over the total population is 7.2 per cent; above the national average, which is 4.5 per cent (Sassone et al., 2010, 2011). Its population is mainly concentrated in cities and towns; some lying on the coastal Atlantic; others in the few, though fertile river valleys; and the rest in the Andes sector, identified as the Argentine Patagonian Andes (hereinafter Patagonian Andes), which is the topic of this study. The aim of this chapter is to explain the population change in the mountain cities of the Patagonian Andes in relation to the growing presence of international migration of diverse origins. These new types of mobilities and global migrations seek

S. M. Sassone (*) CONICET National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Buenos Aires, Argentina M. S. González National University of Patagonia SJB, Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_5

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new residencies, attracted by a privileged environment of mountings, forests, lakes, rivers and waterfalls, with temperate to cold climates, which differs so much in summer and winter. This situation challenges the territorial development approach, as it is known that the participation of migrants and their families in urban life creates both positive and negative local impacts. On the one hand, they encourage different demands of services; influence the urban land market, some of them as investors with a high purchasing power; demand housing aids; or may promote new economic activities or else foster new touristic products and even contribute to the local cultural expressions, among other aspects. However, on the other hand, all that glitters in not gold. There arise certain conflictive situations such as competition between the traditional productive uses and the recreational or contemplative ones; a population growth accompanied by pressure over rural areas and/or by protection; or an over- division into plots conditioned by investment and real estate speculation; a growing gap between the social classes; etc. Bondel (2008) considers that the heterogeneous cultural and socio- economic profile of the urban societies in the Patagonian Andes present itself in complex territorial tensions. The Mapuches and paisanos, Argentine urban and rural migrants, Chilean migrants, traditional and non- traditional settlers relate themselves with different belonging and use patterns, for example, the Welsh settlers in the Province of Chubut. These diversities lead us to think of the regimes of mobility (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2012) when they propose to explore the relationships between the privileged movements of some and the co-dependent migratory movements of those with fewer resources. That perspective would mean not only to analysing the international migration and the tourism. There are two methodological strategies used. On the one hand, the quantitative analysis from the information provided by census to define the urban and regional migration composition; and, on the other hand, the qualitative analysis from secondary bibliographical sources, local and regional information provided by the media, plus that provided by the local governments of the subregion. For the quantitative analysis, the 2010 Population and Housing Census (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos República Argentina, 2010) was used and two resources were chosen. Firstly, entries from basic forms corresponding to Question 6 (P6), available at national, provincial (P6-P) and departmental (P6-D) scale were used “Total population born abroad, by place of birth, according to sex and age group”.1 On a second stage, and with the intention of identifying the urban places and their composition by country of birth, the use of Redatam Database for the 2010 Population and Housing Census. The process assumed statistical filters to identify, in a final stage, the cities with diversity of origins in the Patagonian Andes. This chapter is divided into three parts. In the first one, the conceptual approaches surrounding the new global regimes of mobility, which cross migrations and new tourism types, between another, are presented. In the second place, the diverse 1  The Argentina census considers place of birth (of foreigners) in general and refers to country of birth when each one is distinguished. In this chapter, we talk about the country of birth and the category “origin” refers to the differentiation of the countries of birth from the foreign population, that is, the residential migrants captured by this source.

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migratory composition of the Patagonian Andes, as a subregion that exercises a unique attraction precisely for its magnificent natural scenarios, is characterized. In the third place, the cities of diversity in mountain destinations, with a heterogeneous social configuration – which has become stronger in times of globalization – are analysed.

5.2  I ntersections Between Mobilities and Migrations: Conceptual Approaches Debates on mobility turn in social sciences started in the nineties in response to the increase on movement and flows of people, goods and information between societies. Mobility is directly related to the concept of place as has been conceived since the postmodern theorization of spatiality (Thrift, 1996), by means of which places are in constant movement, exposed to continuous rearrangements and reconfigurations. This is the new paradigm of mobility based on relationships of power, the creation of identities and microgeographies of daily life (Creswell, 2011, 551). This epistemological change in social sciences, as expressed by Sheller and Urry (2006), leads to the understanding of two of the phenomena reflecting such changes: tourism and migration and, by extension, the need to rethink the relationship between them. The new types of mobility give rise to different types of tourists, residents and migrants, in which the limits between tourism and migration are increasingly blurred. It is difficult to distinguish between places of production and consumption touristic, between tourism and labor or lifestyle migration and to understand how tourism encourages or withholds migration flows and the latter creates the same effect on tourism (Morales & Rainer, 2013). Thus, it is possible to identify overlaps between the mobilities of tourism itself and those generated by other economic or professional activities or else by the migration movements from and towards themselves (Sheller & Urry, 2004). Intersections of several mobilities take place in the mountain destinations of the Patagonian Andes’ cities. This situation derives in a conceptual difficulty due to very types of mobilities and residencies which cross labor migration or by amenity. In the last case, different expressions have been used: the already mentioned one (Moss, 2006; Nakayama et  al., 2005; González, 2011), or lifestyle migration (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009; McIntyre et al., 2006; McIntyre, 2012; Parreño-Castellano & Domínguez-Mujica, 2016), or residential migration (Huete & Mantecón, 2010; Mantecón, 2017; Salvá, 2005, 2011). Simancas et  al. (2018) refer to a lack of consensus among names, typologies and classification criteria and Rainer (2019) restates that similarities and differences are object of debate in the field of literature and concludes that migration by amenity may be coupled and even associated with lifestyle migration as synonyms, reaffirming its connection with speculative urbanization and real estate business. These categories are briefly explained below.

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Migration by amenity is when the peoples ‘change of permanent residence to certain places due to the existence –or their subjective perception– of determined natural and cultural attractions to achieve a better quality of living (Moss, 2006). Considered as a world tendency, people with high purchasing power migrate from metropolis to small cities or towns, specially mountain destinations or with privileged environmental conditions, in which the cultural and environmental quality is perceived as superior to the quality of their prior places of residence (González et al., 2009); in this sense, it refers to people who used to be tourists in a certain destination and decide to return in order to become inhabitants (Nakayama et al., 2005). These new residents move to mountain towns and cities, led by a strong appreciation of the natural environment, cultural differentiation and leisure, learning and spirituality (Moss, 2006), with low levels of contamination and noise (Hidalgo & Zunino, 2011). This counter-urbanization has been recently analysed in some mountain areas in the world in the United States, Canada, Costa Rica, the European Alps, Norway, Sweden, Philippines, Australia and New Zeland, included Argentina (Moss, 2006). In the case of the Patagonian Andes, both in Argentina and Chile, this process is shown in numerous studies (Otero et  al., 2006; Sánchez & González, 2011; Hidalgo & Zunino, 2012; Otero & Zunino, 2014; Rodríguez et al., 2016; Zunino et al., 2016; Marenzana et al., 2018; Espinoza et al., 2019). In the Anglo-Saxon academic world, the expression lifestyle migration is highlighted. Some people refer to lifestyle mobilities (Cohen et al., 2013) as the result of the intersection between travel, leisure, and migration. The term lifestyle migration denotes to the individual and/or familiar search of a better standard of living and vital sense, all which triggers migration. It distinguishes from migrations by economic reasons (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009), which is not necessarily related to privileged natural environments; it may be a relocation to other places, even in private urbanizations. According to McIntyre (2009), this implies a conscious decision conditioned by the desire to achieve a better and more satisfactory life. This migration sometimes supposes long movements to relatively remote or peripheral areas in relation to world centers with the economic control of the globalization (Zunino et al., 2016). On the other hand, the expressions residential tourism and residential migration have been used indistinctively (Huete & Mantecón, 2010) to refer to a varied group of processes which are difficult to delimit, and which can be seen in the touristic places in the north coast of the Mediterranean. In addition, this type brings up intense economical activities surrounding the real estate business couple with aspects of traditional tourism and they are related, in turn, with some new migration ways and of residency (Huete et al., 2008). Residential tourism may be associated to different categories of mobilities which are temporal as second residencies (Hiernaux, 2012), or those of the retired or about to retire (Salvà, 2011), always motivated by leisure or prior touristic experiences. In turn, Rode (2008) has suggested the concept of tourism induced by migration to refer to visitors who resort to places in which certain migrants offer new services related to tourism. Mountain touristic centers are privileged destinations of these new modes all over the world, whose varieties are difficult to distinguish. These cities have a

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combination of beautiful, cosmopolitan and exotic, though social and environmentally degraded, landscapes (González et al., 2009). In the case under consideration, surroundings and contact with nature are decisive factors when settling down in those places, while those destinations may evidence contradictions and negative environmental, social, and economic impacts on the local development. Literature about mountain tourism destinations in Argentina is relevant (Otero et  al., 2006; Marchissio, 2007; Otero et al., 2008; González et al., 2009; Matossian et al., 2014; Marenzana et al., 2018) and negative impacts such as land division, plotting and foreign ownership of rural lands, which create diffuse urbanization models, have become a frequent topic (Sánchez & González, 2011). The real estate business puts pressure on the place´ s natural heritage, as in most cases it advances over fragile areas from the environmental point of view (Otero & Zunino, 2014). In addition, according to Hidalgo and Zunino (2011), these migrants may turn themselves into agents of transformation with positive impacts in the places that embrace them, as they may introduce innovations because of the social and cultural capital they own.

5.3  Patagonian Andes and Diversity of Origins Diverse nature on stage and several social profiles make Patagonia attractive. It is made up of five Argentinean provinces: Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego, Antártida e Islas del Atlántico Sur (or the brief expression, Tierra del Fuego). As such, it has been integrated to the territory of the Argentinean State for no more than 150 years and it is characterized by the creation of towns, some of which have become cities decades afterwards, thanked to the road construction, the base of the territorial articulation -though unfinished-, and to the economic growth. Those strategies of territorial organization have contributed to the touristic expansion. With 5.24 per cent of the total population of the country (2,100,188 in relation to 40,117,096 inhabitants in 2010), it is the least populated - though most extensive- area in Argentina. In contrast, its relative growth is very high at a national level (in 2010–2001 it was 21 in relation to the national average of 11 per cent). Its provinces, on their own, have grown much more, as is the case of Santa Cruz (39 per cent) or Chubut (23 per cent). This terrae incognitae was inhabited by pioneers, settlers, explorers and more recently by migrants, tourists, and the new world travellers. Its social composition is formed by indigenous populations, Argentineans coming from other corners of the country and migrants from the rest of the world, in addition to their descendants, who keep the identities of their ancestors; a complex, heterogeneous and diverse social mosaic crossed by logics in tension. Such a composition, innate to the micro-­ societies of the cities and towns of this southern region, promotes an incipient curiosity on the part of scientists. It should be remembered that an 8.3 per cent of the foreigners in the country live in the Patagonia. Río Negro is the province with the greatest number of migrants, followed by Neuquén. Chilean migrants are, by far, the most numerous group, even though they do not keep active. Bolivians, Paraguayans,

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Uruguayans, Peruvians and Brazilians follow them; in conclusion, all Latin Americans. In the case of the European residents, the leading ones are Spanish, Italians, French and Germans. Two sub- regions are distinguished in this region. On the one hand, the so called Extrandina Patagonia, the coastal Atlantic and the almost unattainable plateau in the interior such as Somuncurá or Macizo Deseado; and on the other hand, the Patagonian Andes. It is worth considering that the most inhabited areas are in the first (72.6 per cent), mainly distributed in all the cities in the coastal Atlantic: Viedma, Puerto Madryn, Comodoro Rivadavia, Río Gallegos or Río Grande, among the main ones, as well as the area known as Alto Valle del Río Negro. The Patagonian Andes, regarding its delimitation and in relation to the territorial organization in cities and towns, is identified by departmental jurisdictions of the five provinces, which are in contact with the frontier with Chile. They are shown in Table 5.1. Patagonian Andes is divided into 20 departments in the five provinces: eight in the province of Neuquén: Minas, Ñorquin, Loncopué, Picunches Aluminé. Huiliches, Lácar and Los Lagos; Bariloche in the province of de Río Negro; five in the province of Chubut: Cushamen, Futaleufú, Languiñeo, Tehuelches and Río Senguer; four in the province of Santa Cruz: Lago Buenos Aires, Río Chico, Lago Argentino and Güer Aike; and two in the province of Tierra del Fuego: Río Grande and Ushuaia. Its total population amounts to 575.636 inhabitants (27.4 per cent of the regional population). In contrast to what should be expected, the population born in Chile is not as numerous as in prior censuses. Table 5.2 evaluates three variables for each unit area: a) Percentage of Foreigner Population in relation to Total Population FP/ TP %. b) Percentage of Chileans in relation to Total Foreigners CHI/FP%. and c) Number of Origins N°O. According to the respective sub-regional averages, the tendency to diversity operates under three conditions: high to very high FP/ TP % (greater than 7.98%), medium to low percentage of CHI/ FP% (69.55%) and number of origins (above average, 29.2% cent). Taking the first and third selected variables into account, an analysis is made based on the sub- regional average values of both. This gives rise to a typology of departments related with the presence of foreigners and the diversity of origins (Fig. 5.1). Therefore, this results in four groups of departments: type 1. high to very high percentage of foreigners and many origins; type 2. low percentage of foreigners and many origins; type 3. high percentage of foreigners and few origins and finally type 4. low percentage of foreigners and few origins. Considering the aim of this study, the analysis is focused on the departments of groups 1 and 2 (and in their cities). It is worth mentioning that Rio Grande and Güer Aike are not included, although they belong to type 1. most of their population does not correspond to the Andes area. In this way, the attention is on the analysis of migration diversity in the Patagonian Andes in the urban centers of seven departments: Lácar, Los Lagos, Bariloche, Cushamen. Futaleufú, Lago Argentino and Ushuaia. New and varied migratory processes in the region, within the framework of the new paradigm of mobility, reflect an increasingly flexible and mobile society. Sheller and Urry (2006) tell us that the intersecting mobilities (and immobilities)

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Table 5.1  Patagonian Andes: Total Population (TP) and Foreign Population (FP) by country of birth at a departmental level, in absolute and relative values. 2010 FP Foreign Population

Countries of birth s % Rest % Rest Bordering Countries TP Countries in FP/ % Total Province Departments Population Number TP % Chile and Perú America Neuquén Minas 7234 98 1.38 77.55 14.28 3.06 Ñorquín 4692 61 1.31 75.4 8 8.19 Loncopué 6925 120 1.85 83.33 16.7 – Picunches 7022 153 2.38 85.62 10.45 1.96 Aluminé 8306 310 4.91 76.77 11.29 2.25 Huiliches 14,725 341 2.68 70.96 17 3.81 Lácar 29,748 2.227 9.02 73.59 12.52 2.87 Los Lagos 11,998 1205 13.92 72.11 15.43 2.98 Rio Bariloche 133,500 11,761 8.8 70.27 10.18 5.21 Negro Chubut Cushamen 20,919 644 3.07 52.32 16.92 6.21 Languiñeo 3085 61 1.97 54.09 31.14 13.11 Río Senguer 5979 244 4.08 71.33 25 0.4 Tehuelches 5390 98 1.81 38.77 47.95 7.14 Futaleufú 43,076 1184 2.74 66.72 15.79 4.3 8750 949 10.83 77.02 20.33 0.84 Santa Lago Cruz Buenos Aires Río Chico 5158 475 9.2 43.57 51.78 2.31 Lago 18,864 2723 14.43 22.91 26.95 8.48 Argentino Güer Aike 113,267 12,004 10.59 84.91 11.92 1.01 Río Grande 70,042 6503 9.28 79.77 14.31 3.69 Tierra del Ushuaia 56,956 4793 8.4 42.56 38.84 3.19 Fuego Total 575.636 45,954 7.98 69.54 16.6 3.51

% Europe 5.1 8.2 – 1.96 9.35 7.33 10.28 8.71 13.02

% Others – – – – 0.32 0.88 0.71 0.74 1.3

20.03 1.64 3.28 6.12 11.74 1.69

4.5 – – – 1.43 0.11

2.11 38.93

0.21 2.71

1.97 1.94 13.79

0.16 0.27 1.61

7.97

0.91

Source: Personal production based on information from table P6-D: Total population born abroad by place of birth according to sex and age group from the 2010 Population and Housing Census

have consequences for different peoples and places, according to development cycles across the world. The population dynamics generate impacts, which are not yet fully dimensioned and invite to their study. Population growth and differential changes in local social structures, in addition to real estate speculation, changes in the land use, global capital investments, are some of the impacts that occur in these mountain areas.

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Table 5.2  Patagonian Andes: Percentage of Foreigner Population in relation to Total Population. % of Chileans in relation to the Total of Foreigners and Number of Origins 2010 Foreigner population /Total population % Lago Argentino Los Lagos Lago Buenos Aires Güer Aike Río Grande Río Chico Lácar Bariloche Ushuaia Aluminé Río Senguer Cushamen Futaleufú Huiliches Picunches Languiñeo Loncopué Tehuelches Minas Ñorquín Subregional media

14.43 13.92 10.83 10.59 9.28 9.20 9.02 8.80 8.40 4.91 4.08 3.07 2.74 2.68 2.38 1.97 1.85 1.81 1.38 1.31 7.98

Chilean population/ Foreigner population % Lago Argentino 22.91 Tehuelches 38.77 Ushuaia 42.56 Río Chico 43.57 Cushamen 52.32 Languiñeo 54.09 Futaleufú 66.72 Bariloche 70.27 Huiliches 70.96 Río Senguer 71.33 Los Lagos 72.11 Lácar 73.59 Ñorquín 75.40 Aluminé 76.77 Lago Buenos Aires 77.02 Minas 77.55 Río Grande 79.77 Loncopué 83.33 Güer Aike 84.91 Picunches 85.62 Subregional media 69.55

Number of origins Bariloche Lago Argentino Ushuaia Lácar Güer Aike Futaleufú Los Lagos Río Grande Cushamen Lago Buenos Aires Huiliches Río Chico Tehuelches Minas Ñorquín Picunches Aluminé Río Senguer Languiñeo Loncopué Subregional media

81 62 52 48 48 46 43 43 37 20 19 16 11 10 10 10 10 8 6 4 29

Source: Personal production based on information provided by the 2010 Population and Housing Census

5.4  Ten Cities of Diversity In the Patagonia, urban population is made up of 1.914.187 inhabitants (91.14 per cent of the similar region at a national level: 91.04). In the case of the Patagonian Andes, 28 per cent of the urban regional population is located. The international migration interest not only in the number but also the composition by place/country of birth whether those born in the Argentine provinces or coming from different parts of the world. This chapter is concerned in this variety of origins, which gives heterogeneity to local societies and accounts for the new types of mobilities and migrations. Marie Price and Lisa Benton-Short (2007a, b) hold that migrants play a fundamental role as workforce and in the social life of these cities. These authors believe that the diversity of origins is much more relevant now than in the movements from the beginning of the XX century. Vertovec (2007), Foner et al. (2019) and Meissner and Vertovec (2015) move along towards the notion of super- diversity in relation to cities that attract international migrants of extremely diverse origin. While these considerations refer to global cities, in this study the issue is

Above average Below average

Number of origins Sub- regional average = 29

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Percentage of Foreign Population in relation to Total Population. Sub- regional average = 7.98 % Above average Below average Type 1. High to very high percentage of Type 2. Low percentage of foreigners and many origins foreigners and many origins Lácar Futaleufú Lago Argentino Bariloche Cushamen Los Lagos Ushuaia Güer Aike Río Grande Type 3. High percentage of foreigners Type 4. Low percentage of and few origins foreigners and few origins Tehuelches Lago Buenos Aires Aluminé Río Chico Río Senguer Loncopué Minas Languiñeo Ñorquin Picunches

Fig. 5.1  Typology: relationship between % of Foreign Population in relation to Total Population and Number of Origins (departments of the Patagonian Andes). (Source: Personal production based on information provided by the 2010 Population and Housing Census)

focused on the new types of mobilities and migrations in touristic mounting cities in context of diversity. There are ten cities situated in the seven departments identified in the Patagonian Andes that respond to the profile of migration diversity, as has been shown above. With the aim of advancing towards demographic, social and territorial transformations that accompany their expansion, the exploration is dedicated on the origins of the migrant residents. For this urban level – and for each case – three concurrent criteria were used: a) the percentage of foreign population in relation to total population; b) the number of birth countries of foreigners (in other words, the origins) and c) the equation Chilean – other origins in the total number of foreigners. As the number of origins increases, new diversity scenarios appear, and the social urban mosaic becomes more heterogeneous. Table 5.3 shows the composition of migration by origins for the ten cities, thus allowing seeing their profiles in which the relationships between Chilean and other foreigners invert the traditional migration equation in this sub- region. From North to South, the cities are: San Martín de los Andes, Villa La Angostura, San Carlos de Bariloche. El Bolsón, Lago Puelo, El Maitén, Esquel, Trevelin, El Calafate and Ushuaia. Out of the ten, El Calafate and Ushuaia are the only two cases in which the combination is the following: very high-to-high percentage of foreigners, high number of origins and larger proportion of other origins in relation to the proportion of Chileans. Among their characteristics, these models include new types of mobilities and migrations. Therefore, we will go deep into both cases. Along with the consideration of these socio- migratory indicators, other distinctive aspects harmonize these cities allowing us to understand the territorial transformations derived from new mobilities of globalization. One of these characteristics is their connection with wild landscapes, where the original values of nature have

Foreign Population

Source: Personal Production based on the use of Redatam Database for the 2010 Population and Housing Census

Countries of origin Composition by origins N° Other Province Department Location Total Population Quantity FP/TP % Origins Chile origins Neuquén Lácar San Martín de los Andes 27,956 2130 7.62 48 1571 559 Neuquén Los Lagos Villa La Angostura 11,063 1130 10.21 40 824 306 Río Negro Bariloche San Carlos de Bariloche 109,305 10,596 9.69 78 7,599 2997 Río Negro Bariloche El Bolsón 17,061 676 3.96 39 403 273 Chubut Cushamen El Maitén 4011 59 1.47 14 23 36 Chubut Cushamen Lago Puelo 3129 177 5.66 17 115 62 Chubut Futaleufú Esquel 32,343 696 2.15 45 407 289 Chubut Futaleufú Trevelin 6353 349 5.49 13 282 67 Santa Cruz Lago Argentino El Calafate 16,655 2334 14.01 61 546 1788 Tierra del Fuego Ushuaia Ushuaia 56,593 4734 8.36 51 2003 2731

Table 5.3  Cities of the Patagonian Andes with diversity of origins. 2010

% Chile 74 73 72 60 39 65 58 81 23 42

% Other origins 26 27 28 40 61 35 42 19 77 58

Percentages

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been object of protection by way of the creation of national parks. This double intention is because of the logics of economic and social incorporation relate to consolidation political elements of the National State in the borders (Núñez et al., 2012). There are eight national parks in the Patagonian Andes (Lanín, Nahuel Huapí, Arrayanes, Lago Puelo. Los Alerces, Perito Moreno, Los Glaciares, Lago Argentino and Tierra del Fuego), two of which –Los Alerces and Los Glaciares– have been declared World Heritage by UNESCO. Except for city El Maitén, the rest are associated to these areas; some of them are even their entrance and thus play an essential role in providing touristic services for their visitors. The second attribute refers to the heterogeneous cultural and social profiles, which are key elements of the social frameworks that define the region. The community relation, typical of places with an active demographic dynamic, leads to a differentiation in which the condition of residence becomes a core element. This, therefore, gives rise to different categories in the cities of the Patagonia such as those born and raised (B and R), those who arrived and stayed (A and S)2 and the newcomers (Cicollela, 1994; Baeza 2009) as they include internal migrants who settled down in different decades in line to the offer of jobs in key sectors of the economy of this sub- region. The conditions B and R and A and S appear as additional identity and they are sometimes valued in specific communitarian situations. It can be said that these qualities are used as a guarantee of territorial legitimacy. The category newcomers only distinguishes migrants with a recent staying thus it lacks a precise temporal location and its limits constantly redefine in the interpersonal relationships (Hermida et al., 2016). A third aspect is the regional, national and international tourism which has a direct impact in the economy not only as a job generator but also as an incentive for some tourists to become inhabitants. The tourism is one of the most dynamic activities, both from the economic and the socio-cultural point of view. In the cities and towns with an Andean brand, architecture and cultural aspects play an essential role as they generate circuits, scenarios, equipment and services prepared for the enjoyment of the natural landscapes. According to Bondel (2008), the progressive order of the landscape for the incorporation of this activity has gained enough entity to displace other traditional activities with spatial implications (livestock production and forestry). Lastly, another element with a growing and controversial importance is the advance of the foreign ownership of land (extranjerización de las tierras, in Spanish), which has become a problem since in some jurisdictions it exceeds the limits stated by regulation.3 In the Patagonian Andes, there are four departments in  In Spanish is: “nacidos y criados (NyC)” y “venidos y quedados (VyQ)”  The quantity of land that may be sold to people and foreign companies became regulated by Law 26,737/11, which established the Regime for the Protection of the National Possession over the Ownership, Possession or Tenancy of the Rural Lands. According to the National Registry of the Rural Lands (dependent from the National Ministry of Justice), the land in the hands of foreigners shall not exceed 15 per cent at a national, provincial and departmental level (Jastreblansky, 2018 and Diario Andino, May 28th, 2019). 2 3

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which more than 15 per cent of rural lands have foreign owners: Lácar in Neuquén (with more than 30 per cent), Bariloche in Río Negro, Cushamen in Chubut, and Güer Aike in Santa Cruz. With a smaller percentage but exceeding the 10 per cent are Futaleufú (Chubut) and Lago Argentino (Santa Cruz). This high real estate demand in the Andes environment obeys to the attraction of natural landscapes of snowy mountains, forests and lakes. This presence has not been free of territorial conflicts between the local and the foreigner owners.4

5.4.1  El Calafate: Case 1 El Calafate is located at the South-West of the province of Santa Cruz in the Lago Argentino department, 320  km away from Río Gallegos. the provincial capital. Situated on the south margin of the lake Argentino, it is 80 km away from the Los Glaciares National Park. This settlement took place at the beginning of the 1910s during the boom of the wool cycle as a place dedicated to providing services in the path of wool and leather between the Andes Mountains and Atlantic ports. On December 7th 1927, the town called El Calafate was created by a national decree (for years it was called Lago Argentino, Calafate or El Calafate indistinctively). Since its creation, the city has expanded steadily though faster at the end of the eighties on account of the intense migration movements. This explosive dynamism was looked at the variation between the censuses in 2001 and 2010 of 159.8 per cent, very far away from the average values. In 2010 there were 16.655 inhabitants; out of them, 2.334 were foreigners coming from 61 countries. These figures place El Calafate in a unique position in relation to other cities of the Patagonian Andes and, in turn, it is the city with the greatest proportion of foreign population (14.1 per cent); after San Carlos de Bariloche, it is the city with the greatest number of origins while, unlike the first one, it is the one with the smallest proportion of Chileans (23 per cent). Therefore, it is characterized by a highly heterogeneous profile with a large diversity of migrant origins. If we consider the top ten countries with the growing presence among foreigners, especially they arrive from Latin American countries. However, the participation of Europeans is significant. Spaniards leading (after Chileans) and in a smaller number. French, Italians, Germans, and those born in United Kingdom (Fig. 5.2). If we consider the population born in another country- regarding 2001 census-, interesting matters are identified. Although the percentage of foreigners in relation to the total population does not present many differences (in 2001 it was 13 per cent compared to 14.1 in 2010). When the origins are analysed, it is possible find numerous changes. On the one hand, the representativeness of those born in Chile has 4  Cases such as the group Benetton and the Mapuche communities who keep a resistance post called Pu Lof in Cushamen from which they attempt to recover the ancestral territory. Another conflict is the one kept by the inhabitants of the province of Río Negro with the English businessman Joe Lewis for the access to the Escondido Lake.

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Fig. 5.2  El Calafate city: diversity in the migration composition. (Source: Personal production based on the use of Redatam Database for the 2010 Population and Housing Census)

strongly decreased (from 56.24 to 23.39 per cent). On the other, the countries with the largest presence in 2010 have doubled their proportion in relation to the prior census like those coming from Spain, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil. In addition to been near the entrance to the area of the Perito Moreno glacier, which is not the only attraction, the space brings up wonderful landscape resources such as the Upsala, Spegazini and Onelli glaciers in the lake Argentino and those surrounding the lake Viedma, apart from the Cerro Fitz Roy or Cerro Torre, near the town El Chaltén. The growth of El Calafate shall not be understood without considering the transformations in the Los Glaciares National Park. It was created in 1937 and in 1981 it was declared a World Natural Heritage by UNESCO. However, since the nineties, it has become a tourism destination with both national and international relevance. Continental ice fields, lakes and mountain formations are the main attractions around which different activities are organized such as lake cruises. Walks on the glaciers, trekking, racing, and mountaineering, among others. The significant increase in the number of tourists encouraged national and international local private investors to attract attention different types of accommodation services (hostels, inns, cottages, lodgings. etc.), transportation services, travel agencies, etc., leading to a significant increase in the offer. The State has also played an important role in carrying out infrastructure works. On the other hand, this

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accelerated growth has brought about problems related to the lack of planning and to real estate speculation processes.

5.4.2  Ushuaia: Case 2 Ushuaia is the “City at the end of the world”, capital of the province of Tierra del Fuego. Antártida e Islas del Atlántico Sur. Founded in 1884, it is situated in front of the Canal de Beagle, in a wide bay, surrounded by the Martial mountain chain as well as millennial native forests. It was discovered by British explorers in the XIX century and since then it has become a mythical scenario attributable to its natural beauties. The first settlers that European explorers met were the onas, yaganes and alacalufes communities. With the conformation of the Argentine State, the settlement was carried out in different stages. Firstly. a sub- prefecture was established in 1884, where an Anglican mission of English origin was located. Time afterwards, in 1902, a penal colony was installed, which then became a common prison, which was for several years the central institution in Ushuaia. In 1947, the penal was closed and its facilities were given to the Navy Ministry. In 1950 the Ushuaia Navy Base was created, which operated as the new instrument for the growth of the little town to which a road and an urban infrastructure was provided. A new period began in 1972 when Law 19,640 was passed and enforced. It was about an economic promotion system, which contemplated several tariff and tax exemptions in all the Territory. This led to the establishment of intensive workforce industries and derived in an explosive impact on the population growth. Between 1970 and 2010 population has increased tenfold, going from 5.677 to 56.593, as a result of migrations, in contrast with the participation of foreigners that decreased from 35 to 17 per cent between 2001 and 2010. Ushuaia is today a tourism center of international level that off presents a great variety of attractions such as winter and mountain sports, land and water outings in its surroundings and even towards the East of the island. Cruises, both to the Atlantic and to the fjords in South Chile, have a stop in its port. One of the most outstanding features of the city population has been the high level of foreigners, particularly Chilean. In 1947, the percentage was 59 per cent, which was very high, and decreased 8.4 per cent later on the last census. Considering the international migrants, 42 per cent were Chilean and the rest from 50 countries of birth, as can be observed in Fig. 5.3. Analysis by origins show that 71 per cent of those migrants were born in Latin American countries (Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, among 14 countries) and 24 per cent were born in Europe in 22 countries, in which Spain, Italy, France, Germany, United Kingdom and Greece were the leading countries. The presence of those born in United States is also highlighted. There are changes, though, when the variation of foreigners by country of origin is compared. Although the percentage of foreigners in relation to the total population does not represent great differences- 8.9 in 2001 and 8.4 per cent in 2010-, on analysing the origins, it can be observed that the percentage of Chileans decreased

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Fig. 5.3  Ushuaia City: diversity in migration composition. (Source: Personal production based on the use of Redatam Database for the 2010 Population and Housing Census)

20 per cent going from 62 to 42 per cent in relation to the total foreigners. A similar situation happened with Bolivians with the percentage going down from 56 to 45 per cent. Taking the Latin Americans into account, those born in Brazil and Peru increased their participation while those coming from the global North –Spain, Germany, France, United Kingdom and United States– increased considerably in number.

5.5  Final Considerations At the beginning of the new millennial, the population change and social recompositions accelerate with the international migration in these mountain cities of the Patagonian Andes, where the tourism is considered as the main economic sector. The global mobilities contributes to join more people with different origins and profiles. As Parreño-Castellano and Domínguez-Mujica (2016, 408) tell us: “Tourism destinations have become places where a variety of processes of international human mobility coexists”. The combination of unique landscape resources attracts populations from different parts: some of them are tourists, others are adventure travellers, others seek to reside, others are investors, and others are

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low-skilled migrant workers. Those, who have an economic and social capital, allow to choose a residence in these Patagonia centres. They are moved by a principle of residence, detached from those conventional ideas linked to permanence and immobility. On the contrary, the option may be associated with temporality. Others work in the service sectors that sustain those urban economies. All of them are people on motion. It is possible to affirm that migration composition in these cities implies that the presence of Chileans is decreasing –or has a low representative level– while the presence of other Latin Americans increases, some related to the construction sector such as Bolivians or Paraguayans or to services sectors such as Brazilians. Uruguayans or Peruvians is also growing. Migrants coming from the global North are also on the increase but should be focused on in future studies. These foreigners are residents and it is possible that in their migration experiences, they have once been tourists who, on visiting these environments, turn to choose them as residencies. Others are investors who decide to reside for a certain period of the calendar year in contact with the changing landscapes of snowy mountains, forests and lakes in which the weather is very cold but not as cold as in the North hemisphere. If the hypothesis was to go deep into the diversity of origins in these cities, the fact that the presence of Europeans and Americans is greater accounts for the emerging types of mobilities that intersect tourism, migrations, new lifestyles residents and another. In this sense, we wonder whether these new residents of different origins identified in them belong to migration by amenity/lifestyle migration type. So, focus on international migration coming from the global North leads us to rethink the migration composition in the Patagonian Andes and to relate it with the construction of cultural identities that turn them into complex and heterogeneous social mosaics. The evidences obtained hope to contribute to the study of new emerging mobilities and researchers should advance in the theorization of mobility in all its dimensions as an aspect of the human experience, overcoming binary thoughts and without minimizing differential barriers to movement, such as proposed by Glick Schiller and Salazar (2012, 5). This work invites us to carry out future studies on the relationships of power in intersecting mobilities, rethinking the creation of identities and microgeographies of daily life. In sum, there is a latent urban geography of the international migrations with an emerging diversity due to the several origins in the mountain cities in the Patagonian Andes. Local and provincial governments shall reach an agreement on public policies with the national sectors, in view of the migrants shall not be disregarded or ignored since they demand, for instance, education, health, housing and social participation on the local cultural agendas. In this sense, the relevance of studying the migration composition of those living in these mountain destinations is related to the fact that such information contributes to design intervention practices based on the capabilities to the governance of diversity. Acknowledgement  To the Certified Translator and Lawyer María Agustina Colucci. Graduated at the School of Law. University of Buenos Aires. Argentina.

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Chapter 6

International Mobility: An Approach to the Imaginaries of Residential Tourism from the Northern and South-Eastern Borders of Mexico Nora L. Bringas-Rábago, Ana P. Sosa-Ferreira, and Maribel Osorio-García

6.1  Introduction Human mobility has been a much-studied theme in recent decades, especially those related to crossing international borders looking for a better quality of life or lifestyle migration, which is directly related to residential tourism (Mazón et al., 2011; Huete & Mantecón, 2010; Benson & O’Reilly, 2009; O’Reilly & Benson, 2009, McIntyre, 2009; Hall, 2009; Janoschka, 2009). Williams and Hall (2000) state that the motives which underlie migration can be multiple but draw attention to those influenced by production and consumption. In the former, the individuals decide to move to another city or country because of work or business, the reasons are economical, whereas, in the latter, the migration is to make a change or look for a better quality of life in a chosen site. McIntiry (2011) reinforces the idea that the main aspects to explain lifestyle migration are the motives behind the desire to relocate. In this way he proposes a typology of lifestyle migrants, making a distinction between those who migrate permanently and those who do so temporarily, referring here to traditional tourists and, in the former, to residential tourists.

N. L. Bringas-Rábago (*) Departamento de Estudios Urbanos y del Medio Ambiente, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Tijuana, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] A. P. Sosa-Ferreira Facultad de Turismo, Universidad del Caribe, Cancún, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] M. Osorio-García Facultad de Turismo y Gastronomía, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Toluca, Mexico © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_6

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This capacity for mobility or multi-locating of some sectors from developed countries, which have a higher level of acquisition, emerges as a possibility of permanent or temporary migration, and is related to the life cycle of the individuals. The search for a better quality of life has provoked an explosion of touristic-­ residences in the coastal areas of countries with lower per capita incomes, where it is common to see single-family real estate developments or high condominium towers offered as second residences for foreigners (Osorio & Bringas-Rábago, 2017; Huete & Mantecón, 2010; Hiernaux-Nicolas, 2010). Among the areas which stand out for receiving a constant flow of travellers, both conventional tourists and tourists with a second residence, are the touristic coastal corridors of Tijuana-Ensenada, in the Peninsula of Baja California (Rosarito) and Cancun-Tulum in the Peninsula of Yucatan (Puerto Morelos). The first is located on the northern border, in Baja California, adjacent to the United States; the second is located on the southern border, in Quintana Roo, adjacent to Belize and Guatemala (Fig. 6.1). In both corridors, gradually the concept of residential tourism has been consolidating due to the flow of international tourists who have found settlements in Rosarito and Puerto Morelos. These allow long stay or frequent stays for several months during the winter season, in which the tourists can maintain or improve their standard of living with favourable weather conditions and the decrease in living costs affected by the exchange rate (Osorio & Bringas-Rábago, 2017). The first study of residential tourists in both zones was conducted during the first half of the present decade (Osorio & Bringas-Rábago, 2017), and found that their

Fig. 6.1  Location of Playas de Rosarito, Baja California and Puerto Morelos, Quintana Roo. (Source: Own elaboration based on cartographic information from INEGI.)

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travel practices and their motives were related to the “tourism imaginaries” of what they had construed as residential tourism. In this context, the objective of this chapter consists of identifying the subjectivity that underlies the mobility practices of residential tourists in both places of study, which reveals the relation between the imaginaries and their behaviour in relation to international migration. Therefore, the research follows a line of qualitative analysis, applying the same method, of semi-structured interviews, to 25 residential tourists in Rosarito and 31 in Puerto Morelos, conducted between August and September of 2019, to obtain socio-demographic profiles, mobility, social practices and subjective appreciations of their experiences in the place of their second residences. In this way, the present chapter is structured in four sections. The first includes a conceptual scene in respect to the imaginaries as a central concept of analysis; in the second, a panorama of the context of each destination is presented, as well as the profiles and the behaviour of the residential tourists. In the third section, the identified imaginaries are described in accordance with the interviews, as well as a comparison of the two places, emphasizing the common features and the differences in practices and imaginaries. The final section presents conclusions in relation to mobility and the imagined community.

6.2  M  otivation, Practices, and Imaginaries. The Conceptual Scene The theoretical concept of this research is the ambience of a subjective investigation, in the so-called sociologies of daily life for its part in the study of the sense and the significance of human endeavour (Lindón, 2000). It is assumed that the behaviour of the tourist develops through experience and personal motivations (Pearce, 1982; Serra, 2011), as well as through the social influence of the groups as this study develops (Allen & Ferrand, 1999; Fraj, 2004). For the present study, we have opted to emphasize that behaviour is highly conditioned by subjectivity (Hiernaux-Nicolas, 2015), as an explicative element of personal motivations. Based on Amirou (1995), the position is taken that the motives of the tourists cannot be reduced to only the identification of needs or to economic status, since motivations are not situated in the objective plane of reality, but rather on the level of desire, of the imagined, written in a universe of meaning that shapes behaviours. In this way, it is understood that touristic practices “connect spaces, actors, representations, and even imply an economic impact in the zones where attractiveness is valued and benefit other areas such as the social and cultural, and, above all, redefine the places” (Flores & Rebottaro, 2016: 218). In this sense, an evaluation is made, or appreciation of “the peacefulness”, “closeness to the sea”, “the ambience of cross-border life” and “the community”.

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To study the practices of the residential tourists in their place of destination it is necessary to part from the symbolic dimension that is behind them and conceive the individual space as a result of these practices (Lefebvre, 2013; Hiernaux-Nicolas, 2002, 2009; Bertoncello, 2002; Almirón, 2004, 2015). Consequently, the touristic space is subject to distinct interpretations and evaluations (Bertoncello, 2002; Almirón, 2004, 2015). The imaginaries are taken as a nodal concept for the present study, in the understanding that it is a fertile field to research the meanings and representations which the touristic space acquires for those who live and have their recreation there, as well as orientating their social practices which give sense and form to space. The imaginary tourism, as well as the space, is a social construction which depends on the values the tourist has, which is strongly influenced by life patterns experienced in their place of origin (Bertoncello, 2002; Hiernaux-Nicolas, 2002; Almirón, 2004, 2015; Lindón, 2007). In this sense, the imaginaries are mental schemes (Fuentes, 2016) a product of social constructions (Hiernaux-Nicolas, 2009) which derive greatly from subjective impressions, results of life experiences, as well as data given by other people or even communicated by the media. Also, there are self-constructions of the representation, sustained by imagination, dreams, and individual and collective fantasies. In the case of residential tourism, Hiernaux-Nicolas (2009) has identified five imaginaries especially attributable to this phenomenon: control over time, family reconstruction, and return to nature, a dream house and an imagined community. These imaginaries have to do with the ideals which motivate residential tourists to select a space to live for short seasons or definitely. Here the image is built and adopted by the tourist and it contains elements of the landscape, present in both the natural and cultural environment, as well as the symbolic elements which give meaning to the touristic place (Hiernaux-Nicolas, 2010; Enríquez & Robles, 2014). For this reason, to understand the relation between the imaginaries and touristic practice it is necessary to analyse the context in which these components of tourism interact (Tutor, 2015).

6.3  T  he Context and Profile of the Residential Tourist in the Selected Regions 6.3.1  Playas de Rosarito This is the youngest municipality in Baja California, founded in 1995, formerly part of Tijuana. The social fabric, economic and family life is strongly marked by its border status. It is located approximately 32 kilometres south of the Mexico-United States border and in 2018 had 110,683 inhabitants (Conapo, n.d.). It has an area of 513.32 square kilometres and 45 kilometres of coastline (Bringas-Rábago & Toudert, 2011) which is one of the principal tourist attractions, in addition to its

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Mediterranean-style climate and border connection with California, one of the richest states in the United States, and along with Texas, the main emitter of tourism to Mexico (Sectur, 2019) (See Fig. 6.1). Originally Rosarito was a livestock agricultural area that discovered its tourist vocation given the huge wave of international visitors who arrived in the region during the period of Prohibition in the United States (1920–1933). This resulted in the birth of and subsequent development of urban tourism along the coastal zone. Later decades have also played a central role in developing new characteristics shown by the flow of visitors. Searching for a better quality of life has been exploited by the real estate market to offer urban land and mortgage loans for second residences (Bringas-Rábago, 1993, 2017). Rosarito represents many advantages for foreigners to purchase or rent a second home, as well as benefits due to the low living costs in the area – compared to the United States –, the geographical closeness enables a cross-border life and more frequent visits, helping to maintain close ties with their country of origin (Bringas-­ Rábago, 2002, 2017; Kiy & McEnany 2010a, b). Bringas-Rábago (2017) notes that among the factors that attracted foreign residents to purchase or rent a second home were mainly that of natural attractions, such as the proximity to the sea (52. 85%), the tranquillity of the area (20.2%) and economic reasons (18.2%). Tourism in Rosarito caused a transformation of rural, social and economic structures of the coastal area, creating contrasts between exclusive and planned regions and other areas that emerged without planning. In this way, closed and exclusive settlements coexist and concentrate, within the same space, the necessary services to offer to tourists and provide security. Real estate developments for tourists are horizontal, although since the end of the last century they have also been built in the form of high condo towers. In 2012, there were 22 residential tourism developments or resorts operating in the coastal area of Rosarito beaches, which had 16,765 homes. The construction of the real estate developments that stagnated in the wake of the 2008 housing bubble was recently revived (Bringas-Rábago, 2017). There is another form of second residences, which emerged without any defined architectural pattern, known as trailer parks, which are sought after by lower-­ income residential tourism, conceived originally as sites to install recreational vehicles (RV), which were subsequently transformed into fixed housing in a camper or home mobile (Bringas-Rábago, 2012a, b). All these establishments are located in the rural area of the municipality of Rosarito. Most of the visitors with a second home in Rosarito are in the age group of 55 years or older (71%) and of these 52% are married, 51% have finished their university studies; 68% are retired and 30% are still working, Among these visitors, 56% have an income of less than 25,000 dollars. 76% of these visitors buy their groceries in Rosarito and 23% in the United States. It is worth mentioning that 93% of the foreigners with a second home in Rosarito came from the United States, principally from the state of California, (36%), followed by Illinois (7%), New York (5%), Oregon (4%) and other U.S. states (Bringas-Rábago, 2012a). The latter is relevant as to understand the phenomenon of second residences of foreigners in a border city like Rosarito it is necessary to understand this region as

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a transnational space, with a long history of social, economic and cultural integration. Also, there have been encounters and disagreements with the neighbours of the north. These communities, due to their geographical proximity between the place of origin and destination, carry out transnational or cross-border practices (Gustafson, 2008; Bringas-Rábago, 2017).

6.3.2  Puerto Morelos Puerto Morelos is located on “the third border of Mexico”,1 on the coast facing the Caribbean Sea or Mexican Caribbean. It is located 30 km south of Cancun, so its tourist activity has been subject in recent decades to the logic of this tourist destination, which is very well positioned at the national and international levels. South of Puerto Morelos, the Riviera Maya was developed with a wide range of resorts along 90 km to Tulum; in other words, Puerto Morelos is in the middle of an increasing offer of lodgings and mass tourism services offering sun and beach. This town was a shipping port for logwood, gum, and precious woods for export, until the middle of last century, when demand and prices for these products fell. The fishing industry and the transport of goods to Cozumel revived the economy (César-­ Dachary & Arnaiz, 1998) and then Puerto Morelos became a precursor of nature tourism and even wellness tourism. A French company, Folie Tourisme and the first small hotel established in the port (La Posada del Amor) promoted a pristine and peaceful environment to Canadian tourists. From then on, the image of Puerto Morelos is that of a small fishing port that offers a natural and peaceful environment for tourists, different from that of massive sun and beach tourism (Sosa, 2014). The development of Cancun from the late seventies, promoted by the government and entrepreneurs concentrated attention and investments, leaving Puerto Morelos out of the game. However, it was not totally oblivious to the pressures of urban and tourism growth, also with scarce material resources for the management of orderly development. The result was an expansion of the urban area and activity 1  The mention of Mexico’s “third border,” referring to the maritime boundary towards the Atlantic and especially the Caribbean Sea, was a recurring theme during the 1980s and 1990s in Mexico, relating it to strategic and natural resource’s themes (Martín del Campo, 1987). That set of islands, countries, and continental territories, bathed by the Caribbean Sea, were also referred to as the limit, and at the same time, the contact, the door to the Greater Caribbean (Association of Caribbean States, 1994). However, some historical analyzes state that the consideration of the Mexican Caribbean as the third border in various periods derives from its political, commercial, and strategic importance and that in different stages corresponds to an official position and has been present in speeches and expressions of the Mexican government in recent decades (Muñoz, 2007). Similarly, for this work, a current vision can be mentioned that points to these maritime boundaries as a border with the Greater Caribbean as it receives the largest number of flights and air passengers from abroad throughout the country and hosts the largest number of consulates after Mexico City. Nevertheless, it is not intended to discuss the idea of border, but to take up and understand its concept as a socially constructed space, a line of contact between two entities, cultures, or spaces (Arriaga, 2014; Zusman, 2006).

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that has not yet erased the image of a “quiet fishing village”. As of 2015, Puerto Morelos ceased to be part of Cancun as a municipality to become its own, which gives it autonomy to approve its Urban Development Plan and its Economic Program and thereby define or redefine the tourism model (Ayuntamiento de Puerto Morelos, 2019). The region of Puerto Morelos is home to the Puerto Morelos Arrecifes National Park protected area. It is surrounded on land by an important mangrove forest. In the area to the west of the Cancun-Chetumal road, there are a set of cenotes2 and low forest with diverse flora and fauna. Therefore, it has a valuable natural heritage (INE-Semarnap, 2000). The residential tourists admire this heritage and participate in initiatives of environmental education and protection of natural resources. The coastal area has a concentration of hotels, as well as houses and apartments for rent. Most of the population resides in the western zone, opposite the beach, behind the Cancun-Chetumal highway, in part derived from a gentrification process in the coastal area. However, because of the growing demand for residential tourism spaces, there is also a growing number of residential tourists (PM-E6) in the Western area. Until now, the buildings in Puerto Morelos correspond to an average density with a maximum of three levels, and in the coastal area, there are windows to the sea in each street that ends at the wide white sandy beach. This provides a pleasant landscape in the old town of Puerto Morelos and keeps it free of saturation (Sosa, 2017). The population of the port is 37,000 inhabitants. The number of hotel rooms is 7000. There is no census of houses and apartments for rent for tourists, although estimates for 2010 marked around 300 and currently real estate companies consider that there should be more than 1500 (Jiménez & Sosa 2012). The fishermen migrated to be providers of tourist services and offer mainly snorkelling trips, but there are also large vessels of companies that operate from the hotels and Cancun (Ayuntamiento de Puerto Morelos, 2019). Puerto Morelos has defined an image and offers different attractions for residential tourists and receives mainly Canadian visitors (40%) and to a lesser extent American (6%), although in Cancun and Riviera Maya 70% of international tourists are Americans and 6% Canadians (AHCPM, 2018). Puerto Morelos also receives Europeans (French and Italian), South Americans and national tourists (Sosa, 2017). The stays of residential tourists in Puerto Morelos are prolonged, as is generally the case in this modality, 14% remain 4 weeks or less, while, at the other end, the vast majority (60%) stays more than three months, primarily during the winter. In summer and autumn, there is a low season (Sosa, 2017). Another relevant data of residential tourists in Puerto Morelos is that all age ranges are reported; young adults, adults and older adults; albeit with a predominance of people of retirement age. They travel mainly as a couple and second as a family, although there are people who travel alone too; there is a clear

2  Mayan word, dzonoot, “hole with water”, cenotes are water deposits of karst origin and part of the underground hydrological network of the Yucatan Peninsula.

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predominance of retired professionals and professionals with high and medium incomes (Sosa, 2017). Loyalty to the destination is also surprising. Although a quarter refers to their third stay in Puerto Morelos, there are records of 4 to 9 and more previous visits. However, most prefer to rent an apartment or house instead of having a property, although they must allocate a third of their budget on rent payments (Sosa, 2017). For residential tourists from Puerto Morelos the climate is one of the attractions of the destination. Similarly, a secondary motivation is the lower prices in comparison to their place of origin, which influences their decision to reside temporarily.

6.4  R  esidential Tourism and Imaginaries on the Borders of Mexico 6.4.1  The Imaginaries of Residential Tourists in Rosarito The mobility of international tourism with second residences has been motivated by lifestyles or the search for a better quality of life (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009) associated in the case of Rosarito with the nostalgia of the rural tranquillity, proximity to the country of origin and the low prices. In this case, the relevance of the geographical and economic weight is significant and may be transversal to numerous personal and family reasons used by foreigners to live temporarily or permanently in the area. Through the imaginaries and the meanings that they grant to places, tourists recognize themselves in a certain space-time as part of a community. Thus, spending short or long periods in a secondary home near the sea responds to aspirations of rest or leisure and the representations of an imaginary loaded with symbolism that puts reality face to face with fantasies or preconceived ideas in the minds of tourists (Hiernaux-Nicolas, 2009). The imaginaries are linked to the frames of life, practices and the representations of the tourists themselves: in this way, we will focus on the main imaginary tourism identified: the return to nature, the imagined community and cross-border living. The idea of living in a community and the aspiration to enjoy and relax south of the border permeates the imaginaries as observed through explicit comments and the analysis of certain practices foreign residents take part in in the coastal area of Rosarito, collected through the interviews. (a) Return to nature According to this imaginary tourism proposed by Hiernaux-Nicolas (2009), among tourists, the idea of returning to nature survives, in which the natural landscape is conceived as an attraction that is lived daily. Among foreign tourists, their appreciation is often linked to factors related to the landscape, the proximity of the sea and the natural attractions that exist in the area, among which the Mediterranean-­ type climate and beaches stand out. This in a way implies a revaluation of the rural

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“based on nostalgia for landscapes and lifestyles of the past, imagined or real” (Salvà-Tomás, 2011: 830). In this sense, the existence of a warm and benign climate in Rosarito is appreciated, especially when compared to the cold weather in the northern United States. Many of the interviewees highlighted climate as the main attraction of the area, as well as the coastal environment and little urbanization. This makes possible the participation in recreational activities such as surfing, fishing, walking on the beach or just enjoying the landscape. “The fact of living in front of the sea and with a paradisiacal landscape is the best thing that has happened to me in my life” (ER3). Another resident points out: “Living in front of the sea, surfing and enjoying the sun and the beach is something that I could not dream of doing in Illinois” (ER1). “Living in front of the sea is what I like most about living in Rosarito” (ER4). This imagery is generally associated with the low costs of being able to have a home close to the sea: “The prices here are much more accessible than in the United States. Here I can live well with little money and very close to the sea” (ER15). Another resident mentioned the importance of the natural coastal environment: “After retirement, I wanted to live in front of the sea at a cost low” (ER4). This imaginary tourism is associated with the perception of a rural and idyllic landscape that perhaps only exists in the minds of tourists (Janoschka, 2011) or the longing for a quality lifestyle associated with the values of leisure and free time (Benson & O’Really 2009; Salvà-Tomás, 2011), a life in rural areas, opposite to what gentrified urban areas offer: “I like living in Rosarito, because here we are close to the sea and the countryside, I live away from the noise and traffic of the city, but if I need anything I go there…here you can breathe peace and tranquillity, you maintain a slow pace of life, without haste, it’s like living in paradise” (ER7). The latter is closely associated with the imagined domination of time and evasion, as well as the imagined community proposed by Hiernaux-Nicolas (2009). (b) The imagined community This imaginary tourism is associated with the so-called imagined community of Hiernaux-Nicolas (2009: 122), which proposes that “the second residence is perceived as part of this community and its occupants take identified invented roots”, this is ratified by the interviews conducted with residential tourists and also coincides with what Janoschka (2011: 125) calls “community socialization dynamics”. In this case, it is manifested in the sociability they maintain, mainly with other foreign residents. Most of the interviewees met the other foreigners in Mexico, which allowed them to generate strong closeness and mutual support with them, but also with the local community. According to some residents, the neighbourhood with other expatriates allows them to function socially without facing major problems because of the language barriers: “People are very friendly, it is an affable community and it’s nice to live where there are many expatriates, for me I can mix in without knowing how to speak Spanish” (ER25). This imagined tourism denotes the need to come together to face the relocation and adapt to life in another country, building a dream community in which people share social, cultural and environmental practices and where a sense

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of belonging is construed. Most foreign residents interviewed said they felt part of the community rather than tourists: “My life is here, I love Rosarito because it offers me the opportunity to meet wonderful people, the people here are very friendly, and I do not feel foreign” (ER18). Sociability is a component of active retirement life and is part of the daily life of these local residents. This sociability entails a component of self-organization. One interviewee commented: “I like to hang out with my friends, chatting and playing some board game. Also I like to go to the beach” (ER7) or as stated by another resident “I think here I have more social life than in the U.S. […] as we are gringos living in another country, we migrated as a group, so there are more dinners, trips to the park, to the theatre, to the beach” (ER15). Although most residents are married to spouses of the same nationality, they usually like to meet with other residents, either foreign like them or with residents of Mexican origin (Bringas-Rábago, 2012a). The residents, especially those who are socially active, value getting involved in local matters, so that they establish relationships with their immediate surroundings and community, as well as actively volunteering with different civil organizations or simply attending social and community events. They participate in philanthropic organizations and activities that include matters of health, social improvement, community assistance, whether linked to religious groups or small cultural communities (Bringas-Rábago, 2017). “When you live in California it is very easy to make donations without getting emotionally involved, unlike here in Rosarito, here if you get involved with people and want to help” (ER12). (c) Cross-border community The great interaction and interdependence that exists between both sides of the border has led international tourists with a second residence to rebuild their world in different contexts, giving new meaning to the host territory by transferring many of the practices of their place of origin to the places where they settle (Grupta, 1992; Bringas-Rábago, 1993). In this context, the concept of “transborder communities” proposed by Stephen (2009) helps to understand more clearly this imaginary tourism, which is influenced by the scope of cross-border life. These peculiar tourists live in multiple locations and spaces of social, economic and cultural discontinuity; thus, individuals are located between numerous borders and limits, from which a complex and changing dynamics of construction and reconstruction of identities that accompany these processes is derived, which allows them to configure their own space or appropriate it through their social practices and language (Bringas-Rábago, 2017). Under the lens of the transnational, these individuals carry out activities in different environments, which facilitates exchanges or practices that cross not only material boundaries, but also symbolic ones. Faist (2000) points out that transnationalism explains why people can adopt a sense of belonging both to their country of origin and to the host country. Mendoza (2007) conceptualizes this space as imaginary or third space, by which he means existing boundaries are broken and a new space emerges. This new space connects the two through strong social ties that are

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reflected on the exchange or interaction of people, goods, merchandise or capital: “I like living in Rosarito, proximity allows me to have the best of both worlds. If it is necessary to go shopping or to the doctor, I can cross over and do what I need to do and if I want I can stay or return, as I want” (ER19). Another resident points out: “I would like other Americans to improve their attitude, they believe they are superior and we are the ones who are visiting this country. Mexicans are very friendly” (ER 23). As noted in the interviews, the proximity to the U.S. is an attraction to live in Rosarito: “One of the advantages of living in this area is the proximity to my country, there I have my children and it allows me to visit them frequently or even for them to come on vacation. We spend seasons in both countries; this is the good thing about living between two worlds” (ER21). The idea of proximity is an intrinsic factor for economic and family reasons, as one resident states: “I live in Rosarito because of affordability; I have children and family in San Diego” (ER17). Another resident says: “My whole family lives in San Diego and here I am very close to them and I can go to visit them often” (ER10). The intense regional relations reflected in the flow to the north and south of the border mean that it is not strange to have mobility to the country of origin. “Since I was a kid, I used to come for a trip some weekends to Rosarito with my parents […] we came almost every year. At times we stayed only over the weekend and we would return” (ER16). The health aspect has also marked an intensity in the north-­ south visits: “I settled in Rosarito because when I have a health problem in 20 minutes I am in the United States” (ER14). In general, in this touristic imaginary, the geographical location allows these residents to cross to address different practical issues, both of consumption, for those who buy their groceries in the United States, as for emotional issues, visits to family and friends, for socialization, recreation and cultural events (go to the cinema, theatre or trips), amongst others.

6.4.2  T  he Imaginaries of Residential Tourists in Puerto Morelos Residential tourists in Quintana Roo find different reasons to spend long periods in Puerto Morelos. However, shared elements can be clearly found that motivate residential tourists to choose the space to live in for short or long stays. As Hiernaux-­ Nicolas (2009) points out, the tourist appropriates or builds an image based on natural and cultural elements of the destination, and even with the related information and also the symbolic elements of the destination to place themselves in an imaginary tourism (Hiernaux-Nicolas, 2009, 2010). The comments of residential tourists provide us with elements to identify that imaginary. Below are some of the ideas and statements expressed during the interviews conducted in Puerto Morelos, which allow us to link them to imaginaries.

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(a) Return to nature Being a privileged place due to its natural environment, it is logical that this constitutes one of the reasons for residential tourists to choose Puerto Morelos as a destination for their stay. But there are many attractions that are mentioned around this topic. The Portomorelense winter weather with an average of 26 degrees Celsius, contrasts with the Canadian and American winter temperature: “I definitely could not be in Canada during the winter, while here, I am always happy with the weather” (PME19). The beach scenery is also present in the responses “every day, I can walk a little and happily swim at the beach” (PME19). “Every day I go for a walk on the beach; sometimes I snorkel and go to the reef. In the afternoon, we see people fishing. I have the beach at hand” (PME24). Repeatedly the reef is mentioned with admiration, noted as a great attraction “the reef is a treasure. I want to help protect it” (PME13). The construction of landscape from the natural environment, by residential tourists, can also be observed even in the case of the mangrove forest “I like how I have the green of the mangrove whichever way I see” (PME2). The imaginary tourism of Puerto Morelos as a destination of nature has been present since the sixties of last century when Canadians began to spend longer stays. It can be said that in recent decades this destination has continued to receive residential tourists and that among its main motivations is the natural, rich and diverse environment, an extensive landscape with a fine sandy beach and the reef, near the coast, “as a natural aquarium” (PM-E 2). Hiernaux-Nicolas (2010) refers to the return to nature, the contact with the environment, the landscapes and an environment that cannot be had in the big cities, close to rural life. These are elements present in what is expressed by the residential tourists of Puerto Morelos. (b) The imagined community Following the typology of Hiernaux-Nicolas (2009) regarding the imaginaries of residential tourism, the one designated as the imagined community, is undoubtedly that which finds common ground with what was exposed by the residential tourists of Puerto Morelos. Hiernaux-Nicolas (2010) refers to the imagined community as the destination that is a town or small city, with urban characteristics without the monumentality of the big cities and where it seems easy to integrate into that community “simple to understand small-town”; where there is an identification process that is not possible in large cities. Virtually all interviewees mentioned as the first element to choose Puerto Morelos as a residential tourism destination, or as what they like most about their life in the port, is that it is a small town, with a community life: “It is a small town, quiet” (PME20); “It is a quiet and friendly place, perfect for retirement” (PME4); “Relaxation, quiet and community life, is what I want and I have it here” (PME 7) “I can ride on my bicycle, safely, greeting people” (PME24). “It’s a small, quiet place, surrounded by nature, friendly people: it’s paradise” (PME10).

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Hiernaux-Nicolas (2009) also notes that sometimes “community life” occurs only among tourists themselves without being a real integration into the local community. The residential tourists of Puerto Morelos certainly claim that among their friends and people they live with are neighbours and local acquaintances as well as other tourists “My relationship is with other Quebec tourists and my neighbours and local acquaintances” (PME23). “I have friends from Canada, Mexico and other countries” (PME16). As Hiernaux-Nicolas (2009) says, they coexist among tourists of the same origin, taking with them the community life they seek, even when they also have contact with the local community. As a limitation to integrate even more into the community, some point to the language barrier, because they do not speak Spanish well. The importance that interviewed tourists offer to tranquillity and community life is also expressed in their interest in commenting on the activities they carry out for the local population: “I help children with the school maintenance, which is important since it is a public school and needs many things” (PME2). “I teach English at the Cultural Centre; I really like dealing with people and I am sure that what they learn, whether they are young or older, will be helpful for them” (PME16). In this way, community activities, through the church, the Cultural Centre, the Red Cross or other means, show an interest in being part of the local community. Environmental education activities are another topic with which they feel identified and willing to collaborate. There is communication and collaboration between fellow nationals. For example, on Wednesdays, there is Mass attended by many Canadians. An hour earlier, Canadians place various homemade products, bread, handicrafts, preserves, and fruit, to sell to the nationals. Other Canadians come to buy from each other; in other words, to build a community together. An aspect, which was repeated in almost half of the cases, without being emphasized, relates to what they do not want from Puerto Morelos. The references are Cancun and Riviera Maya: “What we do not want, and fear the most, is that they authorize more and more buildings and turn Puerto Morelos into another Cancun” (PME23). As mentioned, Puerto Morelos is now an independent Municipality with prerogatives for its urban planning and tourism strategies. The tourism development plan corresponds to the State Government, but the Municipality has authority for urban planning. Some imaginaries such as evasion, which means avoiding the pressures of life in large cities and the domain of time, involves fleeing from the pressures of working life and urban problems (Hiernaux-Nicolas, 2009). This implies a search for a certain degree of permissiveness, of greater freedom but does not seem to be present in the comments and approaches of the residential tourists of Puerto Morelos, where there is certainly no significant offer of nightlife. On the contrary, the main quality that is identified in Puerto Morelos by residential tourists is its tranquillity.

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6.4.3  North-Southeast Concordances and Contrasts International mobility by second residence is related to the life cycle of people and to the motivations generated from lifestyles (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009; Salvà-­ Tomás, 2011; McIntyre, 2011). According to the findings, common traits and differences can be distinguished in mobility practices of the imaginaries in the case studies. Regarding mobility practices it is confirmed in both destinations that beach setting, warm climate and reducing the cost of living are the key elements that cause displacement and make their stay more enjoyable, as reiterated by the international tourists. A significant difference in mobility practices in Rosarito is that residential tourism is distinctly American, while in Puerto Morelos it is mainly Canadian. This marks a different relationship in the interactions and frequency of mobility in both cases, since in Rosarito the neighbouring United States favours a cross-border life that allows tourists not only to maintain strong ties with their place of origin but also enables multi-locality living, the reconstruction of identities and their creation of a new space and its appropriation through language. On the other hand, in Puerto Morelos the distance between the place of origin and destination of residential tourists is quite wide, producing a “temporary time” with their community of origin, during their prolonged stay in the winter season. Regarding the imaginaries of residential tourism in border areas, it is significant that in both destinations there is an idealized perception of rurality or nature, as well as a movement to recreate an imagined community that not only permits socialization among the tourists similar to them and local people but also allows them to have the role of benefactors for the community, which they perceive as lacking social welfare. The practice derived from this imaginary tourism encourages them to carry out philanthropic activities, even voluntary work in benefit of the community, which gives them an opportunity to get into the community life of the town. Although the same imaginaries of residential tourism are found in both destinations, its specific expression also reveals distinct meanings. In the case of Rosarito, it would seem that the imaginary of the community tends to overcome the border and rebuild a space that admits everyday family and social relationships, including historical ones. In the case of Puerto Morelos, the imagined community is built through new relationships, established with other temporary, national or permanent residents. The local conforms a community which we would call emerging, in the sense that it is not every day. Therefore, it could be said that in Rosarito residential tourists overlap an imagined community space to the physical territories divided by the border, which gives an active involvement of residential tourists with respect to the construction of the imagined community. This explains in some way, the case of Rosarito, where residential tourists are vectors of change that promote the adaptation of space to their connections, interests and lifestyle. While in Puerto Morelos residential tourists make an insertion in a community space idealized by tranquillity and landscape,

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giving a passive sense to its inclusion as vectors of stability that want to maintain the conditions of rural life and safety of the “bucolic environment”. In both cases, the so-called international tourists with a second residence begin to develop a sense of belonging or attachment to the community that is reflected in the social or philanthropic activities they carry out in the host communities.

6.5  Conclusions Inevitably, international migration for leisure follows several mobility patterns according to the physical and economic contexts of destinations and the location of the borders. Residential tourism that originated in Rosarito and Puerto Morelos accounts of a reiterated international flow with seasonal visits of short or long duration. They are focused on the existence of natural attractions such as proximity to the sea, and the differential economic advantages of the location. However, the way their imaginaries materialize, particularly referring to the imagined community, shows us different ways of conceiving space. In Rosarito, the desire of residential tourists is to integrate into an imagined community in a space divided by physical and symbolic barriers between two countries with constant interaction. These individuals do not break ties with their places of origin, on the contrary, they maintain ties and are present in both societies, and take advantage of the best of both worlds (Glick-Schiller et al., 1995; Rinken & Herrón, 2007), using economic, social and political opportunities offered by living close to the border. In Puerto Morelos, the desire is to preserve an idyllic community in a unified space, which is threatened by the synergy of a mass tourism predator that can destroy its current condition. The conception of the space is revealing in both cases and should be considered in the actions carried out by public and private sector managers, in aspects such as landscape preservation, real estate construction style, the use of land, public spaces and communication channels, among others, that help to integrate a material structure in accordance with the imaginaries of the symbolic space.

References AHCPM. (December, 2018). Barómetro Turístico de Cancún y Puerto Morelos. Asociación de Hoteles de Cancún y Puerto Morelos. Allen, J., & Ferrand, J. (1999). Environmental locus of control, sympathy, and proenvironmental behavior, a test of Geller’s actively caring hypothesis. Environment and Behavior, 31(3), 338–353. Almirón, A. (2004). Turismo y espacio. Aportes para otra geografía del turismo. GEOUSP  Espaço e Tempo, 16, 166–180.

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Chapter 7

The Locational Choice of Urban Lifestyle Migrants in Lisbon: Beyond Tourism Imaginaries Jennifer McGarrigle

7.1  Introduction I knew house prices had been increasing, but I hadn’t quite realized until I got here. I follow the housing protests in the city, but I have a complicated relationship with it as I know I am part of the problem… Just as the Portuguese government has been telling people “come, move here, bring your money, bring your knowledge, welcome,” I had been telling my friends to come… Now, here I am a rich foreigner pushing up those prices, but of course it is impacting me, I am outraged to be paying these prices! (Stephen, early-50s)

Lifestyle migration, conceptualised as the mobility of relatively affluent individuals in search for a better quality of life, has been most frequently researched in rural or costal settings –as the escape from the city itself is central in cultural imaginings of what a good quality of life might entail (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009; Osbaldiston, 2012). Its urban manifestations have been studied less. In the quote above, Stephen hints at the economic and spatial politics that underpin new forms of lifestyle migration to cities. This urban case-study aims to explore how privileged migrants to Lisbon at diverse life stages–specifically beneficiaries of the Non-Habitual Residence (NHR) fiscal scheme– understand and narrate their migration aspirations, motivations, and locational choice. In doing so, I hope to examine from a migrant, rather than an intermediary perspective (Montezuma & McGarrigle, 2019), the factors that make Lisbon attractive paying specific attention to the role of economic factors -including the pull of fiscal benefits-, less explored in lifestyle migration research. While drawing on migrants’ own narratives, it illuminates processes of selectivity within the EU mobility regime as some migrants  – mostly labour migrants from the European periphery  – are politicized, while those offering J. McGarrigle (*) Centre for Geographical Studies, Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_7

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particular forms of human and financial capital are sought after. These asymmetries are accentuated using optimal tax schemes as competitive advantage. The political will to attract relatively affluent migrants to Lisbon – through the Golden Visa programme (2012) and the Non-Habitual Residents fiscal regime (2009, reformulated in 2012) – fits into a wider strategy designed by various scales of government to recover from the economic and political crisis after 2008. Incentives such as investment for residency and optimal tax conditions were implemented alongside other strategies to increase the economic competitiveness and attractiveness of the city of Lisbon for international tourists and real estate investors. Urban revitalization measures started in the 1990s were fast tracked and, in line with the austerity measures introduced in the Portuguese bail out, in 2011, measures were taken to make the real estate market more flexible and attractive to global capital (Barata-Salgueiro et al., 2017; Cocola-Gant & Gago, 2019). The liberalization of the rental market through the New Urban Lease Law (2012) made rental contracts more flexible and long-term tenants easier to evict. Thus, the rehabilitation of housing stock in the historic city centre became particularly attractive to international investors, including investment and lifestyle migrants (Montezuma & McGarrigle, 2019). This was facilitated by the relatively low real estate prices and a rent gap that existed due to long-term rent freezes and subsequent disinvestment in the city. The massive boom in international urban tourism also had a particular impact. According to Statistics Portugal (INE), the number of overnight stays in wider Lisbon almost doubled from just over 9 million in 2011 to over 17.5 million in 2018, of which 79% were foreigners. Geopolitical factors redirected tourism from North-­ Africa and Turkey to Southern European destinations; and city branding also saw Lisbon reach recognition in the international press as a touristic hotspot at precisely the time when sharing platforms like Airbnb made short-term tourism rentals a key feature in the restructuring of the housing market in the city centre (Cocola-Gant & Gago, 2019; Mendes, 2018). Thus, the appeal of the city is related to a confluence of different factors that acted in unison intersecting with the tourism boom, changes in housing policy and governmental programmes aimed at attracting relatively privileged migrants. As such, Lisbon ascended on to the map of low cost and desirable places to live for a variety of transnationally mobile populations from intra-EU lifestyle migrants to retirement migrants, investors, digital nomads and international students (Malet Calvo, 2018; Gaspar & Ampudia de Haro, 2020; Amante & Rodrigues, 2020). As cities, like Lisbon, project themselves as nodes of tourist attraction and new urban tourism creates inroads into the residential life of cities, new imaginaries of place emerge that appeal to cosmopolitan sensibilities. Indeed, through the narratives of my interlocutors, I demonstrate some of the overlaps between tourism and lifestyle mobilities. Tourism or mediatic representations of the city are not only essential in creating a pre-migration imaginary of place but a crucial cog in the mechanics of the locational decision-making process. Travel to experience and embody local life provides a way not only to compare places and their attributes, but to craft a desired mode of living. Despite the overlaps, rather than representing how “tourism might ‘tip’ into migration” (Cohen et al., 2013: 5), or the “de-­differentiation”

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between both (Novy, 2018: 427), this case study brings into relief the analytical distinctions between tourism and lifestyle mobilities not least due to governance, but also due to the correlation between migration and uneven development within Europe (King, 2018). The self-understanding and practices embodied by lifestyle migrants shed light on the asymmetries inherent within the EU mobility regime. Moreover, the stabilization of home -even if engaging in transnational multi-­ residence- and the interpretative frames that migrants themselves use, code their mobilities as being distinct from tourism. This chapter starts by analysing the role of lifestyle and its relationship to migrant mobilities paying attention to its urban manifestations and underlying economic factors. The second section presents the research context followed by the methods. The third section draws upon the narratives of the interlocutors to explore the emotions and mechanics of locational choice. It develops three analytical points. The first focuses on aspirations and formation of the migration imaginary from an ontological position that sees migration as desire and a process of becoming. The second explores the mechanics of locational choice and the role of tourism in this. The third, considers economic motivations. The final section draws together the main findings.

7.2  Urban Lifestyle Migration The mobility practices of the relatively affluent have attracted increasing scholarly attention over the past few decades. Lifestyle migration has developed as a way of conceptualizing these practices (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009). Rather than being a fixed migration category, it is a way of thinking about the subjective meaning and motivations underpinning relatively privileged migrations (Benson & O’Reilly, 2016). Mobility choices are motivated by the search for a better quality of life and escape driven by consumption rather than production, or lifestyle over work. As such, the freedom of choice inherent in lifestyle migration ties it to identity-making projects and self-realization (Hoey, 2010). In turn, as Åkerlund and Sandbergb (2015) have argued, perceptions, representations and meanings attached to places are pivotal in mobility decisions and location choice. Imaginaries of place, representations of local characteristics and the type of lifestyle and experience that migrants envision they will embody are powerful structures involving the media, marketing, and international agents (Benson & O’Reilly, 2016). This “transnational brokerage assemblage”, in the words of Robertson and Rogers (2017: 2), encompasses non-human actors, the state and intermediaries who project images of places that shape expectations (Torkington, 2012, 2013, Åkerlund & Sandberg, 2015). The shared nature of the structures that promote both tourism and lifestyle migration mean it is largely conceived as a tourism-led mobility. The complex relationship between both forms of mobility has been perceived as ordered along a mobility continuum with different spatial and temporal axes (Williams & Hall, 2000; Bell & Ward, 2000).

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Traditionally, lifestyle migration research has focused on counter urbanization as an escape from the city (Osbaldiston, 2012, Benson & Osbaldiston, 2014), costal locations (O’Reilly, 2000), the rural idyll (Benson, 2011, Sardinha, 2015) or spiritual retreats (Korpela, 2010). However, more recently urban manifestations of lifestyle migration have been given attention as transnationals of all ages – attested by the empirical data that follows – are choosing the vibrancy of the city. Griffiths and Maile (2014) explore the “city imaginaries” drawing intra-EU middle class British migrants to Berlin; Zaban (2015, 2017) examines the intersections between gentrification and urban lifestyle migration of Jewish immigrants from Western countries in Israel; and Cocola-Gant and Lopez Gay (2020) the role of young lifestyle migrants in processes of transnational gentrification in the historic centre of Barcelona. King (2018) also argues that an urban lifestyle “optic” can be applied to new European youth migrants as they are attracted to vibrant cities over rural and costal landscapes. As cities project themselves as hubs for international tourism and new urban tourism seeks “off-the-beaten-track” and authentic experiences in residential neighbourhoods new imaginaries of place emerge that appeal to cosmopolitan and creative sensibilities (Füller & Michel, 2014: 1306). Over the past decade, several Southern European cities have crafted strategies to promote tourism, real estate investment and attract the mobile upper and middle classes as a solution to austerity urbanism. This overlaps with literature on globalized residential mobilities depicting the parking of capital in “safe cities” after the financial crisis in 2008 (DeVerteuil & Manley, 2017, Ley, 2010). While attention has focused on the super-rich in global cities, second-tier tourist cities -like Lisbon (Montezuma & McGarrigle, 2019; Cocola-Gant & Gago, 2019) and Barcelona (Cocola-Gant, 2016)- joined the competition to attract high-value migrants of relative privilege. While migrants’ own self-understanding and narratives of their ongoing migratory project is central to the field, scholarship has evolved to theorize underlying structural conditions embedding the relocation of lifestyle migrants in the unequal social relations that constitute the global division of labour (Hayes, 2018). ‘Geoarbitrage’ results in a better quality of life as the same capital and assets ‘at lower latitudes’ buy more and enable material practices that may be unaffordable in the country of origin (Hayes, 2014). Such inequalities persist through the asymmetries in mobility regimes that enable citizens of wealthy societies in the Western hemisphere to relocate more easily – with light regulation – than counterflows from the Global South to the Global North (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013; Knowles & Harper, 2009). These inequalities are exemplified by the bifurcated political will to close borders to undesired migrants, on one hand, while crafting programmes to attract privileged migrants on the other. Within the context of the EU mobility regime, the fiscal policies implemented to attract the relatively wealthy or migrants with high levels of human capital work as a mechanism of selectivity reinforcing existing socio-cultural hierarchies. This not only brings the political asymmetries of European integration to the fore, but also defines who is able to combine lifestyle with work (Cohen et al., 2015). Moreover, it attests to the civic stratification and differentiation that characterises intra-European migration (Engbersen et al., 2017).

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7.3  T  he Research Setting and Methods: Characterising Non-Habitual Residents The Non-Habitual Residents regime was implemented in Portugal, in 2009 and reformulated in 2012, to stimulate the mobility of: first, retirees to the country through complete tax exemptions on pensions –ensuring there are treaties to avoid double taxation in place; and second, non-resident, highly-qualified professionals with high added value economic activities through a flat income rate of 20 percent (Decreto-Lei 249/2009). The optimal tax regime has a duration of 10  years and requires the beneficiary to establish fiscal residence in Portugal, be present in the country for 183 days a year and have a home with the intention of maintaining it and occupying it as a regular residence. While this provides income optimization for those in search of low tax jurisdictions, it has come under the increasing scrutiny of other EU countries whose citizens are relocating to Portugal. Indeed, one such example is Finland resulting in the cessation, on the 1st of January 2019, of an almost 50-year bilateral agreement to avoid double taxation. Questions around the economic contribution of NHR beneficiaries to Portuguese society also led to its reconfiguration in early 2020 and pensions for new beneficiaries will be subject to a 10 percent tax rate. According to data from the Ministry of Finance, a total of 29,901 beneficiaries were enrolled in the Non-Habitual Residents regime at the end of 2018 (Guedes de Oliveira et al., 2019: 133). There has been notable growth in the number of NHRs since 2014, with the number of new beneficiaries per year more than tripling between 2014 and 2018 (Fig. 7.1). The predominant nationality of the beneficiaries is French representing almost a quarter of the total number of NHRs (Table 7.1). Around half as many beneficiaries are from the UK and Italy, followed by Brazil, Sweden, Portugal  – most likely return migrants who have been living outside the country for more than 5 years – Spain, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. The fiscal regime has greater expression among some nationality groups than others. Indeed, the number of NHRs from Sweden represents 56 percent of the total number of Swedes resident in Portugal. Similarly, the importance of the regime for the French is demonstrated again by the fact that 35 percent of the total stock resident in the country in 2018 was participating in the tax scheme, compared to 20 percent of the total resident population from Belgium, 17 percent from Italy and 12 percent from the UK.  The proportion of NHRs from other nationalities such as Germans, Dutch and Spanish is much lower as a percentage of total stock (Table 7.1). Looking to data from the Immigration and Borders Service (SEF), we can observe the recent growth in some EU-15 migrants to Portugal. Indeed, Italy, in 2017, and France, in 2016, entered into the top ten foreign nationalities represented in Portugal, a position the UK already held. Annual growth between 2017 and 2018 of the three origins was among the highest of any nationality group with increases of 45.9 percent, 29.1 percent and 17.9% respectively (SEF, 2018). The recency of this trend can also be seen by the weight of recent flows in stocks. For instance, in

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Fig. 7.1  Number of Non-Habitual Residents, Portugal, 2009–2018. (Source: Elaborated with data from the Ministry of Finance published in Guedes de Oliveira et al. (2019))

2018, inflows over the three years previous from Italy represented 81 per cent of the Italian population resident in Portugal, equivalent figures for France and Sweden, were 68 per cent and 63 percent, respectively. Even flows for more traditional migration corridors increased, such as the case of Spain or the UK, albeit the latter is correlated with the impacts of Brexit and likely includes the regularization of migrants already present in the country. In terms of distribution throughout the country, some nationalities are more urbanized than others: almost half of Italians, Spanish, French and Swedes are resident in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, with other nationalities, most notably the British more widely dispersed across the country. Moving to activity in the real estate market, according to data from INE, in 2018, property sales to foreigners represent 11.3 percent of all property transactions in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, rising to 11.5 percent in the City of Lisbon, higher than the national average of 8.2 percent. Among individual foreign investors the French have the highest number of transactions with a market share of 17 percent at the level of the wider metropolitan area, followed by Brazilians (11 percent), British (9.5 percent), Angolans (8 percent) and Chinese (7 percent). In the Municipality of Lisbon, the Brazilians have the largest market share (15.3 percent of foreign buyers)

298 200 235 400

2018 Stock 2018

2738 1913 813 1345 385 209

2899 2469 868 1477 521 160

14,066 12,817 4147 8984 2,19 1263

3475 4662 5306 19,771 3066 3832 5079 26,445 3106 5267 6989 18,862 7059 11,574 28,210 105,423 749 1033 924 4274

1356 1474 1452 1662 2214 649 761 1003 1024 1587 210 279 387 412 594 437 475 582 834 1165 92 90 124 215 314 41 62 193 326 216

537 703 1930 2495 1246 1402 1485 1866 743 814 1071 1577 11,715 6,68 5,56 5716 157 323 334 643

2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 Flows

56 47 55 44 56 46

68 45 81 44 63

% Weight of flow over the last three years (2016– 2018) in total 2018 stock

9,3 7 20 7,6 * *

35 12,7 17,4 2,7 56,5

% NHR in total stock

50,2 41,0 38,2 36,5 32,2 36,4

48,1 17,7 51,4 47,9 44,6

% total stock in LMA

Source: Elaborated with data from SEF (Immigration and Borders Service) on flows and stock and data on NHRs from the Ministry of Finance published in Guedes de Oliveira et al. (2019) *Data not available

NHR (total) 2018 Total NHRs 29,901 France 6925 UK 3352 Italy 3275 Brazil 2898 Sweden 2415 Portugal 2055 Spain 1307 Germany 896 Belgium 828 Holland 680 Switzerland * Finland *

NHR Pensions 2018 9589 3105 933 1373 256 1347 550

Table 7.1  Migration flows 2016–2018 and 2018 stock for top ten Non-Habitual Resident Nationalities, Portugal and Lisbon

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followed by French (13.6), Chinese (12.8 percent) and British (6 percent). The main nationalities clearly overlap with Golden Visa holders and the Europeans most represented in the NHR regime. However, in addition to the number of transactions presented in Table  7.2 others have been made through companies registered in Portugal. While the data might point to an over-estimation of the effect of foreigners in the real estate market, this is a phenomenon particularly sensitive to scale as studies have clearly shown that investment is concentrated in specific areas of the city (Cocola-Gant & Gago, 2019; Montezuma & McGarrigle, 2019). This demonstrates the need for future finer grained analyses. The data presented in this chapter derives from wider research conducted with privileged migrants – investors and urban life-style migrants – and the intermediary or elite economy that facilitates such migration (Montezuma & McGarrigle, 2019). Ongoing ethnographic fieldwork with ten intra  – EU migrants (NHRs) was conducted over the period from 2017 to 2020. The interlocutors were sampled for their diverse profiles and include two naturalized third country nationals, who onward migrated to Portugal after marrying EU citizens; one was a naturalized Swede originally from China, another Spanish national originally from Argentina. The others were from France, the UK and Denmark (Fig. 7.2). Life story interviews were conducted over various meetings to understand how different experiences throughout the life course contributed to migration as an ongoing process. Indeed, the interviewees were in diverse life phases: four had families with children, three were Table 7.2  Property transactions by non-residents, Lisbon Metropolitan Area and Lisbon, 2018 Main nationalities LMA France Brazil UK Angola China Switzerland Belgium Germany USA Spain UAE Turkey The Netherlands Sweden South Africa Other Total Percentage of total transactions Source: INE

No. of transactions 710 460 396 340 296 162 157 140 136 120 94 85 70 70 66 876 4178 11.3

Main nationalities City of Lisbon Brazil France China UK USA Turkey Angola UAE Switzerland Spain Germany South Africa Vietnam Italy Iran Other Total Percentage of total transactions

No. of transactions 239 212 200 96 75 72 71 63 41 34 31 29 23 22 21 333 1562 11.5

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Fig. 7.2  Pictorial representation of interviewee routes to Lisbon

single and three retired. I came into contact with my interlocutors through social groups for international migrants, ex-pats groups on social media and contacts through international schools in the city.

7.4  D  ecision-Making Processes of Lifestyle Migrants: From Migration Aspirations to Locational Choice In this section, I explore the decision-making processes of my interlocutors. Three analytical points are developed: 1) the factors that instigated the migration imaginary; 2) the mechanics of locational choice and the role of tourism; and 3) economic considerations.

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7.4.1  Migration as an Ongoing Process Past experiences of mobility, from tourism to migration, shaped not only the landscape of potential destinations but, also, the initial migration desire of my interlocutors. Collins (2018), drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1986), provides an alternative ontological position on migration as desire, an underlying social force irreducible to calculative rationales for action. Rather he describes migration as an act of becoming, as an ongoing process in which migration itself is “transformative of subjecthood” (2018: 15). The aspiration or the aspects that bring about migration are expressions of desire for a certain place, experience, a feeling, or to take control of life to “achieve or avoid (un)desirable futures” (Collins, 2018: 966). Migration as an ongoing process combining multiple temporalities is illustrated well by the experience of Zelda, a British retiree, whose past migration experiences first as a child to France -where she still has a home-, and as an adult to Mexico, the United States, the Middle-East and Africa folded into her present life in Lisbon. She recalls the process, when she was only 10  years old, almost 60  years before our interview, of preparing to move to Italy with her parents. My father was posted to Milan and in the summer beforehand, we spent six weeks out there to learn Italian… we had a lovely woman teaching us and of course, I was the one who learnt Italian 5 times faster than the adults… I was a fish in water… and made wonderful discoveries like proper Italian gelato, compared with the vile ice cream in post war Britain, and watermelon, which they would sell in small carts in the corner of the piazza…and that stayed with me. (Zelda, over 60)

Zelda’s father fell ill and their plans to migrate to Italy were not realized at the time. Still, the preparations and sensory experience of discovering a new place shaped her migration imaginary and created a certain kind of pedagogy of what relocation entails. Mobility experiences and feelings about specific places interact with changing life circumstances to perpetuate migration. It is rarely a calculated decision occurring in a single timeframe. June’s experience testifies to this. She first moved to Europe from Beijing to study and, later, while working in Scandinavia met her husband and had two children. Three years later, after “settling”, June found herself relocating to Lisbon for her husband’s job. Changes in life phases also produce different needs either individually or collectively within families. For two of the mothers I interviewed, the desire to provide future opportunities for their children through offering specific educational experiences as they transitioned into adolescence formed part of their motivations to move. Clara, a Spanish national originally from Argentina, illustrates how migration unfolds in response to changing needs and circumstances of different members of her family and shifting relationships with different places. She had lived in six countries starting with her master’s degree in Spain, where she met her husband, followed by Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia and finally Portugal. In her own words: We really had the corporate life in Asia. Originally, we moved to Bali to try to slow down, more and more ex-pats try to escape the madness of Singapore or Beijing… but my husband

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went freelance, he is back in Asia every month consulting. I have the design business, my factory is in Bali, I have five sewers, really good quality, but it is at a point where I can go back three times a year to control the collections… We started to think about our son’s education, we wanted to choose somewhere where my son could do the last five years of high school in Europe before university. (Clara, early 40s)

The desire for a different future and better quality of life present in the interviewee’s accounts are aspects well documented in the literature on lifestyle migration. However, as Clara’s experience demonstrates, realising this in an urban context provided the infrastructure to maintain specific economic activities as well as educational aspirations for children. In this sense, the city was a strategic choice to balance both social and economic positioning with escape, adventure and change. This suggests a blurring of the lines between consumption and production –though lifestyle was paramount– locational choice for the economically active younger lifestyle migrants involved finding a balance in order to maintain their productive capacity. For Laura, who had read Spanish and Portuguese at university, the desire was for her children to experience life in a foreign country and learn a new language. Migration was a way to provide a new – but still high quality – educational experience for her children and escape the pressure of the UK system, as she describes in her own words: The major factor was the fact that my daughter is approaching secondary school age, and in London it’s very, very competitive… She started to feel quite anxious about where she was going to school, and I just thought we could escape the whole situation by moving to a different country and showing her that all of life doesn’t revolve around a tiny part of West London. (Laura early 40s)

We have focused mostly on migration experiences, however, tourism mobilities are also pivotal in the development of imaginaries of what a better life might represent. Stephen developed a strong place attachment to Lisbon over the 20 years that he visited the city as he explored the gay scene and made meaningful friendships. When he visited the city, he sought out the working-class inner-city neighbourhoods and was attracted by the urban marginality and grittiness of the local cafés and the “tascas”: I came in the 1990s, Lisbon was poor, and I really loved it at that time, because of its political history. I was thrilled when I arrived here and found strong established working-class districts in the city centre. The absence of ugly tower blocks… this all sounds terribly simplistic, but it felt to me that it had authenticity and charm. It felt like the whole ugly consumer boom had bypassed it somehow. I fell in love with the city.

His pre-migration social imaginary of Lisbon was related to a very precise sort of urbanity in the period before the rehabilitation and touristification of the historic centre. Post-migration, he lamented, “A lot of the charm has been submerged under the tourism –the Disneyland of the city centre.” Returning to the decision to first move, Stephen reached a turning point in his life when, in sequence, he became quite ill, was made redundant and separated from his long-term partner. He described using the convalescing period to develop an “escape

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strategy”. For Stephen, as for other interlocutors, watershed moments not only act as a catalyst to move, but mobility itself is cathartic and transformative. The political upheaval in the UK, which he was following painstakingly during his illness, was also a driver, Stephen referred to himself several times as a “Brexit refugee” – something he had in common with new Italian friends who had escaped the political situation in London in search of a calmer life in Lisbon. I just had to stop and think, well what am I doing with my life? I thought I could take this as an opportunity. So, all of these things made me say ok let’s do this. I don’t have a job right now, I have ended a relationship and I want to change my life, I have been too much focused-on work, and I have made myself unhappy.

While Stephen’s decision to migrate might have been in response to a critical transition, it drew from his lengthy relationship with the city. Responding to the desire to migrate, or the desire to dwell in multiple places, and identifying a preferred future in another country developed over time and, as demonstrated, often incorporated diverse mobility experiences. The recognition of this desire was the precursor to the material and practical process of choosing Lisbon as a place to live, as explored in the next section.

7.4.2  I maginaries of Place: Tourism and Travel to Try on Local Life Experience as migrants, tourists and housing consumers was an important resource in transitioning from an initial migration aspiration to a concrete decision of where to move to. As Benson and O’Reilly (2016: 30) point out, “lifestyle is to some extent the imagined style of life after migration and as such can be considered as a social structure,” shaping expectations “through more easily identified social and physical structures.” Some of my interlocutors had developed a very sophisticated and detailed set of skills and networks to navigate these structures and support their locational choice. They drew upon an assemblage of resources including desk research, the feedback of other migrants or locals, online marketing engines, agents, consultants, travelling and mediatic representations of places creating clear overlaps with tourism production. Some had quite a narrow list of countries to choose from, predefined by being in Europe and close to their origin country or to work, while others had a wider geographical span. Zelda used the analogy of the “drawing board” in our interview to describe the process of sketching out and defining the characteristics of what she expected from a specific place, as she put it: The drawing board involved… well you have seen that I can be fairly systematic, structured and methodical about these things when I put my mind to it! The drawing board involved things like climate, an important one, sunshine, rain, and things to do, especially cultural life, and potentially what the feel will be of the place.

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The “drawing board” differed for the interlocutors depending on the drivers of their migration and stage in the life cycle. This was a dynamic process as the specifications of what was desirable in a place became increasingly refined. Following on from mostly internet research at home was visiting places on the short list to “try on” and compare local life. The intent of visits differed from “usual holidaying” and involved projecting a future life in each place or as Åkerlund and Sandberg (2015: 360) put it, “tailoring a preferred lifestyle”. This represented the first step in transitioning from what Benson (2011: 226) positions as “pre-migration imaginings” of place in contrast with the post-migration embodiment. Part of research visits involved avoiding the touristic hotspots and searching for real-to-life experiences by staying in Airbnb rentals in different residential neighbourhoods. The following two experiences of Zelda – a retiree – and Laura – a mother of three – illustrate the importance of tourism in the decision-making process at different moments in the life cycle. Laura limited her search to Spain and Portugal given the social and cultural links developed through her study of both languages at university. While the move of her family, like the other interlocutors, was driven by the search for a better quality of life, achieving a work/life balance necessitated an urban location. Living in a city, with specific place attributes and infrastructures was key, such as a good international airport  – as both she and her husband maintained their previous jobs and commuted regularly – and quality international schools. Originally, she had considered some cities in the South of Spain, “where life might be more slow-paced,” but ruled those out straight away, as the flights were too limited. The next stage in the decision-making process involved weeklong visits to each Barcelona, Madrid and Lisbon as she describes in her own words: I knew the cities as a tourist, but I wanted to hang around in residential areas to see where I could see myself living. We also visited two or three schools in each city to figure out what it would be like for the kids to live there. I guess we realised Lisbon had a nice balance for us. Madrid doesn’t have the sea and the temperatures are more extreme, it is too hot and then cold in winter, too busy. It just so happened as well when we were visiting Barcelona there was lots of hostility towards foreigners, there were demonstrations against tourists and we felt that might spill over to foreign residents, we might have been seen as tourists. I was put off by the hostility.

Laura’s experience highlights aspects of social positioning and belonging. Indeed, the anti-tourism critique that has emerged in many European cities created insecurities for a few of the interlocutors, both in terms of potential hostility and how they might be perceived or positioned. Füller and Michel (2014: 1306) point out, that as new urban tourists avoid touristic places and search for more authentic experiences in cities, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish tourists from other lifestyle mobilities. However, given the relationship between lifestyle practices and self-­identity, my interlocutors dissociated themselves with tourists -often in social and spatial terms- through their knowledge of city and tangible practices. For, example Stephen had discovered tourist free spaces in the city, such as “libraries and secret miradouros (viewpoints).” Borrowing Buhr’s term, he was involved in the pursuit of “becoming local” through cultivating an “intimate local

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understanding, a degree of familiarity that allows [him] to do certain things that non-locals would not do” (Buhr 2018: 6). Zelda’s search to define a place to spend the winters outside of France began in retirement. After spending a few years living in Mexico in the mid-1970s as a young graduate, she often thought of returning. With health challenges, she wanted to test her physical capacity in terms of both making the move to Latin America and coping with life there. Her account shows the negotiation between desire and capacity that is prevalent in the experience of growing older. In her own words, she describes this experience: I always had the idea that I might go back to Mexico as a winter base… So, I decided 2008 would be the year I would test this out… I spent a while in a yoga retreat on the Pacific coast. Then I went to the Yucatán peninsula, I rented a car and saw how exhausted I got at the end of the day. It didn’t feel right … It also was if I wanted this beach lifestyle and also these places were crawling with Americans, sort of snowbirds as they call them, who behaved as if they owned the world…I tended to have a more diverse community of friends and contacts… and concerts and opera and things are really important to me.

As a result of this experience, Zelda began to refine place attributes and align them with the mode of life she wanted to practice. Her experience reiterates the findings of Åkerlund and Sandberg (2015) on Swedes in Malta, in terms of avoiding overly touristic places and distancing from tourists or other lifestyle migrants who project a perceived lack of affinity with local life and culture. Distance was also a key factor, as Zelda, like other interlocutors was also figuring out how to build a transnational multi-residence existence rather than planning a permanent move. Once Zelda refined her search to Southern Europe, further visits were made to the Canary Islands, Malaga and Valencia, where she, like the majority of the interlocutors, stayed in Airbnb rentals in different parts of town to get an impression of what it would be like to live in different neighbourhoods. In her own words: I was just testing places out and I mean I probably wasn’t ready; I hadn’t found a place that made me say yes. It was an emotional decision in the end, I was in Valencia and I missed Lisbon, I had saudades. There are nice museums and architecture, but the scale of it was just not big enough for me, I didn’t feel the scope was enough, there wasn’t an emotional connection. I just felt in Lisbon everybody was just much more open and welcoming.

The direct comparison of different places through tourism helped to refine the qualities most valued -climate, proximity to the sea, the “old world” feeling of the city, accessibility, openness of the Portuguese, culture, nightlife, cosmopolitanism and security- and to bring to the fore practicalities of what a new lifestyle would entail.

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7.4.3  E  conomic Considerations: Relative Affluence and Material Practices Migration as a lifestyle is entrenched in relative economic privilege. Such privilege is extended through citizenship rights and special economic benefits in the case of my interlocutors, yet the way economic factors, specifically the attraction of the NHR regime, influenced their locational choice differed. Some had no information on the optimal tax scheme before they migrated, others relied on the benefits to cover the costs of their material practices in the city, such as international school fees, while others claimed it was not decisive in their locational choice. For instance, Stephen had never contemplated fiscal benefits before meeting with an accountant to obtain advice on declaring his earnings in Portugal. The NHR scheme became a post-migration strategy to boost his small rental income from a house he owns back home and, as he puts it, “to survive for longer” on the redundancy money he was living on, especially given that housing costs were higher than expected. This experience again brings to light the coexistence of relative privilege and vulnerabilities as noted in other contexts (Botterill, 2017). The relative dimension of wealth meant that using capital accumulated elsewhere to enable life in Lisbon, seen as a low-cost destination for Europe, was decisive for achieving the lifestyle and quality of life that some of the interlocutors envisaged. As Carin, who moved from Denmark with her family, points out: Lisbon was definitely welcoming it had the sea and the tax benefits here were important for us as I get paid by dividends and I don’t get taxed on those, so that really offsets some of the costs of life, like school fees, that we would have to support ourselves in the other cities we considered… We also were able to rent a beautiful big house when we first arrived. (Cairn, early 40s)

Fiscal gains from the Non-Habitual Residence Scheme coupled with the lower cost of labour in Lisbon relative to other European cities had an impact on the material practices of the interlocutors. Improved material lifestyles -as some could afford to partake in leisure practices unattainable to them at home, such as private schools, horse-riding and tennis clubs- was akin to social mobility and a repositioning among the local upper middle classes and the international ex-pat community. As Lundström (2017) points out in relation to Swedes in Singapore and Spain and Benson (2013) on North Americans in Panama, relocation to lower cost spaces can result in improved class status. The following quote from Clara gives some sense of this: In Bali, a couple of people actually told me about [says name of school in Lisbon]. In Bali we could afford more than in Portugal, but we came here because for Europe it is cheaper and there were tax benefits for us. The weather is good and international schools are affordable we can live in this house without using all our savings, we have the tax benefits. Paris or London would be impossible for us, it is just too expensive for private schools.

This indicates that the lower relative cost of life in Portugal compared to other European countries was an important aspect in the decision to move for Clara and her family and shows the global reach of feedback mechanisms. While beyond the scope of the present chapter, it is important to reiterate that shifting economic

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circumstances have had an impact on post-migration experiences. For example, Laura’s economic situation became quite difficult to navigate due to post-Brexit fluctuations in the exchange rate and increasing house prices in Lisbon. Some of the interlocutors pointed out that several European countries now offer optimal tax schemes, so this worked as a motivation in conjunction with locational characteristics rather than a primary motivating factor. Zelda, who is not an isolated example, sheds some light on this: The NHR certainly wasn’t something that I was terribly aware of. Au contraire, I can tell you, for instance, that I could go and live in Austria and not pay tax for the remainder of my days, but I don’t actually want to go and live there. Fiscal policy per se is not my primary concern. I will say that it is a topic that interests me, but it is not the sole driver and not the primary driver, otherwise I could be in Austria or some other places in Latin America where I could live and not pay permanently… some of which are quite tempting but are off my agenda as main bases for various reasons.

As Zelda’s story continues, she reflects on the fact that, while favourable fiscal policy was not a primary factor for choosing Lisbon as a destination, given the 10 year beneficiary period, it may act as a motive to either onward migrate or for changing fiscal residency in the future: I want to be clear that I am committing to being here, not that it is necessarily something I want to do for the rest of my life. Looking back to the question of taxation, it wasn’t a primary motive for coming here but now that I have spent time here and seen what the taxation rate is it may an argument for not staying here without the NHR, you know, if you are paying a big premium for it.

As such, it was often concerns looking to the future that brought to light the significance that fiscal policies to attract relatively affluent migrants might have on migration decision-making. This is particularly so for those who were dependent on exemptions to offset the rising costs of life in the city.

7.5  Conclusion This urban case study aimed to bring discussions on the city as a lifestyle destination to the fore to challenge the rural or costal bias in lifestyle migration research (Griffiths & Maile, 2014). The city of Lisbon as a destination for lifestyle migrants relates to the way it is projected as a hub for new urban tourism where charm, authenticity and cosmopolitanism are commodified along with other natural attributes, such as climate. Imaginaries of place emerge based on a slower form of urbanism, that permits a balance between leisure and work and sea and cultural offer. While tourism or mediatic representations of the city were an essential element in creating a pre-migration imaginary of place and a mechanism in the locational decision-making process -as local life was tested- tourism did not simply spill over into migration. Part of the process of becoming, identity making or self-­ realization that shaped the self-understanding of these lifestyle migrants meant that their mobility was imagined as being fundamentally different in ideological terms

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to tourism mobilities. Indeed, past mobility experiences also created a pedagogy of what relocation entailed and speaks to the idea of migration as an ongoing process. While recognising the overlaps between tourism and lifestyle migration in terms of marketing, imagination, shared patterns of place consumption, and impacts on neighbourhood change, maintaining analytical distinctiveness is necessary given the distinct way in which they are governed and embodied. Moreover, privileged migration provides a lens through which to understand more fully inequalities and unevenness in the wider EU mobility regime and “constellations of privilege” reinforced by fiscal benefits (Benson, 2019). The mechanics of locational choice relate to the potentialities of the city to meet household needs at different stages in the life course. The urban lifestyle prism reveals diverse lifestyle-led mobilities. My retired interlocutors valued the cultural fabric of the city, security and what they perceived as a slower urbanism. While lifestyle factors are primary, beyond the amenities of sea, sun and culture, the connections afforded by the city are also important as some of my interlocutors or their partners had to sustain jobs and companies, which involved frequent foreign travel. The urban context provided the infrastructure to maintain specific economic activities as well as educational aspirations for those with children. The city afforded a balance between the lifestyle profile they wanted to perform and their social and economic positioning in terms of work and education. Lifestyle motivations were imbued with economic concerns. Locational choice involved a balance between both along different degrees of freedom depending on the material wealth of the interlocutors. The pull of fiscal benefits and lower cost living, while not the primary motivation, was not negligible as it increased economic capacity and enabled certain material practices not thought possible in other major European cities at the time of migration. This did change over the course of my fieldwork as housing costs increased in the city, making the material cost of migration more difficult to bear for a couple of my informants. The finite nature of the optimal tax regime also meant that looking to the future brought the significance of this policy to attract the relatively affluent into focus, as losing the benefits might act as a stimulus to onward migrate or at least change fiscal residency. This demonstrates how lifestyle and economic concerns are interlaced in individual locational choice and migration decision-making. Ultimately, individual choice is realised within a political economy that entangles selectivity within the EU mobility regime and neoliberal agendas to promote the territorial competitiveness of the city. Acknowledgments  This research received financial support from the Fundação para Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) within the scope of the SMARTOUR project (Ref: PTDC/GES-­ URB/30551/2017); and DiasporaLink H2020-MSCA-RISE-2014 [grant number 645471].

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Part III

Transnationalism, Return and Circular Migrations

Chapter 8

Residential Mobility of Hungarian Nationals and Foreign Citizens: The Case Study of Budapest Sándor Illés

8.1  Introduction From the point of view of terminology, international migration and residential mobility are situated in the arena of spatial mobilities, but relatively far from each other (Coulter et al., 2016). Both phenomena are conceptualised as a move (movement). International migration works cross the borders of countries. We get closer to residential mobility through the term of internal migration, where settlements are the defining spatial unit. Short-distance residential mobility functions within migration defining spatial levels. Moreover, it includes smaller areas as territorial frames in order to cross them. In this article the districts of Budapest are the spatial units of residential mobility. In this chapter we connect the investigation of time series as a statistical method with the preparation of a map a geographic tool, in order to investigate the spatial patterns of residential mobility within Budapest. We put emphasis on the uneven territorial distribution of residential movers (Dodge, 2017). Utilizing cartography is intrinsically geographical and the effective way of visualization of flow data (Kincses et  al., 2013; King, 2002; Kritz et  al., 1992; Sander et  al., 2014). In so doing, we discover the geographical systems and subsystems (King & Okólski, 2018; Mabogunje, 1970). After that we examine the differences in quantities, which reflect the effect of the 2008 economic crisis as well. The aim of this paper is two-fold. We study both the external and internal dimensions of two sorts of spatial mobilities, namely long-term international migration and short-distance residential mobility. We employed a relatively recent administrative database (30-6-2019) in this research article. However, we must mention that the absolute and relative numbers of the period before the crisis (2006–2008) slightly changed due to official cleaning of the statistical databank year by year. So, S. Illés (*) Active Society Foundation, Budapest, Hungary © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_8

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some data in this publication may differ from the previous publications (Illés, 2015; Illés & Kincses, 2018). In the following sections we depict some strata of the international migration situation according to population census information. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Firstly, we use territorial series analysis in order to stress the peculiar position of the capital, Budapest, within the receiving counties. The statistical table method is combined with parity analysis. Secondly, focussing on Budapest, we turn to our main topic, namely residential mobility within the capital city. We extend the time horizon to the post-crisis period but concentrate on the geographical directions and distances of flows of Hungarian citizens and immigrants. Lastly, we conclude the results and discuss the findings in the full spectrum of spatial mobilities. Given the macro-scope of this research (Beauchemin, 2014), the map (Fig. 8.1) serves as a visualisation tool, the classic method of population geography (Pott, 2013; Simon & Randalls, 2016).

8.2  S  ome Forms of Human Spatial Mobility Related to Budapest – A State of the Art This chapter of the book contains highly quantitative research at the intersection of positivism and constructivism scientific paradigms (Healy & Perry, 2000; Panke, 2018). We begin to operate official statistical data as facts localised in the form of discrete numbers. Later we reconstruct and visualize these facts in a cartographic way. The results in Fig.  8.1 recognise a new quality far from a simple statistical description and analysis. The map reflects the complete and comprehensive situation of residential mobility of Budapest echoing the directions and distances of residential mobility flows of nationals and foreigners in three time periods. However, residential mobility is not the entire reality of the arena of spatial mobilities of Budapest from the point of view of structuralism. Residential mobility which means change of usual residence within a settlement is a part of the whole spectrum. The capital is effected by tourists, commuters and migrants’ flows both from internal and international perspectives. It is interesting that King and Skeldon (2010) argue against the rigid distinction between internal migration and international migration. Their argumentation may partially be valid on tourism and commuting, too, if we accept the ‘global village’ concept (Srinivasan, 2018), the globe is conceptualised as a borderless world (Paasi et al., 2019) whose problems arise mainly at state borders. It is important to note that migration literature is more developed on the topic of circular migration (Constant et al., 2013) than tourism literature on circular (repetitive) tourism (Bódis & Michalkó, 2017; Südas & Mutluer, 2010). One of the critical subjects for tourism scholars is to fill the research gap. Considering all of forms of spatial mobilities, Budapest contains 20% of the total Hungarian population, but the capital attracts significantly higher shares of mobile

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Fig. 8.1  Direction of the dominant residential out-mobility flow of Hungarians and foreigners by district in 2006–2016 within Budapest and the share of foreigners in each flow by three periods (per cent)

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populations both from internal and international angles. The period between 2006 and 2016, international circular migrants preferred Budapest (50.9%) to the rest of country. Similarly, first-time international immigrants choose to locate in the capital city (42.3%). Beyond Budapest, the second main target area of both first-time immigrants (11.2%) and internal circulators (11.1%) was Pest County, surrounding the capital. The remaining 18 counties received immigrants in low shares and there were not significant differences between first time immigrants and circulators. Budapest was a relatively ‘stable’ settlement area during the crisis period in the sense of circular migration. The share of circulators (51.0%) did not change compared to pre-crisis times (50.6%). We hypothesised that the force of circulation came from the multiple selection mechanisms. They resulted in a kind of resistance against the economic crisis. This feature of the circulatory system counterbalanced the general negative effect of the economic downturn in the city (Illés & Kincses, 2018). The question arises whether transnational forces overwhelm translocal ones (Maslova & King, 2020). For the answer, we connected the recent residence county of circular migrants with previous ones in Hungary. By studying both internal and international migration, Illés and Kincses (2018) contributed to transnational versus translocal debates with empirical evidences in migration studies (Fauser & Nijenhuis, 2016; Göler et al., 2014). Except for Budapest and Pest County, the vast majority of circulators returned to the same county before and during the crisis, as well. This phenomenon reflected the exceptional force of translocalism in the Hungarian side. In other words, the circulators, the successful multiple migrants with individual local knowledge, returned to the same counties. If we accept the validity of the model of translocal-transnational continuum (Brickell & Datta, 2011; Glick-Schiller & Salazar, 2013; Waldinger, 2017), the city of Budapest can be found close to the transnational mooring. Before the crisis, 40.3% of circular returnees were measured in Budapest. During economic upheaval, this proportion diminished to 37.0%. The decrease could be explained by two processes. Budapest pushed large amounts of its circulators to the international (transnational) sphere outside Hungary. In addition, the capital pulled circulators from Hungarian counties, but less extent. The utilization of translocal-transnational nexus worked effectively as general explanatory frame of international circular migration in the case of Budapest and Hungary. Unfortunately, the transnational-translocal nexus, one of the meso-theory frameworks in migration studies, was understudied in tourism and commuting literature (Bódis & Michalkó, 2017; Cresswell & Merriman, 2011; King & Skeldon, 2010). The capital was characterised with uneven social spaces. There was no question that the high attracting force of Budapest was functioning through different mechanisms on each form of spatial mobilities within separate districts. Smith and her co-authors (2018) found that the VII district was the main magnet point of ‘ruin bars-led’ international tourism. The development of ‘ruin bars’ took place in parallel with the rapid increase of Airbnb apartments and hostels. A ‘party quarter’ appeared from some parts of V, VI and VIII districts around the core of VII. The basic needs of local inhabitants (both Hungarian and foreigners) were disregarded

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due to the unreasonable noise levels and the daily behaviour of internal and international tourists. These disadvantages combined with the rapidly growing property prices induced locals to move away (see Fig. 8.1). A highly qualified segment of international commuters can be conceptualised as the members of ‘creative class’. Egedy and his collaborators (2018) signed that the ‘elite districts’ on the Buda side of the capital represented higher proportions of creative firms (XII, I and II districts) compared to peripheral ones on the Pest side of the Danube river (XXI, XXIII, XV and XVII districts). We hypothesized with great probability that the members of ‘creative class’ moved in and around these professional concentrations. The scientific hubs with third level educational and academic institutions attracted internal and international researchers and students located in dispersed way in the territory of capital (Fabula et al., 2017). So, their effects on the volume of in-migration, out-migration and residential mobility was not significant by district level. However, changes in the property market put enormous influences on spatial mobility flows due to the owner dominated housing market, a long-lasting heritage of socialist epoch (Földi, 2006). Foreign private investors purchased traditional houses and flats in the inner city (V. and VI. districts) and urban rehabilitation areas (for instance IX district) in the Pest side of the city. The other side of River Danube, they preferred ‘the richest’ II and XII districts. All in all, ‘tourist-migrant niches’ of foreign property owners developed in traditionally Hungarian neighbourhoods under the umbrella of general gentrification processes (Boros et al., 2016; Illés & Michalkó, 2012). Keresztély and Scott (2012) underlined that the deprived areas, mainly former industrial zones, gained low levels of funding for urban renewal. Besides small parts of the IX district, the characteristic example of new-built housing development in rust belt areas was the XIII district with gated and semi-gated communities. It became one of the most popular target points for residentially mobile Hungarians and foreigners within Budapest (see Fig. 8.1).

8.3  Foreign citizens in Hungary In 2011, foreign citizens, in line with international definitions, were defined as those who had habitually lived in Hungary for at least for 12 months or intended to live here at least 1 year at the reference date of the census. Out of the foreign citizens, the members of the diplomatic corps and their families; the members of the foreign armed forces stationed in the country on the basis of the decree of the Parliament or Government; as well as those staying in Hungary for the purpose of tourism (recreation, hiking, hunting etc.), medical treatment and business meetings were not enumerated. The total resident population (natives and immigrants) of Hungary has been steadily decreasing since the early 1980s due mainly to natural loss. From the 1990s, Hungary – like many other Eastern and Central European countries – has become a host country of international migrants thanks to its economic growth and European

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integration. Most migrants come from neighbouring countries. Thus, in addition to its direct population replacement role, international immigration has indirect economic, social and demographic effects on Hungary. The declining and emigrating domestic population has been partially replaced by foreign citizens, bringing with them their attitudes, behaviours and different demographic compositions (Karácsonyi & Kincses, 2011). Two main macro-data sources exist in Hungary, related to immigrant subpopulations. The international foreign immigrant register is a part of the continuous population register which is computed on a yearly basis and revised every 10-years. It is according to the United Nations recommendation and fulfils the minimum one-­ year-­stay criterion – the analysis below is based on this sort of data. The second main data source is the latest population census held in 2011. This full scope data set provides information not only on the gender, age, family status dimensions of population but also the educational attainment, housing conditions and economic activity – as relevant context of this research. Moreover, it contains information on different international migrant subpopulations: (1) dual citizens (status change by acquiring Hungarian citizenship, this subgroup is out of the scope of foreign immigrant registration); (2) Foreign citizens (closest to the foreign immigrant status); (3) Foreign-born people (hybrid category of only Hungarian citizens, dual citizens, only foreign citizens, refugees, persons under international protections and stateless people) (Table 8.1). The census found less foreign citizens in comparison with the earlier updated (1st of January 2011) foreign immigrant population based on continuous registers. The latter exceeded 200 thousand long-term immigrants. At the reference date of midnight on the 1st of October 2011, 143,197 foreign citizens (excluding dual citizens having also Hungarian citizenship) and 383,236 foreign-born citizens resided in Hungary. The importance of neighbouring countries is related to the ethnic Hungarian groups living there and its cross-border language and cultural ties. Romania as sending country is also prominent amongst international migrants, representing a flow of mainly ethnic Hungarian migrants to Hungary. However, the number of Asian, African and American international migrants is not insignificant. It is interesting that the number of Romanian-born people living in Hungary is higher than the total population in Szeged (Hungary’s third largest city after Budapest and Debrecen). Stressing the increasing diversity of the population, foreigners living in Hungary are composed of a total of 161 different nationalities and were born in 195 different countries. In line with the previous expectation the migrant-origin subpopulations are relatively young compared to the resident population in Hungary, so international migrants slightly rejuvenate Hungary. The average age of male foreign nationals is 38.0 years. The female value is a little bit higher, 39.6 years. The corresponding indicators are 39.3 and 43.5 years in the total population. Foreign citizens aged over 25 years are better educated than the Hungarian resident population. As direct consequence of the differences of education attainment the share of employed amongst foreign citizens is 70.2%. The share of employed persons amongst the Hungarian resident population is lower (64.4%) than amongst the foreign citizens. The

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Table 8.1  Immigrant-related subpopulations living in Hungary by origin countries, 1 October 2011 Country of citizenship/place of birth/ country of residence before return Romania Germany Slovakia Austria United Kingdom France Netherlands EU28 Ukraine Serbia Europe other Europe total China Viet-Nam Iran Asia other Asia total USA Canada America other America total Nigeria Egypt Africa other Africa total Other and unknown Total Percentage of Immigrant-related subpopulations (%)

Dual citizens (Hungarian and other) 39,270 6412 1679 1467 1627 1298 762 59,644 2383 9394 3434 74,855 952 783 146 2240 4121 4978 2149 741 7868 128 168 679 975 1087 88,906 0.89

Foreign citizens 38,574 16,987 8246 3936 2602 2201 2058 85,414 11,820 7752 7536 112,522 8852 2358 1523 9571 22,304 3022 484 1237 4743 1015 472 1366 2853 775 143,197 1.44

Foreign-born people 176,550 22,605 33,155 6160 3597 3233 2438 266,701 35,354 29,144 13,608 344,807 8767 2668 1713 12,358 25,506 4684 1198 2416 8298 1101 632 2256 3989 636 383,236 3.86

Source: Hungarian Central Statistical Office

proportion of unemployed is lower within foreign citizens than in Hungarian residents (4.6% and 8.7%). The two types of indicator on economic activity of the population aged 25–64 years confirm that foreign citizens are better educated than the Hungarian resident population. So, we can conclude that foreign citizens are selected in positive directions in terms of socio-demographic and economic dimensions according to the 2011 census results in Hungary (Kincses, 2015).

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8.4  I nternational Migratory Processes in the Light of Economic Crisis Spatial mobilities have become increasingly frequent during the epoch of globalisation (Cohen, 2018; Domínguez-Mujica, 2016). Migration systems have emerged due to the rapid development of information, transportation technology and telecommunication (Hugo, 2014; Lévai, 2011). The distinctive function of state borders within the European Union have been eroding as a long-term trend (Cassarino, 2013; Gábrity-Molnár, 2011; Karakayali & Rigo, 2010). The relatively free movement of individuals between countries became a reality within the European Union, so the probability of migration has increased (Gellérné-Lukács, 2011, 2016). The interpretation of international circular migration is one of the key questions that our research will address (Williams et  al., 2011). From the perspective of Hungary as a receiving country, a single migratory move may mean a move from the country of origin to the host country. Return migration (from the host country to the country of origin) already involves two interlinking moves. Return migration represents a simple corridor in migratory systems whilst onward migration expands the system (Ahrens et al., 2016; Montanari & Staniscia, 2016; Nadler et al., 2016). Onward migration (from the country of destination to a third country) also consists of at least two interlinked international migrations due to the previous arrival to the destination country. The third interlinked migration system might be the event of a second immigration (embedded into events of immigration-emigration-­ immigration). This is already circulation. In our interpretation, an at least threestep-­migration system can be viewed as circular migration. All in all, international circular migration contains two or more instances of immigration to Hungary (second or higher rank immigration at individual levels). From the distinction stated by the European Commission (2011 p. 21), we may identify two different perspectives on non-nationals as viewed from the destination country. We might differentiate between foreign circulators residing in the country of destination (inwards circulation) and non-national circulators settled in the origin or in a third country (outwards circulation). From a methodological point of view, the analytical value of these two perspectives is equivalent. For practical reasons, due mainly to data accessibility we decided to utilise the inward perspective in this research. The outward perspective would be more useful in the investigation of the circulation of Hungarian nationals (Lados & Hegedűs, 2019; Moreh, 2014) and cross-country comparison would be highly worthwhile (Domínguez-Mujica et al., 2014; Göler et al., 2014; Triandafyllidou & Marchetti, 2013). We mentioned in a previous paper that the share of circulators was 14.9% among all immigrants in Hungary over the period of 2006–2012. We distinguished the indicators before the crisis period (14.7%) and during the crisis period (15.1%) and concluded that under the effect of the economic slowdown, the proportion of circulators increased slightly (Illés & Kincses, 2018). Following the method described above, the quantitative effect of the economic crisis would be mainly the differences between shares of circular migrants in the total foreign population in the pre-crisis

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and crisis periods. The differences between shares show the effect of the crisis period in each origin country. We measure huge negative numbers in Romania, Ukraine and Serbia. These amounts must be explained not only by the effect of economic crisis but also the introduction of the new citizenship law in 2011. After this point in time, many ethnic Hungarians living abroad and/or immigrants in Hungary became Hungarian nationals and citizens of the European Union/nationals of Ukraine and Serbia (Çağlar, 2013; Hárs, 2016). So, the probability of being immigrants diminished from these two countries in parallel with their vulnerability originally produced by their migrant status in Hungary. The citizens of Romania gained EU citizenship in 2007, so the immigrant and/or citizen’ status was not so attractive in Hungary. Both under the effect of the economic downturn and structural change some countries’ proportions of circulators increased. The German, American, Turkish, Chinese and Japanese values became higher in times of recession. The proportions from the countries of the European Economic Area (except for Germany), Russia and Israel remained the same.

8.5  I nternational Immigrants in Budapest and the Countryside According to Table 8.2 international circulators preferred Budapest (50.9%) to the rest of the country. Considering the first-time international immigrants, the same correlation functioned comparing Budapest (42.3%) to the countryside during the whole period, but to a smaller extent. Beyond Budapest, the second main target area of both first-time immigrants (11.2%) and circulators (11.1%) was Pest County, surrounding the capital. The remaining 18 counties received immigrants in low shares and there were not significant differences between first time immigrants and circulators (Kincses, 2015). Budapest was a relatively ‘stable’ area of settlement during the crisis period in the sense of circular migration. The share of circulators (51.0%) did not change compared to the pre-crisis time (50.6%). We hypothesised that the force of circulation counterbalanced the general negative effect of economic downturn in the city (Illés & Kincses, 2018). The next results provide us with a third lens of analysis. We connected the recent county of residence of circulators with previous ones in Hungary. In doing so, we compared transnational moves with local ones to enhance our understanding of transnational versus translocal mobilities (Fauser & Nijenhuis, 2016; Göler et al., 2014). Except for Budapest and Pest county the majority of circulators returned to the same county before and during the crisis, as well. This phenomenon reflected the exceptional force of translocalism in the Hungarian side. In other words, the circulators, that is, the successful multiple migrants with individual local knowledge returned to the same counties.

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Table 8.2  The share of immigrants in Hungarian counties by number entering from 2006 to 2012, (%) County Budapest Baranya Bács-Kiskun Békés Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén Csongrád Fejér Győr-Moson-Sopron Hajdú-Bihar Heves Komárom-Esztergom Nógrád Pest Somogy Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Tolna Vas Veszprém Zala Total

Number of entering 1 2 3 42.3 48.5 53.0 3.3 4.0 4.5 4.9 1.6 1.1 1.3 0.9 0.9 1.7 1.4 1.4 6.4 5.3 6.8 2.,3 2.0 1.9 5.2 2.9 2.8 5.0 6.5 5.7 1.2 1.2 0.8 2.0 1.7 1.2 0.6 0.4 0.4 11.2 13.1 8.5 2.5 2.4 2.4 2.2 2.6 3.2 1.0 0.4 0.4 1.0 1.0 1.1 1.6 1.0 1.3 1.9 1.5 1.2 2.6 1.6 1.4 100.0 100.0 100.0

4 57.1 4.8 0.2 0.4 1.2 7.7 1.8 2.7 4.6 0.8 1.1 0.2 7.1 2.6 3.3 0.0 0.8 0.9 0.9 1.7 100.0

Together (2–4) Together (1–4) 50.9 43.5 4.2 3.4 1.3 4.4 0.8 1.2 1,4 1.6 6.0 6.3 2.0 2.2 2.9 4.8 6.0 5.2 1.0 1.2 1.5 1.9 0.4 0.6 11.1 11.2 2.4 2.5 2.9 2.3 0.4 0.9 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.6 1.3 1.8 1.5 2.4 100.0 100.0

Source: Author’s own calculations

Pest County is located in the neighbourhood of the capital from a geographical point of view. It is situated in an intermediary position in-between the countryside and Budapest. 63% of circulators were labelled as returnees in both investigated periods in Pest county. If we accept the validity of the model of translocal-­ transnational continuum, Budapest can be found close to the transnational mooring. Before the crisis 40.3% of circular returnees were measured in Budapest. During the economic upheaval, this proportion diminished to 37.0%. The decrease could be explained by two processes. Budapest pushed large amounts of its circulators to the international (transnational) sphere outside Hungary. In addition, the capital pulled internal circulators from Hungarian counties, but to a lesser extent. Thus, the translocal-transnational nexus works as a general explanatory frame in the Hungarian example as it is impossible to explain the uneven spatial movements of first-time immigrants and circular migrants with only translocal nor transnational frames, separately.

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8.6  Residential Mobility Within Budapest The total population of the Hungarian capital, Budapest, was 1,729,040 residents in the time of 2011 census. In which, 56,632 inhabitants only had foreign citizenship. It was 3.3% within the residents of Budapest, which was more than double compared with the country’s average (Fig. 8.1). From a quantitative point of view, we can observe that immigrants are distributed unevenly in the country. They are concentrated in the capital similar to tourists (Dövényi et al., 2009; Rátz et al., 2008; Smith et al., 2018). In this section of the paper we analyse one of the spatial movements of foreign citizens amongst Hungarian movers between the districts of Budapest from 2006 to 2016. So, the defining areas of residential mobility are the 23 districts of the capital city. The movements under investigation flowed between districts within the borders of Budapest. We concentrated on the residential mobility of foreign residents in comparison with Hungarian citizens. Our aim is to investigate the volume, intensity, distance and direction of residential mobilities before, during and after the latest economic recession. The average yearly number of residentially mobile foreigners was 2557 people in the period of 2006–2008, 2479 people during crisis and 2397 people between 2013 and 2016. In accordance with the previous expectation, the volume diminished slightly during the financial-economic upheaval. However, the decrease continued after the crisis. The average yearly number of residentially mobile Hungarians was 56,028, 49,365 and 57,882 people in the consecutive periods. We can notice the deteriorating effect of the economic downturn, but later a massive recovery period. We may ask questions about the absence of the recovery period amongst the foreign movers. According to our explanation the main potential reason is embedded in an administrative change in Hungary. The effect of the crisis would be conceptualised by examining the differences between both groups of movers -Hungarians and foreign residents- over the three periods. The decreases in the movement of foreigners could be explained not only by the pure effect of the economic crisis but also due to the introduction of the new citizenship law in 2011. After this point in time lots of ethnic Hungarians living as immigrants in Hungary became Hungarian nationals in an even simpler manner than before became immediately citizens of the European Union. This process concerned the nationals of Ukraine and Serbia. Moreover, for the citizens of Romania, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and Slovakia the weak status modification opened the possibility to avoid lots of bureaucratic impediments to living in Hungary as quasi-­ foreigners (Çağlar, 2013; Illés & Kincses, 2018). So, the probability of holding immigrant status in Hungary diminished firmly amongst ethnic Hungarian minorities due to the legal change. After the analysis of absolute numbers, I move to analyse intensities. The research question arises: is there any difference in indicators between the foreigners and the citizens in Budapest? Table 8.3 reflects key differences.

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Table 8.3  Average yearly intensity of residential mobility amongst Hungarian citizens and non-­ Hungarian citizens in Budapest from 2006 to 2016 (per thousand) Years 2006–2008 2009–2012 2013–2016

Total 33.9 30.0 34.9

Hungarian citizen 33.5 29.5 34.6

Foreigner 45.2 43.8 42.3

Source: Author’s own calculation

The intensities of foreigners were constantly higher than the Hungarian level of residential mobilities. It meant that non-Hungarian inhabitants with immigration backgrounds were more mobile in one of the aspects of spatial moves than Hungarian citizens. Searching for explanation we may hypothesise that the more extended migratory experiences of non-Hungarians in their actual stage of life (immigration to Hungary as a plus move) is conducive to higher levels of residential mobility. The higher level of residential mobility of foreigners were in strong correlation with their migration specific capital and knowledge gathered through their previous migration experiences (Illés & Kincses, 2018; Khadria, 2013). The second sort of explanatory factors were situated in the repetitive search for appropriate accommodation in a new city (Skeldon, 2012). The third kind of rationalisations relate to insufficient local knowledge on the labour market, property market and local laws, rules, habits (Sacchetto & Vianello, 2016). First of all, we must mention that each district was a peculiar case in Fig. 8.1. The story of spatial mobility of 23 districts differed from each other completely. However, we investigated some general patterns that bore strong correlation with the geographical locations of the districts and the directions of residential mobilities. The fundamental inner border of Budapest was the river Danube. The capital was divided into two parts by the river: on the right side Buda and the left side Pest. The Danube functioned as the deep borderline of the most numerous cross-district moves. Only two exceptions existed. Residential out-mobilities from III district to XIII and in the opposite direction from IX district to XI district. In no other cases did residential mobilities flow between the neighbouring districts of Buda or Pest. These sorts of moves were strongly correlated with the spatial phenomenon of distance dependency in geographical, social and economic senses. The third characteristic was the movements from central districts to peripheral ones due to the development of the housing market. The most numerous residential mobilities of I. district directed to II. district in Buda all the three periods investigated. On the other side of the Danube, the most populous residential mobilities flowed from V. district to XIII district in 2006–2016. The ‘semi-centre’ district of VI sent mobile people to XIII district conceptualised as ‘new magnet pole’ and/or ‘semi-periphery’. Another two ‘semi-peripheries of VII and VIII headed to the second ‘new magnet pole’ of XIV. The inhabitants of the remaining ‘semi-centre’ of IX district did not flow to the ‘centres’ or other ‘semi-centres’ or to the two ‘magnet poles’. As mentioned above, the most numerous out-mover group of IX crossed the Danube to XI. The most out-mobile group of residents of two ‘magnet poles’ (XII,

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XVI.) flowed to IV district labelled as ‘periphery’. The most populous out-movers of three ‘semi-peripheral’ districts (X, XIX, XX.) did not change their usual place of resident to ‘semi-centres’ and/or ‘centres’. They preferred accommodations in neighbouring ‘peripheries’ in pair: X to XVII, XIX to XVIII and XX to XXIII. According to the geographical sense, peripheral districts only existed in Pest within the capital (IV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XXIII and XXI). They had common borders both ‘periphery’, ‘semi-periphery’, ‘magnet poles’ in these areas and the countryside over the capital. It was interesting that the most numerous out-flows of ‘peripheral’ districts directed to neighbouring ‘semi-peripheries’ and ‘magnet poles’ (IV to XIII; XV to XIV; XVI. to XIV; XVIII to XIX; XXIII to XX; and XXI to XX). Only one exemption existed. The most out-mobile people of peripheral XVII district moved to non-neighbour XIV district as ‘magnet pole’. Connections through residential mobility were very rare between peripheral districts, as well. Flows and counter-flows only happened between peripheral IV and XV districts within the Pest side of the city in 2006–2008. In this paragraph we utilised a widely cited migratory analogue formulated by Georg Ravenstein in his seminal works at the second half of nineteenth century (Lee, 1966). We extended one of the ‘laws of migration’ to the sphere of residential mobility. We argued that the mass flow of residential mobility was seldom unidirectional. The continuous flow of cross-district moves in one direction produced its counterpart, the counter-flow. With the help of cartographic visualisation (see Fig. 8.1), we provided the paired flows listed below in the case of Budapest: XI – XXII in Buda side; XX – XXIII; XIX – XVIII in Pest. We must mention that these long-lasting pairs (systems) functioned during the whole period. However, the residential mobility systems with shorter life cycle can be found in Fig. 8.1.

8.7  Conclusions This chapter explored residential mobility flows amongst the districts of Budapest. The international and internal dimensions were analysed through the distinction between the moves of foreigners and nationals. Initially, I investigated people with immigrant status in Hungary. The analysis separated immigrants into two parts: first-time immigrants and multiple immigrants (circulators) in pre-crisis and crisis periods. The average yearly number of first entry immigrants was 22,205 people before the crisis period and 19,490 people in the recession period. The average yearly number of circulators was 3636 people in the pre-crisis period and 3590 people during the crisis. We can conclude that the average decrease was smaller amongst circulators. We must emphasise that the intensity of circulation grew from 14.7% to 15.1% in the context of immigration. It reflects the resistance/resilience of circular migrants during the crisis compared to first-time immigrants. Another aspect of the analysis was the exploration of the territorial distribution of immigrants within Hungary. Both the first-time immigrants and circulators chose

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mainly Budapest and the adjacent Pest county opposite of the countryside (Kincses, 2020). In order to explain these facts, we hypothesised that transnational forces dominated in Budapest (Maslova & King, 2020) and translocalism had very strong influence on the countryside (Rye, 2014). Pest county possessed an intermediary position as a so called ‘one-way escalator region’. It facilitated the movement of immigrants to Budapest with weak counterflows year by year. Budapest contained heterogeneous terrains in which relational spatial practices occurred (Urry, 2007). The foreigners’ residential mobility was to a higher degree than the Hungarians between the districts of Budapest. In other words, the transnational immigrants were more mobile than the mass of native and inner in-migrant inhabitants of Budapest. The residential hyper-mobility of transnational migrants came mainly from their previously higher migratory experiences (Smith, 2011). The immigrants fuelled the dominant flows from core to greener semi-peripheral districts with new-built accommodations: for instance, from V to XIII and from VI, VII and VIII to XIV.  This research represents the beginning of a more detailed interpretation-­explanation of the main findings, that is foreign inhabitants were more mobile from a spatial point of view than Hungarian residents within Budapest, the capital, labelled often by ‘global city’ and/or ‘gateway city’ for immigrants, as well. Finally, the author stresses the needs of more theorization of short-distance residential mobility beyond the transnational-translocal nexus by different geographical scales (Bygnes & Erdal, 2017; Coulter et  al., 2016; Brickell & Datta, 2011 p. 10).

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Chapter 9

Patterns of Transnational Urban Drift to Latvia Zaiga Krišjāne, Māris Bērziņš, Elina Apsīte Beriņa, Jānis Krūmiņš, and Toms Skadiņš

9.1  Introduction The global landscape of population movement has changed considerably over the past few decades. Migratory flows have reached an ever more extensive range of countries and have become globalised. Thus, nowadays, migrant transnationalism is a crucial phenomenon in research on international migration (Castles et al., 2013; Carling & Erdal, 2014). Simultaneously, migration has accelerated quantitatively and has become very diverse with new types of circular and temporary movements, including high-skilled professionals, international students, lifestyle migrants and real estate investors (Gotham, 2005; O’Reilly & Benson, 2009; King, 2018). Many studies reveal that contemporary migration patterns in Europe show an increase in and diversification of migratory flows and the emergence of a new migration system followed by several concepts to describe a more diverse reality (Cassarino, 2004; Favell, 2008; Okólski, 2012; Engbersen et al., 2013; Farrell et al., 2014). This has expanded the scope for migrants to foster multiple belongings or ‘double identities’, hold dual citizenship, travel back and forth, work, and do business simultaneously in distant places (Portes, 2000; Vertovec, 2009). Similarly, some recent studies reveal the increase in transnational practices and behaviour among Latvian migrants (King & Lulle, 2015; Krisjane et  al., 2018). More recent studies on youth mobility patterns reveal that migration decisions consider not only socioeconomic, cultural, and place-specific aspects within which individuals’ migration decisions are made but also that migration aspirations are shaped by a desire to build a better way of life and self-development (Benson & O’Reilly, 2016; Sandu et al., 2018; King & Williams, 2018). Thus, it can be argued, that contemporary migrations in Europe are not just determined by the job, Z. Krišjāne (*) · M. Bērziņš · E. Apsīte Beriņa · J. Krūmiņš · T. Skadiņš University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_9

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education, income and career prospects but also shaped by lifestyle mobilities (Benson & Osbaldiston, 2014; King, 2018). Lifestyle-induced migration is widely interrelated with travel, leisure and migration, and relate to societal shifts associated with consumption or in other words how migration expresses itself behaviourally (Cohen et al., 2015; Benson & O’Reilly, 2016). Besides, the geographical contexts of the migratory flows and transnational connections are essential. The migration always has a strong relationship between the spatial patterns of migratory flows and the geography of uneven development expressed through the core-periphery framework (Williams et  al., 2004; Nadler et al., 2016; King et al., 2016). Therefore, countries, regions and cities that are more economically advanced, and tend to be also socially and culturally vibrant are the magnets, which attract migrants of all categories. The rise of the transnational behaviour of migrants and the attractiveness of urban lifestyles creates a new framework for understanding migratory flows towards the large cities and metropolitan regions (King, 2018). The geography of migration is critical for regional human capital outcomes: ‘urban drift’ amongst immigrants, returnees and circular migrants means that they prefer more dynamic regions than the remote, sparsely populated and lagging regions. ‘Urban drifters’ are those seeking a more extensive range of employment, individual and collective consumption opportunities, and the search for a better way of life (Lewis & Williams, 1986; Williams & Hall, 2000; O’Reilly & Benson, 2009). Latvia’s situation seems to give rise to exploring issues relevant to changing patterns of international migration and a little expressed but an emergent trend of transnational gentrification. The metropolitan region, including the capital Riga, attracts some new residents internally and internationally. The rising numbers of immigrants are of particular interest in Latvia’s case as it points to the globalisation of real estate market associated with lifestyle migration and transnational gentrification (Sigler & Wachsmuth, 2016; Gentile, 2018). There is substantial literature on migration processes in Latvia, but understanding the patterns of transnational urban drift and characteristic of urban drifters is limited. Thus, the contribution sends forward the interplay between immigration and return migration experiences by questioning: 1. What are the geographical contexts of the migratory flows? 2. How do they overlap and illuminate the process of ‘urban drift’? 3. How do the ‘urban drifters’ value their current life preferences and migratory experiences? A comprehensive approach in terms of data usage is performed for this study. Therefore, several data sources are employed. Our methodological approach allowed us to gather quantitative and qualitative data because we consider combining qualitative and quantitative data to analyse the geographical patterns and migrants’ experiences in the light of ‘urban drift’. For migratory flow identification to and from Latvia, available statistical data is used. The data derived from the Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia long-term emigration and immigration rates allow statistical analysis. Besides, available population statistics specify geographic

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divide for groups of immigrants, emigrants and return migrants. Finally, the statistical data are used to visualise gender and age differences as well as the process of ‘urban drift’ among immigrants and return migrants in the period from 2013 and 2018 in Latvia. Besides secondary data, also primary data was employed for this study. The authors draw on empirical materials from the Horizon2020 YMOBILITY project and reflect on data from the survey. This Pan European survey took place in nine European countries with a total number of 30,000 respondents in 2015 and 2016. The total number of survey respondents analysed in this study is 311, who conform to the characteristics of return migrants from Latvia. Moreover, the final part of the study employs in-depth interview material with 46 young returnees who have returned to the metropolitan region of Latvia’s capital. The evidence set out in the following sections covers the main results of the Latvian case. First, we present a brief overview of recent patterns and dynamics of migration to Latvia. Second, using the data collected through the YMOBILITY project’s survey and in-depth interviews, we present an empirical reading of residential patterns and migratory experiences of recent migrants. The chapter finishes with some concluding remarks and discusses how migrants’ behaviour and residential preferences interplay with the features of ‘urban drift’ and transnational gentrification.

9.2  Immigration and Return in a Country of Emigration Latvia has been an emigrant country for the past 30 years. Within this context, the country experienced substantial population shifts due to emigration and long-term negative net migration leading to a rapid decline of the national population. Previous studies reveal that many inhabitants started to emigrate in the years immediately following the restoration of independence in 1991 (Eglite, 2009). Latvia, along with other Eastern European countries witnessed the removal of migration barriers that triggered a wave of mainly Russian-speakers’ return migration to their ethnic homelands in the first half the 1990s (Heleniak, 2004) and westward emigration of the labour force became evident (Eglite & Krisjane, 2009). Since 2004, the phenomenon of mass East-West European migration started with Latvia’s accession and other Central Eastern European countries to the European Union (EU). Large numbers of East European citizens took advantages of the free movement of labour and participated in the higher wage labour markets (McCollum et  al., 2017). Thus, migration flows between Latvia, and Western Europe became a part of the much broader intra-EU mobility of citizens from East European accession countries to Western Europe. The enlargement of the EU had a substantial effect on the increase of migration outflows from Latvia. Following the country’s accession to the EU, Latvia experienced rapid economic growth, which caused emigration rates to drop slightly and the appearance of the first signs of return migration. However,

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the Latvian economy entered a severe recession in 2008, and the emigration reached the highest levels in its recent history. Analysing statistical data on international migration in Latvia, it is evident that the country has lost population massively through emigration (see Table  9.1). Statistics indicate a loss of more than 300,000 people due to emigration over the period since 1995. The peak of emigration was evident just after the EU enlargement and in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2008–2012. During this peak of emigration, it was mainly adult individuals and later, in times of economic recession, families who had left, seeking higher-paid jobs and better life in Western Europe (McCollum et al., 2017). Thus, in Latvia, the impact of the economic recession was more significant on emigration than on the level of return migration observed among other Central and Eastern European migrants (White, 2014; Zaiceva & Zimmermann, 2016). Throughout recent years, emigration from Latvia has decreased, while immigration is gradually increasing and reaching its highest rates over the past decade. The return migration of Latvian nationals until 2013 was modest and did not reflect in statistics. However, more frequent return visits to Latvia and particular transnational practices or circular movements have increased and in numerous ways, interacting with possible return migration (Lulle, 2014; Krisjane et al., 2016). The potential for return migration became widely discussed in public debate. This target group has also attracted decision-makers’ attention, explicitly looking for a solution to the population decline caused by the economic recession. Given the declining demographic situation, emigrants’ possible return is crucial for the sustainable development of society, and Latvia has decided to foster return migration (Apsite-Berina et al., 2019). In 2013, the Latvian government adopted the main policy document of return migration “Return migration support action plan for 2013–2016” – the plan aimed at defining specific support measures for those individuals and their families considering returning. Besides, the plan intended to strengthen business ties with the diaspora and its more active involvement in the Latvian economy, science and society (The Cabinet of Ministers, 2013, Kļave & Šūpule, 2019). Efforts to promote remigration are still in place, and in 2018, the Latvian government set up a network of regional coordinators to support return migration. Coordinators assist in the process of return and actively communicate with local municipalities. Along with the economic recovery and attempts to foster return migration, immigration patterns have also changed. After the numbers of emigrants slightly decreased since 2013, Table 9.1  Emigration from and immigration to Latvia, 1995–2018 Periods 2013–2018 2007–2012 2001–2006 1995–2000

Emigration 115,809 175,841 110,852 79,356

Immigration 57,313 43,474 35,828 19,878

Net migration −58,496 −132,367 −75,024 −59,478

Source: Authors’ analysis of data derived from the Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia

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Fig. 9.1  Recent trends of international migration in Latvia and its regional patterns. (Source: Own calculations, based on population statistics)

immigration to Latvia gradually increased, but the overall net migration is still negative (see Fig. 9.1). In Latvia’s case, the available statistics suggest that international immigrants favour Riga Metropolitan region and large cities, while returnees more intended to settle in the non-metropolitan areas. The rising numbers of immigrants are of particular interest in Latvia’s case as it points to the globalisation of the property market and reveals sure signs of lifestyle migration responding to transnational gentrification (Sigler & Wachsmuth, 2016; Gentile, 2018). The visualisation on a municipality level of immigration to Latvia in a five-year time interval distinguishes the large cities (especially Riga) and the entire Riga metropolitan region as the main foreign migrant destinations. In total, 14.3 thousand immigrants have been registered during this time, of whom 68.4% have relocated to Riga and 16.6% to Pieriga (suburbs). Other four non-metropolitan regions have collectively registered slightly above 15% of all immigrants. Immigration flows are considerably more attracted to the largest cities and their suburbs than the rural areas. All the largest cities of Latvia have attracted 82.5% of immigrants. This can be explained with increased interest of this specific migrant group to migrate to urban areas with a considerably better job and study opportunities. As for the suburbs, municipalities of Pieriga have the highest immigrant numbers due to Riga’s proximity. Overall, the Riga metropolitan region usually attracts a considerable number of internal migrants from non-metropolitan

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Fig. 9.2  Average number of immigrants per municipality, 2013–2018. (Source: Own calculations, based on population statistics)

regions due to suburban in-migration. However, the immigration statistics indicate the similar, albeit smaller in numbers, settlement patterns (Fig. 9.2). Since 2010, Latvia started to attract foreign capital through investments into the property market, allowing investors to obtain temporary residence permits enabling free movement across the Schengen area. The system was introduced to respond to the severe consequences in the real estate market caused by the economic recession. The similar ‘golden visa’ programmes in exchange for investments were implemented in some other EU countries (e.g. Slovenia, Hungary, Portugal and Greece). Compared to other countries, Latvia offered the most reasonable opportunity to obtain a 5-year residence permit as the minimum required value threshold initially was just 70,000 EUR, but this amount was subsequently raised in 2014 with some other limitation to the programme (Viesturs et al., 2017). In Latvia by the end of 2019, the residence permits by the real estate investment program produced more than 7000 new residents (excluding family members). The vast majority of them are Russians and other citizens of the Commonwealth of the Independent States who have bought the property in Riga and its suburbs, including Jurmala city’s most popular sea resort. Some research in the light of global gentrification process labels them as ‘Schengtrifiers’. Schengtrification is absentee gentrification that depends on the expanding freedom (of movement) gap between authoritarian states and democratic ones (Gentile, 2018). Most of the residence-by-real-estate-investment program buyers belong to the Russian and lesser extent to Ukrainian and Uzbek middle class. Nevertheless, it reveals that the most prosperous Riga metropolitan region is more associated with immigration as the economy is developing. There is a demand

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for more qualified labour, and migrants tend to move to places where they have better economic opportunities and lifestyle preferences. Returnees’ geography is much more comprehensive than for immigrants, as returnees often decide to move back into the home or choose the municipality where they lived before migration. However, there are signs of ‘urban drift’ in remigration as more than half of the returnees choose large cities, especially Riga and its metropolitan region. Figure 9.3 presents the metropolitan/non-metropolitan distribution of returnees across the five planning regions and Latvia’s capital city. Since 2013, about half of return migrants decided to settle in the Riga metropolitan region while the other half preferred non-metropolitan areas. The more pronounced pattern of ‘urban drift’ among returnees reflects the urban/rural divide, where about two-thirds of return migrants preferred urban/suburban areas instead of sparsely populated countryside. This urban concentration level is much lower than that of international immigrants but confirms that migrants in Latvia prefer economically and socially dynamic regions with higher population density. Similarly, to the immigration, Riga and Pieriga are the most attractive destinations to the return migrants; however, the difference in the share among the regions is less steep. 25.6 thousand return migrants have been registered from 2013 to 2018, of whom 33% have relocated to the capital city and 18% to its metropolitan region. Regions further from Riga had fewer return migrants during this period. However, all four have reached at least 10% of the total. Remigration flows are more attracted to the main settlement centres of Latvia. All nine large cities of Latvia have attracted 56.7% of return migrants. However,

Fig. 9.3  The average number of returnees per municipality, 2013–2018. (Source: Own calculations, based on population statistics)

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more than 10 thousand (43.3%) have returned from abroad to either rural areas or smaller cities/towns. There is intense urbanisation at the national scale and signs of ‘urban drift’ towards the capital expressed for all population mobility types. Thus, urban core and peripheral regions could be well seen in Latvia. Moreover, internal and international migration, work and education-related commuting are complexly interlinked. In essence, populations have been moving towards the capital city or other urban centres, and different types of mobility largely overlap and influence each other very jointly. Frequently it is evident that returnees originating in peripheral non-­ metropolitan and rural regions resettle in urban destinations. Statistics on the gender and age structure of immigrants and return migrants reveal that they are mostly adults of working age (mainly between 25 and 44). In both groups of migrants near retirement age are similar shares. Interestingly slightly mort men than women, engage in immigration and return migration. This gender gap is evident among all age groups (see Fig. 9.4). Less inclined to return are young adults who have just graduated from school and are planning to continue their studies in a university or enter the labour market. The more active return migration of children is linked to double citizenship acquisition when parents choose to register their child in the country of origin. The desire to maintain citizenship in the country of origin became more evident, followed by amendments to Latvian citizenship law recognising the reality of contemporary Latvian Westward migration (Lulle & Jurkane-Hobein, 2017; Kaprans, 2019). There is a high proportion of international students among immigrants who have chosen Latvia for educating. Over the past several years, Latvia has become an attractive destination for international students, and this also explains the increase of young immigrants in large cities, but especially in Riga. The number of foreign (mobile) students enrolled in Latvian higher education institutions has increased sixfold since 2004 while it has doubled over the last 5 years and reaches 10,148 students in 2018.

Fig. 9.4  Returnees (on left) and immigrants (on right) by gender and age, 2013–2018. (Source: Own calculations, based on population statistics)

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9.3  Return to Metropolitan Latvia The chapter is based on analysing primary data from the Horizon2020 YMOBILITY project reflecting data from the survey. The Pan European survey took place in nine European countries, with 30,000 respondents in 2015 and 2016. The total number of survey respondents analysed in this study is 311, who conform to the characteristics of return migrants from Latvia. There is a distinction of returnees to the central or metropolitan regions of Latvia and returnees to peripheral and rural areas. The following analysis includes return migrants to Latvia up to 35, surveyed with an average age of 27. As evident from Table 9.2, descriptive statistics show that more men (57.9%) have returned to the metropolitan region, but other regions are slightly more preferred by women (54%). Civil status figures display sharp differences, respectively, more persons who are single without children have returned to the metropolitan regions, but young returnees to other parts of the country are more likely to be married or in partnership with children. This mostly relates to the family reunification processes. Overall, the most common level of education in Latvia is secondary or vocational education. This is also revealed in the respondents’ profiles in the case of peripheral regions. Thus, in the metropolitan region, 29.2% hold secondary education, followed by 25.5%. with the first stage of tertiary education. Similarly, vocational education is most common among returnees to the other parts of Latvia. In this context, Riga can attract more young returnees who wish to study or continue studies. It was found that the occupational status of young returnees shifts according to the return destination. Overall, the most common occupational status after returning is employment as a skilled manual; the least common is a student. In Riga and surroundings, the most common status is clerical and administrative work, and the least common is other manual work and the group of house-persons or somebody not in employment. However, in the periphery, most often returnees are employed as skilled and other manual workers, and least often, they continue studies. Moreover, the geography of previous and current living places shows that the majority live in the capital Riga (73%) and (50%) respectively. Currently, over 20% reside in the suburbs of Riga and a small number of returnees in rural areas. Before emigration, over 40% lived in small and medium towns in the metropolitan region. However, those living in other parts of the country are distributed among small and medium towns (56.9%) compared to the previous residence (63.7%). Around one quarter reside in rural areas, and 18.4% live in larger cities. Experience of previous migration episodes is collective around 16% to 17.5% of the current return migration with the return migrants currently living in the metropolitan area with the small preference to previous moves. Upon the choice of the return migration decision, several aspects are taken into account. Besides economic aspects in the return migration decision, often, personal and emotional aspects can play a crucial role. Interesting observations appear when analysing the life satisfaction aspects among those who have returned to the metropolitan and those to other regions of Latvia  (see Table  9.3). It appears that

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Table 9.2  Descriptive  statistics on return migrants to Metropolitan region and other parts from Latvia

Gender Women Men Average age (years) Civil status Single without children Single parent Married/partner without children Married/partner with child/ children Separated/divorced/widowed without children Separated/divorced/widowed with child/children Educational level Primary education or less Secondary education Post-secondary non-tertiary education First stage of tertiary education Second stage of tertiary education Current occupational status Manager or professional Clerical and other administrative Skilled manual Other manual Student House-person, caring, and other not in employment Seeking a job Other Current place of living Metropolitan area, large cities Small or medium town Rural area Living before migration

Pearson Chi-Square test Sign X2

All returnees to Latvia

Metropolitan region

Other regions

51.1% 49.9% 27.55

42.1% 57.9% 27.91

54.0% 46.0% 27.26

4,190*

36.4% 2.9% 13.5%

43.9% 3.6% 13.1%

30.5% 2.3% 13.8%

12,966*

39.5%

29.2%

47.7%

2.6%

3.6%

1.7%

5.1%

6.6%

4.0%

6.8% 33.7% 32.5%

5.1% 29.2% 24.1%

8.0% 37.4% 39.1%

18.6% 8.4%

25.5% 16.1%

13.2% 2.3%

12.8% 18.1%

17.8% 28.1%

8.9% 10.1%

21.7% 13.5% 6.3% 7.6%

17.9% 5.9% 7.4% 5.9%

24.9% 19.5% 5.3% 8.9%

9.5% 10.5%

7.4% 9.6%

11.2% 11.2%

42.4% 41.5% 16.1%

73.0% 21.9% 5.1%

18.4% 56.9% 24.7%

31,401***

32,959***

94,797***

(continued)

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Table 9.2 (continued) All returnees to Latvia 33.6% 55.0% 11.4%

Metropolitan area Small or medium town Rural area Circular migration experience Circular migrant 16.7% Non circular migrant 83.3% Total and responses with 311 geographic identification

Metropolitan region 50.0% 43.8% 6.2%

Other regions 20.8% 63.7% 15.5%

17.5% 82.5% 137

16.1% 83.9% 174

Pearson Chi-Square test Sign X2 29,406***

Source: own calculations, based on Pan European survey Table 9.3  Mean values and ranks of life satisfaction aspects among returnees Metropolitan region Std. Mean dev. Rang Family relations 3.87 1.049 1 Community of residence 3.64 1.049 2 Your health 3.58 1.129 3 Housing 3.49 1.112 4 Your current job 3.41 1.129 5 Safe environment 3.29 1.086 6 Standard of living 3.19 0.982 7

Other Std. Mean dev 3.70 0.946 3.67 1.000 3.42 1.055 3.99 0.982 3.16 0.994 3.36 1.064 3.69 1.035

All Rang 1 3 2 4 7 5 6

Mean 3.65 3.74 3.45 3.94 3.17 3.33 3.67

Std. dev 1.030 0.872 1.079 1.013 0.987 1.072 1.040

Rang 1 2 3 4 6 5 7

Source: own calculations, based on Pan European survey

statistically significant differences among these two groups are less evident. The only exception where the results are statistically significant is satisfaction level with the current job, but strikingly this aspect is not among the most common. Overall and in both geographic areas, the most highly valued life satisfaction aspect is family relations, followed by the community of the current residence and health. This result points to the extreme importance of personal relations whether establishment of the family or family reunification upon return.

9.4  The Metropolitan Attraction from the Individual Perspective The final part of the study employs in-depth interview material from a large-scale Horizon2020 project. We draw on 46 in-depth interviews conducted with young returnees who have returned to the metropolitan region in Latvia and could be identified as young ‘urban drifters’. These interviewees returned from the UK (n = 20), Germany (n = 11), Sweden (n = 10) and Ireland (n = 5). The sample includes four

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young returnees with a doctoral diploma, 21 with university-level education, 13 students and eight persons with primary or vocational education. Eight returnees have been engaged in international education systems. All interviews were carried out in Latvia’s capital, where the interviewees lived or worked after their return. Interviews took place in the Latvian and Russian language and were translated for this study. For this study, geography-specific indications to identify ‘urban drifters’ were accounted. The following section illustrates the most common experience of an urban drifter or young urban migrants who are on the path of their uneasy journey to adulthood. It is also crucial to note the complexity and uncertainty in their return migration-­ decision (Apsite-Berina et al., 2020).

9.4.1  Career, Opportunities and Balance For many return migrants who have gained international work experience see Latvia as a place with opportunities. Andrejs, in common with other participants, mention the combination of two main return migration motives, which relate to the emotional state and nostalgia as well as seeing career opportunities back in the country of origin. Some aspects like social status, possibly changing form the ‘lower middle class’ in London to ‘middle upper class’ in Latvia is also an important trigger. Andrej’s quote illustrates the narrative between economic, personal, and career gains: Two things were the most important [upon return]: the way I felt and a career opportunity… There was no doubt, as I had been thinking about this for half a year in England. I lived in Rīga, and I returned to Rīga. A big salary here is equal to the minimum salary there. I mean, the income would definitely be higher there, but, if compared to the standard of living there, I think it would probably be lower. It is expensive to live there, as I could be part of the “lower middle class”, whereas here I can be a part of the “middle upper class”. Everything coincided in a way that I had opportunities here in Latvia. (Andrejs – returned from London)

The second quote by Roberts illustrates distinct wish to proceed with the particular career development, which was not taking place abroad. Latvia was seen as one of the best choices to accomplish those plans. After gaining international experience in the UK, Roberts does not receive long-waited work promotion and decides to return and engage in further career development in Latvia. When I was denied the opportunity to be promoted, it seemed that the only way to make it happen was in Latvia. I came back and started a business here. Returned of two factors: growth, because I had learned everything I could have about the restaurant business. The second most important thing was the inability to be promoted, and I also wanted to go back home, where there is nature and the air is fresher. If I had stayed abroad, life would be easier but more uninteresting. In terms of money, it would be easier. Also, I would work less, but life would not be interesting. I could live in an apartment that I own, travel to that same workplace. Maybe there would be growth career-wise, I could be a director of bars, restaurants, but life in International London would not be intimate, I would not make friends because those comrades make a profit and then disappear. Then I would be in a situation where I have to find new friends again. (Roberts – returned from London)

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Typical ‘urban drifter’ Aleksejs originally moved from a large town in the eastern part of Latvia to London and worked as a high-profile photographer while still missing vibrate life in London settle down for a calmer environment in Riga. For high-­level professionals who believe Riga is a better place in terms of cost and value balance. Riga’s has also been recognised ‘friendlier’ place in terms of the living environment, the choice between London and Riga seems to lower the speed of everyday life, however, living in a world-metropolis at some stage can be seen as an alternative. I was born in Daugavpils and I currently live in Rīga. I feel more satisfied with life here. That is because you can afford more financially, as London is a costly city. Earning the same amount in Rīga is better, as apartments and everything else is cheaper. I miss London because I grew up there, I like its atmosphere, what happens there and the freedom of the city. I would love to live in London, but I have to choose between living in a large apartment in Rīga or a small on the fourth, fifth floor in London. We will be living in Rīga a year from now; maybe we will move to London sometime in the next five years. I would like to come back to London and live there, the main thing is the financial aspect. We want to afford to live there in the same way as we live in Rīga. That is my goal, but now I do not know whether it will work out or not. For now, we are happy with Rīga it is a good, nice city, it is nice to live here. (Interview – Aleksejs professional returned from London)

Sigitas experience indicated that the period spent abroad could be beneficial in terms of future financial stability and wish to return. Riga is being recognised as a nice place to live and accommodate satisfying life quality. Such preconditions as previous financial obligations – bank load for the real estate can also play an essential role upon migration decisions making. When I returned from Sweden, I had no job in Latvia. I was here for two months. I had an apartment, which I bought after taking out a loan and so I returned to it. I thought that exciting things were developing in Latvia which I was missing. I wanted to go home. In my case, returning to Latvia meant a return to a more pleasant environment than the one where I lived before. When I came back to Latvia I had an apartment to live in and two mortgages – one for the apartment, and also a student loan. At the moment, I have all the resources; I do not need outside help. I would like to start a family and to have an interesting job with a competitive salary. (Interview – Sigita returned from Sweden)

A final example for a former student Krists touches upon elements of transnational urban drift. Within Latvia Riga, by all means, is the most vibrant and lively place thus attracts numerous internal migrants and also return migrants. For student Krists who returned after studies in Sweden return to the place of origin (Liepāja – one of the largest towns in Latvia) was not an option. Having international experience return to a smaller place, then the capital does not seem suitable. Comparison with other large European cities such as Copenhagen or Brussels can point to the possibility of further engagement into migratory processes. Krists, in his quote, refers to Riga as the smallest city he sees himself living in: I can’t see anything smaller than Riga for myself as a place to live in. This is the absolute minimum. I cannot imagine going back to Liepaja. It is a place where I grew up, but not a

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place where I would like to live in. Riga fits that minimum; other favorite places to live are Copenhagen and Brussels. (Krists – student returned from Sweden)

The interview materials highlight several related and overlapping main life preferences and migratory experiences. Those include career-related moves in combination with nostalgia and family-related moves. Gain-loss-balance is mostly evident in the interview material, thus moves to Latvia are seen as places with growing opportunities both in terms of social status and income-costs level. Moreover, compared to the large metropolitan cities, Latvia offers calmer and ‘friendlier’ environment, at the same time metropolitan region and the capital Riga still conform to the urban lifestyle and thus preferred. The complexity of the return migration decision often means that a combination of at least two main return migration decision aspects is mentioned.

9.5  Concluding Remarks This chapter has shown how lifestyle-induced migration has attracted returnees and foreign professionals, residence-by-real-estate-investment newcomers, and international students to urban Latvia. These different migration types are critical elements in understanding how transnational migration has taken place and shaped the most contemporary migration landscape. The effects of migrants’ transnational lifestyle are studied by residential patterns and life preferences of returnees and immigrants. We achieved this by questioning associations between the interplay of return and immigration, firstly, by mapping the migratory flow and, secondly, by seeking to identify the process of ‘urban drift’ and, thirdly, to explore subjective experiences of ‘urban drifters’ in Latvia. Our findings suggest that these migration processes are illuminating and overlapping in the main settlement centres, especially in the Riga metropolitan region. To these migrants or ‘urban drifters’ selected urban destinations offer better salaries, recognition, modernisation, and personal development. It offers not only better career opportunities but also improved provision of services and more exceptional position in the housing market. Contrary to the previously dominant population loss over the past 30 years when Latvia experiences several substantial emigration waves (McCollum et al., 2017), the current situation shows a change and global competition in attracting transnational migration flows. For the returnees and also newcomers from other destinations, gain-loss-balance is crucially essential. Thus Latvia is seen as places with growing opportunities in social status and income level. Moreover, metropolitan region and Riga conform to the urban lifestyle and thus preferred among both highly skilled professionals, opportunity seekers as well as groups of immigrants. Improvements of the return migration flows in Latvia accelerated with the institutionalisation of the return migration practices governed as a strategic priority. Even though immigration rates until 2018 were still negative, it has more than doubled compared to 20  years ago showing broad geographic

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contexts and attraction of Latvia and Riga’s more dominantly attraction. The geographic divide is also evident in immigration and return migration distribution in Latvia. Returnees more convincingly resettle in the non-metropolitan areas, but international newcomers settle in Riga Metropolitan region and other large cities. Besides, Pieriga, a critical element in suburbanisation in Latvia, attracts the highest proportion of immigrants. Urban drift among return migrants is more evident in the main centres of settlement in Latvia. Demographic features of transnational urban drifters translate as working-age adults, more men and families with children among returnees and study migrations among immigrants. Qualitative materials highlight several related and overlapping lifestyle preferences and migratory experiences, emphasising the diversification of motivation in recent years behind the ‘urban drift’. In case of a return, this is a kind of combination related to career prospects and nostalgia and family-related moves which has already been confirmed in several previous studies (Apsite-Berina et  al., 2018, 2020; Sandu et  al., 2018; Domínguez-Mujica & Díaz-Hernández, 2019). Subjective valuation of the transnational ‘urban drifter’ experiences shows that relocation to Latvia supports social mobility from a ‘lower middle class’ in a global metropolitan to a ‘middle upper class’ in Latvia. Moreover, it also discovers Latvia as an open place for career opportunities and a harmonised income-loss balance. Thus, we have exemplified a case of ‘urban drift’ which, to a certain extent, can be considered as a manifestation of the changing transnational migration process currently experiencing changes in Latvia. Acknowledgement  This work was supported by the ERDF grant 1.1.1.2/VIAA/1/16/184 and National Research Program Project grant number VPP-IZM-2018/1-0015.

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Chapter 10

International Mobility and Its Spatial Impacts in the Rome Metropolitan Area: An Analysis of the Last Two Decades Gerardo Gallo, Armando Montanari, Barbara Staniscia, and Enrico Tucci

10.1  Introduction The city of Rome is a symbol of tourism in Italy: international tourist arrivals make up over 11% of the national total, generating revenues of $5.65 bn, a figure that is unmatched anywhere else in the country. In 2017, the number of tourist arrivals in the city of Rome exceeded 12,000,000 for hotel accommodation and 2,000,000 for other registered accommodation. The number of overnight stays was close to 30,000,000 for hotel accommodation and over 6,000,000 for other registered accommodation (Staniscia, 2020). These figures underestimate actual figures, which should include other types of accommodation, such as the ones marketed through Airbnb. The number of resident foreign citizens in the municipality of Rome in 2017 was 377,217 (ISTAT, 2020). The city of Rome is the core of a large metropolitan area, which – with its cruise port and its airports – interacts with the core and contributes towards the spatial organization of people’s permanent and temporary movements.

G. Gallo · E. Tucci Italian National Institute of Statistics, ISTAT, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] A. Montanari (*) · B. Staniscia Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_10

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10.1.1  The Role of Migratory Flows in Urban Development The structure and form of cities are increasingly conditioned, and even determined, by migratory flows, be they on a metropolitan, regional, national, or international scale. Cities should increasingly be viewed as a crossroad of human flows rather than as morphological structures (Williams et al., 2012). The first conceptualization of cities as being dependent on people flows derived from Berry et al. (1969) and the introduction of the concept of Functional Urban Regions (FURs). Metropolitan and urban areas are interpreted as relational systems in which the population undertakes temporary movements while keeping their residence unaltered. This results in a functional area that goes beyond administrative boundaries. FURs consist of a core (dominant area) and rings (peripheral areas) with different functions. Studies that seek to identify the existence of a city life cycle (or Urban Life Cycle-ULC) are linked to the concept of FURs. In Europe, studies on urban life cycles can be traced back to the pioneering volume of van den Berg et al. (1982). This publication identifies four phases in the life cycle of a city: urbanization, suburbanization, deurbanization and reurbanization (van den Berg et  al., 1982, pp. 36–38). It is argued that the four phases characterize the life cycle of cities, but with non-homogeneous beginnings and durations. The beginning of the first phase dates back to the industrial revolution and the post-war period, respectively, in Great Britain and other regions of the world. It is linked to the movement of large masses of the population from the countryside to the cities following the transition from an agriculture-based economy to an industrial economy. Movements can be to new cities that arise as industrial cities due to their proximity to the places of supply of raw materials or to existing cities that are recognized as “administrative, cultural, religious, commercial or military centres” (p. 26). The second phase is characterized by urban growth, in which the emphasis is placed on qualitative improvements, and priorities refer to better housing conditions and public services. Another feature of this phase is the extension of the transport system, making it possible to move families to suburban areas. “New spacious residential quarters in more pleasant surroundings and ‘garden towns’ can be sometimes added to the city. Town parks and green belts are designed; (…) it is in this period, too, that people begin to live out of town while working in the city” (p. 30). In this phase the population in city cores goes down in size, while that in suburban areas increases. With the transition from an industrial to a tertiary society, suburbanization increases traffic and congestion in the core due to daily movements from suburban residential areas to workplaces. This jeopardizes the very existence of the city thus organized, and leads to the third phase, that of deurbanization, in which the population of the entire FUR goes down, in favor of medium-small satellite cities located around the FUR. A process of deconcentration of the population and of jobs characterizes this phase. The last phase that of reurbanization, is characterized by a core that begins to grow again – in absolute or relative terms in respect of the ring – even if the FUR population continues to go down, as in the deurbanization phase. The urban cycle phases model has been widely applied in Europe,

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especially in English-speaking countries. Champion (1989), Cross (1990), and Cheshire (1995), among others, have obtained important results in this field.

10.1.2  The Evolution of the Rome Metropolitan Area In this essay, we will address the issue of permanent movements of residence characterizing the Rome Metropolitan Area (RMA) in the period 2002–2017. We will look at international movements, by age and educational level. After a spatial analysis of the entire RMA, we will focus on a specific case – the Northern Coastal area – where the main airport (Leonardo da Vinci, Fiumicino) and the cruise port (Civitavecchia) are located. The aim is to gauge the impact of international migration on the metropolitan spatial structure considering the ULC theory. The province of Rome covers an area of 5355 km2 and has been identified with the Functional Urban Area (FUA) of Rome by the Urban Audit and Urban Atlas Programs (EEA, 2006). It has gone through several of the stages identified by van den Berg et al. (1982). According to Salvati et al. (2013) and Salvati (2014), the growth rate of population in the FUA of Rome (FUAR) decreased from 1950 to 2010, and a decline in relevance of the core in terms of population in the same period was recorded. From the post-war period to the early 1980s, FUAR underwent a dense and compact growth, turning into suburban development, gradually decreasing in intensity, in the period going from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. This suburban growth appears to have left room for a slight rise in the importance of the core from the early 2000s onwards. If we break down the stage from the post-­ war period to 2011 into decades, three phases can be identified in the development of FUAR (Salvati & Carlucci, 2016): (i) a typical urbanization phase from the post-­ war period to the early 1970s; (ii) a phase of rapid suburbanization from the early 1970s to the early 1990s; (iii) a transition phase that is difficult to interpret based on ULC theory in the period 1991–2011. This latter period is marked by a slow-paced suburbanization process between 1991 and 2001 and a phase in which the core regained importance (as in the ULC reurbanization phase) between 2001 and 2011. Residential movements involving the middle classes, who continued to work in the core, but also young families and pensioners seeking affordable housing opportunities (Salvati & Carlucci, 2016), characterize the suburbanization phase. Strozza et al. (2016) highlight the fact that in the period 2001–2010 international migration contributed to the population increase in the core, while the internal migration rate was negative. Overall, migration – international in the core, and national and international in suburban areas – provided the stimulus for demographic changes in the entire FUAR. This was a production-led international migration, linked to the economic structure of the FUAR – with demand for labor in the sectors of tourist services, retail trade and home care services. The most numerous international communities in the core were Romanian, Filipino and Bangladeshi, while in the suburban rings the Romanian, Albanian and Polish communities were the most numerous.

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This development resulted in a deconcentration of the population and economic activities over the territory, but this did not influence the compact and monocentric structure of FUAR. This structure was characteristic of Mediterranean FUAs from the post-war period to the 1990s (Salvati et al., 2013). According to Salvati et al. (2013) and Salvati (2015), this structure is linked to: (i) a consolidated urban tradition; (ii) rapid population growth due to migration from rural areas and, more recently, from less developed countries; (iii) a relatively low but constantly increasing social segregation  – both horizontal and vertical; (iv) a speculative property market. These cities are marked by inefficient public services and limited infrastructural networks; unregulated construction, spontaneous settlements, and urban disorder; the presence of an informal economy, social adaptability and “popular creativity” (Salvati, 2015). The municipality of Rome is the center of FUAR.  It covers a surface area of 1285 km2, is the largest municipality in Europe and the largest rural municipality in Italy. The built-up area is almost double that of Paris within the “Petite Couronne” and slightly smaller than that of Greater London (Montanari et al., 2007; Montanari & Staniscia, 2012). Marcelloni (2003) describes it as an archipelago city due to the vast empty spaces alternating with built-up areas: the non-built-up area covers 73% of the municipal territory (in Paris the non-built-up area makes up 23% of the total, like in Amsterdam). Undeveloped areas are in many cases rural areas, and there are numerous areas having a high environmental and cultural value, with a large presence of parks and protected areas (Montanari et al., 2007; Montanari & Staniscia, 2012). The economic structure is based on the public service sector, tourism, and moderate specialization in the sectors of retail, audiovisuals, information technology, pharmaceuticals, and chemistry (De Muro et  al., 2011; Montanari & Staniscia, 2012). In the period 2006–2015, the population of the municipality of Rome increased by about 0.2% (Salvati, 2016). This increase is the result of decreases in the historic center (the part of the core within the Aurelian Walls; −0.4%) and in consolidated urban districts (the part of the city that borders the historic center and has the highest population density; −0.6%) and increases (+1.7%) in the suburbs of the municipal area characterized by a medium-low population density. In the historic center, three historic districts are an exception, with population increases in the Esquilino, Trastevere and Pigna quarters. These neighborhoods are characterized by a strong residential presence of low-­ income foreign citizens (Esquilino) and single young people (Trastevere), and by an intense tourist presence (Pigna). Exceptions in consolidated urban districts are Trionfale, Aurelio, Gianicolense and Ostia, residential areas of varying quality and house prices. Ostia is located on the coast and offers relatively low residential costs. The historic center of Rome began its population decline in the early 1980s due to the shift of economic activities to the outskirts of the city (Salvati et al., 2017). In consolidated urban districts, the population increased from the 1950s to the mid-­1990s before decreasing (Salvati & Carlucci, 2016). The slight increase in population albeit in suburban districts is linked to the suburbanization process already highlighted for the entire FUAR.

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The number of unmarried or divorced people increased among residents of the municipality of Rome in the period 2006–2015 (+4.7%), with a parallel increase in the number of children and students in all areas, above all in the historic city (+0.6%). There was a slight drop in the working population in all areas. The elderly population diminished in the historic center and consolidated urban districts and grew slightly in suburban districts (+0.2%) (Salvati, 2016). The growth of population in the municipality of Rome was entirely due, in the period 2006–2015, to the foreign population, in both the historic center (+3.7%) and suburban districts (+8.5%). The foreign population is mainly employed in traditional retail and services in the historic center and in home care in consolidated urban districts. In the historic center the highest growth rate (+11%) was recorded for the age group 20–29 years, while in suburban districts the highest growth was recorded for the age groups 40–49 (+11%) and 50–59 (+13%). From a socio-economic point of view, the historic center of the municipality of Rome is characterized by the presence of small family units belonging to the middle-­ upper class, with a high educational level and economic wellbeing, and a high average age (Di Feliciantonio & Salvati, 2015). The historic center is experiencing processes – here and there – of social segregation and gentrification, with the concentration of some foreign communities in given areas (Mudu, 2006) and young singles in others. Residential areas with a high density of young residents are associated with a busy nightlife and leisure clusters attracting residents from other areas and tourists. The historic center is the area that has the highest home rental rate (30% according to Di Feliciantonio & Salvati, 2015), to which the growing number of apartments rented as B&B and through online marketplace Airbnb should be added (Staniscia, 2020).

10.1.3  Aims of the Study To better understand the linkages between migratory flows and the Rome urban development, our analysis highlights the significant impact of the growing temporary and permanent mobility flows (a) on the gentrification processes of some neighborhoods in the urban core, (b) on the progressive replacement of residential with tourist usages in many areas of the urban core, (c) on the progressive conversion in many areas of the core of commercial usages intended for the consumption of the historical resident population with businesses for the consumption of tourists and new residents, and (d) on real estate values.

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10.2  Definitions, Data Sources and Methods RMA was identified by the SELMA and SECOA projects, and is based on the joint consideration of economic, social, cultural, and territorial variables (Montanari et al., 2007; Montanari & Staniscia, 2012). For the purposes of this study, a cluster of coastal and lake municipalities located to the north of the core has also been identified and integrated into the analysis. This cluster is important above all for its direct and indirect involvement in the tourism sector connected with the area under review. RMA consists of a core  – which includes the municipalities of Rome and Fiumicino – and two belts of peripheral municipalities (inner and outer rings). The criterion adopted for identifying the three components is purely geographical, namely that of spatial proximity to the core municipalities. Thus, the municipalities belonging to the first belt, which we define as “inner ring”, are spatially contiguous to the two core municipalities; those of the second belt, which we define “outer ring”, are contiguous to municipalities in the inner ring (Fig. 10.1). There are advantages in choosing these units of analysis, above all being able to carry out simple comparative analyses between the core municipalities and the two external rings. RMA covers 111 municipalities, had a population exceeding 4.5 million inhabitants in 2017 (two thirds of the population of the Latium region), a surface area of 5782 km2 and a population density of almost 780 inhabitants per km2 (Table 10.1). About half of the population of the Latium region lives in the municipality of Rome,

Fig. 10.1  Map of the Rome Metropolitan Area. (Source: Authors’ own elaboration)

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Table 10.1  Main characteristics of Rome Metropolitan Area and Latium region in 2017 Rome Metropolitan Area (RMA) and Latium region Core Inner ring Outer ring RMA of which Lake and Coastal Other municipalities Latium region

No. of municipalities 2 48 61 111 10

2017 resident population 2,952,381 1,186,204 370,913 4,509,498 299,306

Surface area (km2) 1501.3 2109.0 2172.1 5782.3 1223.4

% of resident population of Latium region 50.1 20.1 6.3 76.5 4.9

267 378

1,386,745 5,896,693

11449.9 17232.3

23.5 100.0

Population density per km2 1966.6 562.5 170.8 779.9 244.7 121.1 342.2

Source: Authors’ own elaboration on ISTAT data

in the 48 municipalities of the inner ring there are almost 1.2  million residents, while in the 61 municipalities of the outer ring there is a population of about 370,000 inhabitants. Finally, the ten lake and coastal municipalities, to which we devote a specific focus, have a population of about 300,000 inhabitants, corresponding to nearly 5% of the Latium region’s population. The following data sources were used to evaluate the contribution of the migratory and foreign components and examine recent demographic trends and traits of the resident population of RMA, for both core and peripheral areas: 1. Macrodata at a municipal level of the demographic balance of the resident population, broken down by Italian and foreign citizens, providing information on natural events (births and deaths), migratory flows (internal and international migration) and other population changes (registry office revisions – or updates – and acquisitions of Italian citizenship) from 1 January 2002 to 31 December 2017. 2. Microdata provided by municipalities on changes of residence – at national and international scale – from 1 January 2002 to 31 December 2017. To analyze growth and demographic trends of the municipalities under review, the following indicators were constructed: average annual growth rate (r); natural growth rate (sn); net internal migration rate (smi); net international migration rate (sme); growth rate due to Italian component (si); growth rate due to foreign component (ss); growth rate due to acquisitions of citizenship (sa). The growth rate is calculated as the ratio between the population change in the 0−t interval (tP−0P) and the number of person-years1 lived by the population in that interval: t·(tP−0P)/ln(tP/0P). The natural growth rate and net migration rates (internal and international) are calculated by placing as denominator the

1  Person-years are a combined measure of the number of persons undergoing a given event (in our case: birth, death, and migration) and the time during which they are in the condition of undergoing that event. It is the value placed in the denominator for calculating the rates considered here to express, for each person, the sum of years in the condition of belonging to a given quota or subset of the population (born, deceased, immigrants, emigrants).

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person-­years obtained as per above (Preston et al., 2001; Strozza et al., 2016). This type of method guarantees equality between the overall growth rate and the algebraic sum of the natural growth rates (NGR), the increase in internal residence changes (IMGR), and the increase in international residence changes (EMGR). Based on the same logic, the population change was broken down into two parts: the one due to the Italian component (si) and the one due to the foreign component (ss); changes linked to acquisitions of Italian citizenship were kept separated, and an additional rate was calculated (sa). The above-described methodology serves to highlight the contribution of Italian and foreign citizens to the overall population change.

10.3  Recent Demographic Trends 10.3.1  A  n Overview of Recent Demographic Trends in the Rome Metropolitan Area The contribution of natural and migratory components to the growth of RMA population was analyzed for the period 2002–2017. Figures indicate an average annual population growth rate of around 10 per thousand (1%) for both RMA and the municipalities in the Latium region (Fig. 10.2a, b). In all areas of the Latium region population growth is mainly due to the foreign component of the population and the international migratory balance which, for RMA, showed an average annual growth rate of almost 13 per thousand (1.3%) (Fig. 10.2a). The growth rate for Italian citizens – net of acquisitions of citizenship, which are extremely low (1 per thousand for both RMA and the entire Latium region) – is slightly below an annual average of 3 per thousand in RMA and almost nil in other municipalities in the Latium region (Fig. 10.2b). The natural component is close to nil, and even negative, just as for other municipalities in the Latium region. The contribution of internal migration is also not significant, given that in relative terms it amounts to a growth rate of around 1 per thousand per year. Yet if one analyses the situation in RMA, a different picture emerges compared with that in the Latium region (Fig. 10.3). Demographic trends are determined not only by international migration but also by internal migration taken as a whole, with significant differences between core and peripheral rings (inner and outer). Regarding international migration, it should be noted that RMA has a substantial net emigration, the result of a significant net immigration in peripheral rings (inner and outer), offsetting the negative balance of the core (Fig. 10.3a). Municipalities in the inner ring are characterized by international migration (the average annual growth rate is close to 13 per thousand), although internal migration (an annual average growth rate of 7 per thousand) also had a significant impact on overall population growth.

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Fig. 10.2  Population growth in Latium region, Rome Metropolitan Area and other municipalities of Latium region in the period 2002–2017. (a) Average annual population growth rates, natural and migratory balances. (b) Average annual population growth rates by citizenship. Values per 1000 inhabitants. (Source: Authors’ own calculation and elaboration based on ISTAT data) 

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Fig. 10.3  Population growth in RMA core, inner ring and outer ring in the period 2002–2017. (a) Average annual population growth rates, natural and migratory balances. (b) Average annual population growth rates by citizenship. Values per 1000 inhabitants. (Source: Authors’ own calculation and elaboration based on ISTAT data)

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The average annual population growth rate was 16 per thousand in the inner ring and over 10 in the outer ring; the population growth rate in the core was slightly higher than 7 per thousand (Fig. 10.3b). It should also be noted that, in the case of the inner ring, the average annual growth rate for Italian citizens was about 2 percentage points higher than that observed for foreign citizens. It may be surmised that, because of strong international migration trends – both in the core and in the rings – and greater attractiveness of the rings, RMA system is currently in a phase of the ULC that is not yet fully defined. This evidence is corroborated in several studies on urban systems in Mediterranean European countries (Pacione, 2005; Salvati & Carlucci, 2016) (cf. Sect. 10.1 in this chapter). Over the last 15 years, residence changes (both internal and international) highlighted a significant attractiveness of urban suburbs with a prevalence, for inner ring, of Italian citizens. The same trend has been observed in other Italian urban areas and appears to be rather generalized (Strozza et al., 2016).

10.3.2  A  Focus on Recent Demographic Trends in Coastal and Lake Municipalities Coastal and lake municipalities have become, in recent years, of particular interest since they are characterized by the presence of holiday homes and by the development of commercial and tourist activities, and other consumption-related services (e.g., real estate). We here analyze municipalities in Northern Latium, surrounding Bracciano lake. Among those municipalities, Civitavecchia and Fiumicino are the most important, due to the presence of the previously mentioned cruise port and international airport. Demographic trends (Fig. 10.4) show high positive net international migration rates in the municipalities of Ladispoli (more than 15 per thousand), Trevignano Romano and Fiumicino (more than 10 per thousand for both). Positive net internal migration rate is significant in Fiumicino, the lake municipalities of Anguillara Sabazia and Bracciano and the coastal municipality of Cerveteri (growth rate ranging from 10 to 13 per thousand). The average annual population growth rate is particularly high in Fiumicino (more than 25 per thousand), and in Bracciano, Cerveteri and Anguillara Sabazia (around 20 per thousand for each of the three municipalities). It should be noted that, among those municipalities, Civitavecchia is undergoing a significant demographic crisis, given that both population growth rate and migration balance have extremely low values, and the natural balance is negative (Fig. 10.4a). Looking at the composition of population growth by citizenship, we observe that growth is significantly higher for Italian citizens, except for the municipalities of

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Fig. 10.4  Population growth in some selected coastal and lake municipalities in Latium region in the period 2002–2017. (a) Average annual population growth rates, natural and migratory balances. (b) Average annual population growth rates  by citizenship. Values per 1000 inhabitants. (Source: Authors’ own calculation and elaboration based on ISTAT data)

Trevignano Romano and Ladispoli, where foreign citizens posted higher growth rates. The distribution of the foreign resident population by country of citizenship makes for interesting reading. The analysis of countries of citizenship was broken down by differentiating lake and coastal municipalities due to the different traits of the communities involved in these two areas (Table 10.2).

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Table 10.2  Ranking of the first ten countries of citizenship of the foreign resident population in some selected lake and coastal municipalities in Latium region in 2003 and 2017. Absolute and percentage values 2003 Country of citizenship Rumania Poland Albania Ukraine United Kingdom Peru Germany France Philippines United States First ten countries Other countries Total Rumania Poland Albania Bangladesh China Bulgaria Egypt Morocco Ukraine India First ten countries Other countries Total

2017 % of the Annual total foreign change citizens (%)

% of the total foreign Absolute Sex values ratio citizens Lake municipalities 480 100.8 22.2 259 73.8 12.0 294 110.0 13.6 57 23.9 2.6 118 63.9 5.5

Absolute values

Sex ratio

2240 390 356 203 183

83.8 60.5 109.4 38.1 69.4

44.0 7.7 7.0 4.0 3.6

102.7 27.3 12.8 84.7 29.3

69 77 39 36 27 1456

72.5 54.0 21.9 63.6 42.1 80.0

3.2 3.6 1.8 1.7 1.3 67.5

110 76 56 55 47 3716

57.1 40.7 64.7 66.7 38.2 75.9

2.2 1.5 1.1 1.1 0.9 72.9

31.1 −0.9 24.1 28.3 37.0 62.5

702

78.6

32.5

1380

92.5

27.1

45.1

2158 79.5 100.0 Coastal municipalities 2830 105.4 33.2 907 53.5 10.7 268 127.1 3.1 46 253.8 0.5 111 91.4 1.3 280 105.9 3.3 277 168.9 3.3 301 146.7 3.5 245 25.0 2.9 215 211.6 2.5 5480 96.8 64.4

5096

80.1

100.0

57.3

15,127 1348 535 728 1014 762 611 505 842 1321 22,793

89.2 54.8 106.6 349.4 92.4 75.2 281.9 148.8 36.5 244.0 96.3

54.0 4.8 1.9 2.6 3.6 2.7 2.2 1.8 3.0 4.7 81.3

111.7 26.4 46.1 184.1 147.5 66.7 52.7 34.5 82.3 121.0 95.0

3033

71.9

35.6

5228

73.2

18.7

36.3

8513

87.2

100.0

28,021

91.5

100.0

79.4

Source: Authors’ own calculation and elaboration based on ISTAT data.

For both lake and coastal municipalities, Romanians, Albanians, and Poles are the largest foreign communities; in lake municipalities, there is also a significant presence of foreign communities from countries with high per capita income (France, Germany, United Kingdom and United States), while in coastal

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municipalities there is a strong concentration of foreign communities from less economically developed countries. Gender composition also appears to be very different in the two areas: a prevalence of female citizens is recorded in the lake municipalities, while male citizens (especially from Bangladesh, Egypt, India and Morocco) are predominant in coastal municipalities.

10.4  Migration Flows in Rome Metropolitan Area 10.4.1  I s the Rome Metropolitan Area Attractive to Foreign Citizens? From 2003 to 2017, almost a million individuals registered with population registers in the core area of RMA. In Table 10.3 these incoming flows are represented by area of origin and citizenship. Regarding place of origin, it can be observed that the core mainly attracts individuals from non-neighboring regions: 41.5% of registrations originate from a foreign country and 32.1% from other Italian regions. The remaining 26% relate to movements originating from the inner ring (16.8%), outer ring (3.2%) and other Latium municipalities (6.4%). International migration is certainly one of the processes that has contributed most to changes in the core population in recent decades (Bonifazi et al., 2012). Looking at distribution by citizenship, we can observe that foreign citizens make up almost half of all inward movements (45.9%). This percentage, as might be expected, rises to over 92% if only registrations from abroad are considered, and falls significantly if we consider also Italian municipalities as place of origin of flows, oscillating between 11.2% for interregional movements and 13.2% for registrations from the inner ring. The evolution of the phenomenon over the 15 years considered highlights the fact that the largest increase was for the number of short and medium-range movements: from 2003 to 2017 registrations from Latium municipalities rose by 23%, while those from other regions rose by 13% (Fig. 10.5). On the other hand, those registered from other countries fell by 24%. The drop in registrations from abroad occurred over the last 5  years (−52% compared with 2012). This decreasing trend is in line with the national figure from 2012 to 2015, when the total number of international in-migrants decreased significantly. On the other hand, from 2015 to 2017 there was a fresh spike in registrations from other countries to Italy (from 280,000 in 2015 to 343,000 in 2017), while the core continued to experience a drop in international in-migration (from 22,000 to 16,600). The drop in the number of international in-migrants was so marked that, as from 2016, it was exceeded in intensity by movements from other Italian regions, and in 2017 the number was slightly higher than that of registrations from Latium municipalities.

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Table 10.3  Registered citizens in core area of RMA  by citizenship and place of origin. Years 2003–2017. Absolute Values From From outer inner ring Years ring Italian citizens 2003– 43,450 7721 2007 2008– 47,684 8883 2012 2013– 43,708 8154 2017 Total 134,842 24,758 Non-Italian citizens 2003– 2417 485 2007 1779 2008– 8117 2012 2013– 9933 2459 2017 Total 20,467 4723 All citizens 2003– 45,867 8206 2007 2008– 55,801 10,662 2012 2013– 53,641 10,613 2017 Total 155,309 29,481

From other municipalities of Latium

From neighbouring regions

From non-­ neighbouring regions

From other countries Total

15,443

33,671

49,727

10,486

160,498

19,154

39,673

52,480

8840

176,714

18,006

36,202

50,724

9307

166,101

52,603

109,546

152,931

28,633

503,313

678

1651

2227

105,275

112,733

2714

4884

8081

154,326

179,901

3285

6297

11,084

96,059

129,117

6677

12,832

21,392

355,660

421,751

16,121

35,322

51,954

115,761

273,231

21,868

44,557

60,561

163,166

356,615

21,291

42,499

61,808

105,366

295,218

59,280

122,378

174,323

384,293

925,064

Source: Authors’ own calculation and elaboration based on ISTAT data

10.4.2  T  hose Leaving the Metropolitan Area of Rome Are Increasingly Choosing to Move Abroad In the same period over 600,000 individuals left the core area. Unlike what has been observed for inward flows, the main destinations for outward flows were municipalities of the inner ring (36.2%). A significant percentage of moves away from Rome were to municipalities in other Italian regions (36.0%). Changes of residence to foreign countries made up 11.3% of all registry cancellations. In Table 10.4 outward flows are represented by area of destination and citizenship. Foreign citizens make up 15.1% of outward movements. This percentage rises to over 18% if we consider registry cancellations for other Italian regions and drops to 12.4% for movements towards inner ring municipalities. The number of registry cancellations in the core area was basically steady over the 15 years considered (−5.5%). The stability of the overall figure conceals two

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Fig. 10.5  Registered citizens in core area by area of origin. Years 2003–2017. Absolute values. (Source: Authors’ own calculation and elaboration based on ISTAT data)

contrasting trends. On the one hand, there was a drop in the number of short and medium-range movements: from 2003 to 2017, movements to Latium municipalities fell by 23%, while those to other regions fell by 8%. On the other, there was an increase in the number of movements to foreign countries from 5000  in 2003 to almost 7000 in 2017 (+32%) (Fig. 10.6). The number of cancellations from the core towards foreign countries, increased over the last 8 years (+140% compared with 2009; from 2800 to 6800 out-migrants). This increase is in line with the national figure, which saw an increase in the numwber of international out-migrants following the 2008 economic crisis. On the other hand, the number of movements to other Italian municipalities fell during the observation period (−11%). In short, the number of registry cancellations from the core area shows, unlike the case for registrations, an increasing relevance of movements towards foreign countries, while the number of movements towards other Italian municipalities fell slightly. In other words, those who decided to move away from Rome in 2017 chose a foreign country in 17% of cases, compared with the figure of 12% in 2002.

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Table 10.4  Individuals deregistered from core area of RMA by citizenship and destination. Years 2003–2017. Absolute Values From From outer inner ring Years ring Italian citizens 2003– 73,824 12,118 2007 2008– 74,234 12,713 2012 2013– 51,910 8716 2017 Total 199,968 33,547 Non-Italian citizens 2003– 6487 1401 2007 2008– 11,583 2787 2012 2013– 10,311 2550 2017 Total 28,381 6738 All citizens  2003– 80,311 13,519 2007 2008– 85,817 15,500 2012 2013– 62,221 11,266 2017 Total 228,349 40,285

From Non-­ neighboring regions

From other countries

Total

32,758

17,112

181,882

28,521

36,866

15,044

187,758

15,888

24,916

36,444

28,008

165,882

56,194

79,581

106,068

60,164

535,522

From other municipalities of Latium

From other neighboring regions

19,926

26,144

20,380

2018

3625

9372

2676

25,579

2923

4420

9760

3173

34,646

2795

5085

9244

5118

35,103

7736

13,130

28,376

10,967

95,328

21,944

29,769

42,130

19,788

207,461

23,303

32,941

46,626

18,217

222,404

18,683

30,001

45,688

33,126

200,985

63,930

92,711

134,444

71,131

630,850

Source: Authors’ own calculation and elaboration based on ISTAT data

10.4.3  M  igratory Balances for the Core Area and Individuals’ Characteristics From 2003 to 2017, resident population in the core of RMA grew of almost 300,000 units because of a positive migratory balance (Fig. 10.7). The balance is positive in all years, fluctuating from values close to zero (+900 in 2005) to almost +40,000 in 2012. The positive state of this balance is due exclusively to international and interregional movements, while the balance with Latium municipalities was negative throughout the period. The dynamism of the core shows a drop during the last 5 years of this period: the balance with foreign countries dropped from +30,000 in 2012 to almost +10,000 in 2017, while for other Italian regions the figures were +11,000 in 2012 and +4000 in 2017. On the one hand, there was a drop in attractiveness of areas that most

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Fig. 10.6  Individuals deregistered from core of RMA by destination. Years 2003–2017. Absolute Values. (Source: Authors’ own calculation and elaboration based on ISTAT data)

contributed to the growth of resident numbers, on the other, inner ring municipalities gained in attractiveness (from −3200 to −1800). If the overall migratory balance is broken down over the 15 years, it emerges that only the foreign component contributed to population growth (+326,000), while Italian citizens overall posted a generally negative balance (−32,000). Foreign citizens are therefore responsible for bringing the core migratory balance back to positive values, after years of negative balances due to the movement of Italian citizens from the core municipality to inner ring municipalities. It is interesting to note that before 2008 and, in the years, following the positive peak in 2012, Italian and foreign citizens presented similar trends for net migration. On the other hand, in the years following the economic crisis, the behavior of Italian and foreign citizens differed, an evident sign that migration choices and survival strategies in the first years of the crisis varied. In those years in which Italians emigrated in greater numbers, foreign citizens reveal higher migratory balance values. “In recent years, the main migratory processes involving large urban areas have been international migration and the residential deconcentration from urban centers to outer rings” (Crisci, 2010, p. 13). As already observed, the most substantial outward flow is towards inner ring municipalities, while for inward flows registrations from foreign countries and from other Italian regions show a greater intensity. Focusing on outward and inward flows, we can observe that there is a substantial gender balance, except for incoming flows from other regions, which shows a slight

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Fig. 10.7  Migration characterizing  the core of RMA.  Years 2003–2017.  (a) Net migration by origin/destination. (b) Net migration by citizenship. Absolute values. (Source: Authors’ own calculation and elaboration based on ISTAT data)

prevalence of women (52.4%). As already noted, foreign citizens make up the most significant component of inward flows from foreign countries, likewise Italian citizens with regards to flows from other regions (88.5%) and flows to the inner ring (87.6%). Foreign citizens on the move are on average younger than Italian citizens. This difference is more evident for flows towards inner ring municipalities (average age of 32.9 for foreign citizens vs 38.5 for Italian citizens).

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If we focus on Italian citizens aged 25 and over, we can observe that from 2003 to 2012 population losses were observed for persons with medium-low educational qualifications, while for graduates there was an overall positive value. In the last 5 years of the period studied, on the other hand, there was a negative migratory balance of graduates, while the balance for fellow Italians with lower qualifications showed positive values. It therefore seems that graduates suffered more from the economic crisis and decided to move away from the core (Fig. 10.8).

Fig. 10.8   Core of RMA. Net migration characterizing Italian citizens aged 24 and over, by educational level. Years 2003–2017. Absolute values. (Source: Authors’ own calculation and elaboration based on ISTAT data)

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10.5  R  elationships Between Spatial Dynamics and Human Mobility in the Northern Coastal Area of Latium region 10.5.1  Spatial and Environmental Characteristics The extensive Northern Coastal Area (NCA) of Latium region provides an excellent opportunity to compare permanent with temporary mobility, which can only be done through qualitative analysis. NCA was chosen for this comparison as it presents some characteristics that have accelerated the mobility-related phenomena over time (Castellano & Montanari, 2020). It is a rich area in terms of landscape, historical, and archaeological assets, including hilly areas that slope down towards the sea. Due to these features, the territory has continued to attract residential settlements for hundreds  – if not thousands – of years. Settlements have been facilitated by the presence of infrastructures, such as the Aurelia state road, which was built in the third century BC. Today there are other major infrastructures in place, such as Fiumicino airport – with tens of millions of transits a year –, the port of Civitavecchia – with millions of cruise passengers and passengers travelling to Sardinia every year –, and, finally, the historic center of Rome, visited by millions of tourists every year. These infrastructures, providing frequent and continuous connections to the rest of the world, are the necessary reference elements for human mobility. Entrepreneurs and land speculators laid the foundations for the urbanization of the territory for tourism and residential purposes, with development dependent to an extent on changes to the economic and social situation of RMA. NCA is today marked by the overlapping of various types of settlements created over recent decades, adding to ancient settlements, whose dimensions were limited by the erection of walls around the towns. From the late 1960s limited parts of rural areas began to be subdivided and sold to middle-class families who aspired to own a small property by the sea, where they could spend weeks or even months of summer holidays, as was customary in those years for the families of the better-off social groups. Up until the 1980s these properties were not heavily taxed; therefore owners could maintain them without any particular economic burdens. In the 1990s property taxes increased, and at the same time family summer holidays changed, shifting from a fixed summer tourism in the period June to September to staggered short-stay tourism in different locations. To identify the presence and size of settlements, reference was made to the results of the CORINE Land Cover project (EEA, 1990) (Fig. 10.9). Figure 10.9 shows that NCA can be divided into two parts, the division occurring between the municipalities of Civitavecchia and Santa Marinella, with the hilly zone, in the proximity of semi-wild areas, reaching as far as the coastline. Here the flat land is restricted to a narrow strip of land, where residential areas overlap with areas set aside for services and infrastructures. Before this natural obstacle, there are flat areas between the coast and the area encompassing the municipalities looking onto Bracciano Lake, and subsequently between the coast and inland

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Fig. 10.9  Northern Area of Latium region,  coastal and lake municipalities. Land Use (1990). (Source: Authors’ own elaboration on EEA, 1990)

municipalities. During the period of second homes development, historical settlements were already located in hilly positions: Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Montalto di Castro, and Bracciano, Anguillara Sabazia and Trevignano Romano around Bracciano Lake. Ladispoli on the other hand is a lowland settlement that developed in the late nineteenth century. Hinterland municipalities with poor connections to the coast have remained outside building development in recent decades but have medium- and long-term development potential. In all these municipalities, registered residents (approx. 187,000) live in a territory covering just under 200,000 ha. It is an area devoid of productive activities, dominated by farming activities, with the presence of some residential settlements. In 1990 urbanized areas covered about 8440  ha which, according to the results of the EEA (2012), had risen in size by no more than 15%. In 2012 therefore there were over 19 inhabitants per hectare in urbanized areas. New second home settlements therefore developed around pre-existing settlements, as is the case of Ladispoli, or on flatland close to the coastline. Where land made it possible, settlements are spread out, with small, low-cost apartments (EEA, 2006). Elsewhere, where development took place along a narrow strip of the coastline, building types were mainly small, but villas of higher quality. An analysis of urbanized areas in relation to the number of inhabitants highlights some figures that would seem unlikely when thinking about recent areas of expansion, which would be expected to be of similar building density. Based on building density, the surface area of urbanized areas in relation to the number of officially

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registered residents appears to be credible. This is true for all coastal municipalities except for those of Cerveteri and Ladispoli, as well as Bracciano and Anguillara Sabazia. These municipalities have an official number of residents that is about half of what has been calculated, as confirmed by literature on this subject. Non-­ registration is due, for Italian citizens, to the missing communications of the change of residence for several legal and family-related reasons. Non-Italian residents often do not register, if they come from other EU countries, because their stay is temporary, and local registration does not bring them any benefits. In the case of non-EU citizens, non-registration is, probably, linked to a state of illegality, or to a temporary stay. In conclusion, it seems that in the areas of greatest landscape quality, where settlements are also of higher quality, there are communities of citizens originating mainly from Germany, France, and the UK, living alongside well-to-do Italian families. In areas where the territory has permitted settlements of higher population density – and therefore lower-cost real estate – there are communities from the new EU member States and from non-EU countries.

10.5.2  Tourist Accommodation Supply and Overtourism Temporary residence, always lasting months rather than weeks, overlaps with stays of a few days, commonly called short stays or “phantom presences”, undertaken solely to visit Rome as a tourist. In the historic part of RMA, about 44 million overnight stays in hotel and other officially registered accommodation are recorded yearly. A further 30% of informal and unregistered overnight stays is estimated, bringing the total number of overnights stays to approximately 57  million (Sociometrica, 2020). The possibility that parts of tourists in the core of RMA might be attracted to NCA, rich in cultural and natural assets, has often been examined. So far, the phenomenon has gone in the opposite direction. The hotel supply of NCA caters to local tourism only in the summer months, and for a few weeks. During the rest of the year, hotels are used by tourists who spend their time exclusively in the city of Rome. Non-hotel accommodation supply in NCA is informal and unregistered and does not contribute to the development of local tourism industry at any time of the year. To pinpoint this sort of accommodation (Fig. 10.10), a survey was conducted on specialized websites, being an informal offer beyond the control of local authorities, escaping any form of taxation, and not covered by official statistics. These properties are officially classified as being used by owners; in a few cases owners occupy their properties for short periods of the year, but in most cases, they rent them out for short periods. The resulting 3000 non-hotel accommodation serve to host a percentage of tourists that contribute to overtourism in the city of Rome and help maintaining property assets along the coast and inland.

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Fig. 10.10  Northern Coastal Area of Latium region: spatial distribution of tourist accommodation. (Source: Authors’ own elaboration on surveyed data)

10.5.3  Real Estate Market and Suburbanization Processes Human mobility is conditioned by the difference in the cost of apartments recorded in the city of Rome and in the municipalities of NCA (Borsino Immobiliare, 2020). Taxation levels set autonomously by municipal administrations also favor changes of residences to municipalities in NCA. The value of the property and its taxation are a sound motivation for families who own the asset, being able to maintain it providing the family budget is not overly affected. The average cost of a house in NCA is about one third of the average cost of a property in the city of Rome. The difference in value also depends on the area and closeness to the seaside, location in a rural area, and level of prestige. In the municipalities of Montalto di Castro, Tarquinia, Santa Marinella, Fiumicino and Trevignano Romano, coastal settlements can have real estate values 20–30% higher than the average cost for the rest of the territory. Slightly lower prices of apartments – less than 1000 Euros per mt2 – can be found in the rural areas of the municipalities furthest from Rome, such as Montalto di Castro and Tarquinia, while in rural areas in the municipality of Cerveteri they cost over 1300 Euros per mt2. Available housing in NCA is therefore made up of the lower quality parts of

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previous tourist settlements. In addition, new housing developments not located directly on the coast, offered at very affordable prices, and aimed at demand leaving the city of Rome, where the higher the cost of apartments, the higher the taxation sought by the city administration and the poorer the quality of life, costs being equal. In this situation, to avoid the costs of taxation and cover any unlawful residency situations, houses have been rented out without a regular contract, therefore the authorities responsible for official statistics cannot always gauge the number of residents.

10.6  Conclusions Human mobility is now a global phenomenon and appears in similar ways all over the world. This incorporates all the characteristics of a liquid social and economic system that adapts quickly to demand at an international level. Thus, there can be no rigid division between the real estate market focusing mainly on leisure-related activity and the real estate market aimed primarily at those who work and produce. The official housing market remains sound, within the RMA at least, although it is affected by local regulations, and is unable to have the tools needed to measure its characteristics and offer adequate statistical surveying and effective administration. Consequently, the research highlighted the following elements from a geographical point of view: The historic center of Rome is one of the areas of the urban core that has seen the most significant transformations. In some districts, for example Trastevere and Pigna, the value of residential properties and the cost of rents have grown. This has led to the phenomenon of gentrification, with the concentration in these districts of a higher class, more schooled and better paid population. In other districts of the historic center, for example Esquilino, there are many more immigrants, mostly illegal and “passing through”, and property values have gone down. The phenomenon of overtourism – concentrated in the area going from Piazza Navona to Trevi Fountain, and in some squares in the Trastevere and San Lorenzo districts  – has brought about conflict with local residents over noise levels at all times of the day and night, with large numbers leading to episodes of violence and petty theft. Thus, the quality of life of residents who have attempted to move to other parts of the city has fallen. Additionally, overtourism has also contributed to rising prices for business premises, because of the transformation of a tourist offer oriented towards an occasional clientele, more interested in fast food, take-away and fast-consumption products. And, finally, the conversion of many apartments and properties into short-term rented accommodation in many parts of the core has led to a series of social and economic problems. This form of accommodation has been very popular with tourists and brought in high earnings for owners. At the same time, there has been a general rise in the value of properties and in rental costs. Changes in the real estate market have removed thousands of apartments from the residential market. The

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inevitable consequence has been a general increase in rents and in the value of properties in a large part of the core, with a consequent fall in the number of residents.

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Chapter 11

Diasporic Links and Tourism Development in Cape Verde. The Case of Praia Juan M. Parreño-Castellano, Claudio Moreno-Medina, and Judite Medina Do Nascimento

11.1  Introduction For more than three decades, the issue of the multifaceted link between migration and tourism has been reviewed from different perspectives (Dwyer et al., 1993; Hall & Williams, 2002). In addition to approaches that analyse the tourism’s impact on local, regional and international labour markets and on its related human mobility, other approaches associate it with lifestyle migrations, retirement migrations, the national and international second home market, the creation of diasporic communities and the development of circular or return mobility of international migrants. The tourism-migration interrelationship is stated in two ways, throughout these studies: tourism is analysed as a stimulating factor of human mobility and, the latter one also encourages tourism supply and consumption. The relationship between the creation of international diasporic communities and tourism raises special interest in our case of study. In the first place, this can be manifested in the direct or indirect investments of remittances in the tourism offer (Azizi, 2018; De Haas, 2010; Yang, 2011). Secondly, the delivery of remittances can stimulate the tourist consumption of the population of the countries of origin, as it has been observed in Mexico (Mora-Rivera et al., 2019). In the third place, migrants can also boost tourism development by their contribution like human capital to enterprises and, finally, they often become tourism consumers in their own country. In the latter sense, new products such as VFR tourism (Dwyer et  al., 2014; Provenzano & Baggio, 2017), ethnic and root search tourism (King, 1994; Nguyen J. M. Parreño-Castellano (*) · C. Moreno-Medina University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] J. M. Do Nascimento University of Cape Verde, Praia, Cape Verde e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_11

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& King, 2002) is explained by the existence of migratory flows associated with diasporic communities. The analysis of the relationship between tourism and human mobility within island spaces has not been very abundant, in spite of the importance this productive activity has within these spaces and the tendency of island populations to emigrate. Nevertheless, there are models that theorise the relationship between these two variables, such as the SITE model, according to which patterns of population mobility on small islands are in agreement with the different phases of tourism development (McElroy, 2003; McElroy & Hamma, 2010). Besides, it is common to consider the islands as “pleasure peripheries”, specialised in tourism and historically linked to migrations (Connell, 2007; Gössling & Wall, 2007). Some studies have also raised the interrelation between tourism and migrations in island spaces within the restructuring theories (Curtis, 1997; Domínguez-Mujica et al., 2011; Morgan, 1991). Yet, the relationship between migration and tourism destination on the island has not generated literature in accordance with the importance that this issue seems to have in the explanation of the economic and demographic dynamics of such spaces. In this context, this study is focused on the tourism development in Cape Verde and its relationship with the existence of a diasporic community. Cape Verde is an archipelago-state of only 4033 km2, basically formed of ten major volcanic islands and with an estimated population of just over 543,000 inhabitants in 2019 (Fig. 11.1). The islands are located on tropical latitudes of the Atlantic Ocean, at around 500 km from Dakar, on the coast of Senegal and began to be inhabited by Portuguese, Spanish and Genoese population since the 1460s, turning into a colony under the regime of the Portuguese Crown. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was considered a highly important place for the transit and sale of slaves, while the island territory contained extensive agricultural plantations. The base of the demographic composition of Cape Verde was formed throughout those years, based on the mixture of European and African origin populations. In 1975, the archipelago gained independence from Portugal and constituted a new socialist state, tightly linked to Northwest Africa. In 1990, a new Constitution was approved whereby the country abandoned the single-party political system and, after the first elections, a liberalising process of the economy began, becoming increasingly linked with Europe and the United States. Since that decade, Cape Verde has been trying to develop its own identity in a new regional framework formed by the Macaronesian island spaces, together with Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands (Carling & Batalha, 2008), within a strategy to obtain a special status or membership in the European Union. Indeed, since the early 1990s, after the change in the political and economic model in Cape Verde, the country’s development strategy has been based on macroeconomic stability and the capture of foreign investments. Hence, tourism activity is perceived as one of the main strategic development sectors, in which the first major international investments take place, concentrating firstly on Sal, because of the construction of an international airport since the 1940s on that island. In the different stages of the historical development of Cape Verde (colonial economy, Marxist system and capitalist liberalisation), one of the elements that has

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Fig. 11.1  Location and geographical data of Cape Verde. (Source: INE. Elaborated by the authors of this study)

remained stable is the presence of outward emigration flows. Although emigration is consubstantial to the archipelagic reality, it can be stated that large-scale emigration dynamics have been launched since the mid-nineteenth century. The dimension of this phenomenon has resulted in the formation of important diasporic communities in some migratory destinations, especially in Atlantic and Mediterranean urban and port spaces from the United States, Portugal, the Netherlands and France. The recent nature of some of these migratory processes, especially those developed since the 1960s, the maintenance of relationships between emigrants with family members and friends and the preservation of a Cape Verdean identity abroad have led many emigrants to return or go back and forth their host and origin countries. In the case of this “shared identity”, it is common for the emigrant to launch investments in Cape Verde, some of which, lately, are directly related to the tourism sector, since this is currently considered as the country’s great engine of development. The aim of this article is, therefore, focused on the study of the relationship established between the country’s recent tourism development and Cape Verdean emigration, so as to explore how these emigrants adapt to the opportunities that tourist activity generates, turn into direct and indirect developers and adopt the

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role of consumers. Besides, the study aims to analyse the consequences of this relationship, in particular, the productive and social imbalances generated. The approach is made from two scales, that of the entire archipelago and the largescale analysis for the city of Praia. The combination of these two scales of analysis makes it possible to nuance the results and show reality from a greater complexity. For this purpose, a qualitative study was carried out, combining the use of bibliographic sources, the consultation and mapping of tourist databases, the structured observation of territorial reality and regulated and informal tourist establishments and the conduct of 19 in-depth interviews with directors and owners of accommodation establishments, politicians, academic experts and qualified executive managers of NGOs (Table 11.1). The interviews followed a semi-structured and focused pattern in most cases. In addition, informal conversations were held with returnee emigrants. The field work was carried out in two campaigns, between October 2019 and January 2020, that implied the extended stay on five islands (Fogo, Sal, Santiago, Santo Antão and São Vicente). The results, which should be valued as a first approach to the subject of study, are presented in a double scale of analysis: a more general approach for the whole country, and another one more precise and related to the urban structure for the case of Praia. These results are shown in Sect. 11.4 and 11.6 in which the relationship between migration and tourism in these spatial areas is analysed. Previously, there are two sections that include the quantitative dimension and the main characteristics of Cape Verdean emigration abroad, as well as the recent tourism development of the country. Section 11.5 explains the urban and tourism development of the city of Praia, preliminary to the analysis of the incidence of the city’s tourism development in its housing market. The article ends with some final considerations, presented in the conclusions section. Table 11.1  In-depth interviews conducted Category Number Subject area Accommodation 6 Resort, coastal hotel 5 Politics

3

University

4

NGOs

1

Coastal and rural hotel Environment, territorial policy Geography, economics Manager

Source: Elaborated by the authors of this study

Profession General manager, director, accommodation manager Owner

Island Sal, Santiago Fogo, Santiago Santiago

Teacher, researcher

Santiago

Rural development

Sao Vicente

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11.2  Cape Verdean Foreign Migration United Nations estimates that, in 2019, there were more than 186,000 Cape Verdean emigrants abroad, a figure that was equivalent to 34.3% of the estimated population residing in the archipelago, thus the country belonged to the group of nations with a high number of people abroad in relative terms (Fig. 11.2). Additionally, 55% of them were women. The data refer to the stock of residents of Cape Verdean nationality, so the figures usually do not include second-generation migrants (UN DAES, 2019). In 2019, 32.5% of these emigrants resided in Portugal and 10.6% in other Portuguese ex colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Brazil, Sao Tome and Principe and Guinea-Bissau, in decreasing order), which shows the importance of linguistic and colonial ties in the migratory patterns of the Cape Verdean population. The countries of Western Europe, except for Portugal, accounted for 32.9% of the total number of emigrants, among which France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy and Spain stood out, in descending order. Besides, 23.5% of the total expatriates settled in the USA. The rest, less than 5%, were distributed in several countries, including those in the Gulf of Guinea. The number of Cape Verdean emigrants living abroad has doubled between 1990 and 2019, despite the fact that during that period the level of per capita income in the country has increased to much higher values in comparison to the ones in the northwestern African countries. In relative terms, emigrants’ number in the United States and in the EU (especially France, Luxembourg and Belgium) has recently increased, while it has

Fig. 11.2  Cape Verdean migrants abroad and % of the country’s population. (Source: UN DAES. Elaborated by the authors of this study)

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stagnated in Portugal. The way in which the immigrant group in Angola has been recorded determined the high overall figures registered back in 2017. Thus, if we exclude this value out of the range, the registered trend in the period 1990–2019 represents a continuous linear rise. These figures show clearly the importance of emigration abroad, but they do not totally express the real dimension of the process. Emigration is a continuous element in the history of the archipelago, which along with the existence of different criteria to quantify it, the scarcity of statistical data, the at times undocumented nature of the process, the existence of remigrations to third countries and the frequent circularity make difficult to determine the real size of communities of Cape Verdean living abroad. Estimates published between 1985 and 1997 (Carling, 1997) established an average figure of 458,000 people, with a range between 366,000 and 620,000, based on data from 25 countries of destination. These estimations reflected higher values than 390,000 inhabitants the archipelago had in the mid-1990s. Yet, it is more difficult to determine the number of people who make up the so-called Cape Verdean diaspora, since the emigration process should be considered over a long period of time, which would involve second and third generations, as well as the permanence of feelings of identity and emotional and material ties with the country of origin (Carling & Batalha, 2008). Besides the figures, the truth is that migratory flows have been very diverse in terms of employment niche, destination, level of coercion or legal status throughout history (Carling & Åkesson, 2009). Leaving out the movements that took place until the abolition of the slave trade, the main Cape Verdean migratory flows went, at first, and until the 1970s to other Portuguese colonies, especially Sao Tome and Principe, where emigrants were “forced” to work in the cocoa and coffee plantations by the Portuguese authorities (Meintel, 1984) and, to a lesser extent, to Angola and Guinea. Until the 1920s, there were relevant flows to the northeastern coast of the United States (Massachusetts and Rhode Island) to work in the whaling industry, in blueberry plantations and in textile factories (Halter, 1993) and, since then and until the 1950s, to Senegal and Argentina. In Senegal, many men were employed as artisans and, in Argentina, were hired in port and factory activities while many women were domestic workers (Correa, 2000). Since the 1960s, migratory processes have been more intense, with flows of workers to the Portuguese building and domestic sectors (Góis, 2006) and to the Dutch navigation industry (Rotterdam), as well as to the United States of America. In this country, between the 1960s and 1990s, the great number of Cape Verdean emigrants were hired in the manufacturing market of the state of Massachusetts, especially in Boston, Rhode Island and Connecticut at first, while later on they got recruited in services, to the extent that arriving migrants were increasingly qualified (Halter, 2008). Since the 1980s, the mobility of the wealthiest classes for studies to the United States are quite common. Besides, at first, a percentage of migrants set up businesses aimed at members of the Cape Verdean community in the United States, but, over the years and with the qualifications improvement, family business initiatives have become more diverse and successful.

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Besides, significant flows of women, as domestic workers have been introduced into Spain, Italy and the Netherlands since the 1970s (Andall, 1999), as well as men in mining and fishing into Spain (Moldes Farelo & Oca González, 2008). Additionally, workers of different conditions have been enrolled in the labour market in France, stimulated in the latter case by the remigration of Cape Verdeans from Senegal, and ultimately into other Western European countries, such as Sweden, Germany, Luxembourg, Norway or Belgium. With the immigration restrictions that have been approved in most countries, especially since the economic crisis of 2008, the outings of Cape Verdeans have not been as many as in the past decades and, in several cases, they are related to family reunifications. The decrease in the arrival of young people in the main Cape Verdean migratory destinations means that the average age of migrant communities has been growing. Besides, the retirement of many migrants is favouring return mobility in order to enjoy the houses they have built by the remittances sent. Other return movements had begun since the 1970s, such as the one assisted from Sao Tome and Principe. At the same time, communities abroad are changing, since the second and third generations, much more integrated in the destination societies, are becoming more numerous and the marriages between Cape Verdeans and the natives of the countries of destination are increasing. Overall, transnational behaviours are less frequent and differentiated compared to the ones observed in the past decades.

11.3  The Tourist Development in Cape Verde Tourism in Cape Verde began in the 1960s, after the construction of the Amilcar Cabral International Airport on Sal Island (Moreira Dos Santos & Rodriguez Campo, 2014). Until the mid-2000s, the number of accommodation beds was still low, with a capacity of 6749 beds in 108 establishments, according to the National Statistics Institute of Cape Verde. Since then, the growth rate has been high to such an extent that, in 2016, the hosting capacity reached 24,376 beds in 233 establishments (see Fig. 11.3). At the same time, the number of arrivals and overnight stays has increased. Since the beginning of the century, when 145,076 arrivals were recorded, the figure has over quadrupled reaching 644,429 in 2016, with an average annual growth of 21.5%. The overnight stays have increased even more in relative terms. In 2016, there were 4,092,551 overnight stays, with an average growth of 31.1% during that period (see Fig. 11.4). Apparently, this greater growth stems from the progressive increase in the average stay of visitors, which is currently 6.3  days compared to 4.4 at the beginning of this century. Most of the visitors are foreigners. British citizens accounted for 30% of overnight stays, followed by Germans (13%), Belgians and Dutch (11.7%). All these data are in accordance with the fact that Cape Verde held the 86th place in the Tourism Competitiveness Index of the World Economic Forum (2019) and the ninth place in the African continent.

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Fig. 11.3  Tourist establishments and beds in Cape Verde. (Source: INE. Elaborated by the authors of this study)

Fig. 11.4  Arrivals and overnight stays in Cape Verde. (Source: INE. Elaborated by the authors of this study)

The tourism model of Cape Verde has been based on the development of sun and beach resorts, aimed at an average purchasing power and concentrated on the islands of Sal (50% of overnight stays in 2016) and Boa Vista (40%), with a rate of 55% occupancy. In the first one, there are two large local destinations, Santa Maria in the

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south of the island, and the bay of Murdeira in the west, while in Boa Vista, the tourist activity is located in Sal Rei and Rabil, in the west of this island. The islands of Santiago and São Vicente concentrate their supplies in Tarrafal and Praia, in the first case, and in Mindelo and Sao Pedro, in the second one, but in general, unlike Sal and Boa Vista, these are constituted by small or medium-sized tourism companies. The tourist activity on the rest of the islands is run by small businesses managed by the local community, in most cases. As a consequence of the country’s tourism development, in 2014, this accounted for 18.7% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product and an even higher percentage in the number of jobs created, with values around 20%, according to Tourism Satellite Accounts of Cape Verde (INE, 2014). In 2016, the Bank of Cape Verde raised tourism’s contribution to GDP to 21.6%, which corresponded to 57.6% of the foreign exchange inflows during that year. Despite the importance and evolution of the tourism sector, we can say that the archipelago is still in a phase of strong growth, even more if we take into account that the distribution of supplies is concentrated. There are islands, like Maio, with great sheltered beaches from the prevailing winds and a clear tourist potential. As a result of the strategic plans that are underway, others, such as Boa Vista, Sal, Santiago or São Vicente, will foreseeably undergo significant growth in the short and medium term. Cape Verdean government is committed to place Cape Verde among the 30 most competitive countries in the world in the sector (Direçao Geral do Turismo de Cabo Verde, 2009). Four axes structure the public intervention towards this purpose: first, a new tourism development plan aiming at the tourism diversification into new subsectors (mountain, nautical, cultural, business and luxury tourism); second, the implementation of actions in collaboration with the municipalities to solve the assistance and productive deficits of the country (electrical capacity, sanitation system, supplies, urban space, commerce, port and air infrastructure improvements); third, the progress in the professionalization and qualification of employees in tourism; and, finally, the intensification of the sustainable tourism promotion.

11.4  I mpact of Cape Verdean Emigration on Tourism Development of the Archipelago As we mentioned above, the development of tourism activities in Cape Verde is, mostly, the result of the arrival of major investors in the context of the internationalisation of large European hotel chains. This becomes apparent in the islands of Sal and Boa Vista. However, another less massive tourism model is also being developed and associated to medium and small investors, especially on the islands of Santiago, Sao Vicente, Fogo and Santo Antão.

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11.4.1  Remittances and Entrepreneurships from Abroad This other type of tourism is closely related to Cape Verdean migration abroad in different ways. In the first place, the development of infrastructures for regulated and unregulated accommodation, catering establishments and companies providing other services to tourists (tourist guides, especially) is partly financed by remittances from the Cape Verdean diaspora. In 2018, remittances received totalled 212 million dollars, which represented 12.3% of Cape Verde’s GDP. The largest amounts that year arrived from Portugal and the United States, and smaller quantities, in decreasing order, arrived from France, the Netherlands, Italy, Angola, Mozambique and Spain. These have been the main recipient countries of the Cape Verdean diaspora and those with which Cape Verde maintained colonial ties in the past. Remittances have increased since the country’s independence, with circumstantial fluctuations, according to the global economic framework (Fig. 11.5). This evolution occurs simultaneously with its value drop, in relation to Cape Verdean GDP. After independence, remittances and international aid accounted for between 80 and 90 of GDP (Bourdet & Falck, 2006). In 1980, within a still pre-tourist economic context, they ascended to 28.1%. Since then, with the oscillations introduced by the economic cycles, this percentage has been reduced to a minimum of 7.9% in 2010. Hence, it can be assumed that, until the 1990s, Cape Verde followed a MIRAB development model (MI-migrations, R-remittances, A-aid, B-bureaucracy) (Bertram, 1999), in order to gradually change its model towards another one, in which tourism and foreign investment would become the main economic element.

Fig. 11.5  Remittances and percentage of GDP of Cape Verde. (Source: The World Bank. Elaborated by the authors of this study with data provided by https://es.theglobaleconomy.com/ Cape-­Verde/Remittances/)

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Nonetheless, there has been, basically, a constant increase in remittances, in absolute and relative terms, in relation to GDP during the last decade. Since 2010, they have increased by 69%, while their weight has also increased in relation to GDP (The World Bank, 2018). Therefore, remittances are an increasing financing instrument in absolute terms and with a rising weight in the country’s economy, in recent years. The difficulties and conditions for obtaining funding in Cape Verde give a special importance to remittances. Even though the Bank of Cape Verde is carrying out an expansive financial policy by lowering interest rates and decreasing minimum bank reserves, the truth is that families and small businesses are not offered good conditions to access financing. The average interest rate in 2018 was 9.61% and the requested guarantees are still high (Ministério das Infraestruturas, Ordenamento do Território e Habitação y ONU-HABITAT, 2019a). The microcredit sector has not developed significantly, either. Between 2009 and 2014, only 3000 Cape Verdeans had access to those loans, granted by non-profit microfinance institutions (Gomes Barbosa Vicente, 2016), although the situation has improved with the approval of a new regulation in 2015. In addition, international aid in the form of subsidies and credits has declined in recent years in relative terms, as the country increased its level of per capita income (Carling, 2004). In this context, Cape Verdeans’ own resources, informal financing (toto-caixa) and, mainly, remittances are the main financial instruments for the citizens to create their own businesses in the tourism sector. Those who wish to open a business often use the remittances from their close relatives or do so under a not always formal associative corporation with an emigrated friend. It is also common for the emigrant himself to promote the entrepreneurial process, asking from relatives or reliable acquaintances to help him with the management of his business. These investments by emigrants, family members or residents in Cape Verde tend to focus on activities, such as catering, transportation, small tourist accommodation, as well as purchase of land agricultural and establishments in rural areas. Yet, the construction or renovation of properties is the most common phenomenon, usually through self-built processes, some of which end up in low-class accommodation establishments or houses for tourism use (López-Guzmán et al., 2016). Since the emigrants play an active role in entrepreneurship and financing, their territorial mobility usually conditions the temporary flow of remittances. This way, a great deal of the remittances arrives when emigrants travel temporarily to Cape Verde. Since they usually return in holiday periods, at that time the money input becomes more obvious, reactivating the construction or rehabilitation processes. Along with this and, with ever more relative importance, Cape Verdeans living abroad are prone to depositing their money in the special accounts for emigrants offered by the banks of Cape Verde, which have high interest rates, zero taxation and special conditions for their holders (for instance, these can obtain loans for amounts up to twice the value of their deposits). These accounts, which emerged back in 1984 and were enhanced under a regulatory reform in 1995, have partially diverted direct investment involving remittances to a financial investment instrument, contributing to the growth of bank assets and the expansion of the credit

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availability. Suffice it to say that in 2013 the amounts deposited by emigrants in these accounts tripled remittance inflows and represented almost 30% of GDP (Bank of Cape Verde, 2014). Although in this case the direct relationship between tourism development and migration abroad becomes rather complicated, we can assume that, since these deposits are of high importance for bank assets, they are financing tourism ventures of the local population. To sum up, the first relationship we have raised between emigration and tourism is based on the capital provided by the first one to family investments, the granting of direct loans to resident entrepreneurs in Cape Verde, the savings deposit in the accounts for emigrants and the direct investments carried out by emigrants themselves.

11.4.2  Entrepreneurship with Return and Qualification The relationship between tourism and Cape Verdean international migration is also specified in the exercise of professional activities in the field of tourism after the return process. In this regard, we should mention the case of young returnees with medium or high qualification level after a period of studying and/or working abroad, who become owners of small tourist businesses (in activities such as catering, accommodation, rental cars, intermediation, etc.) or are employed as salaried labours in tourism businesses, usually run by relatives or acquaintances, like some interviewees stated. In the case of Santo Antão and São Vicente, Åkesson (2015) has studied the mix of imitative and innovative entrepreneurial behaviours of these young people. The qualification is usually the element that conditions the business model and this, in turn, determines the quality of the employment generated, usually among members of the same family. Therefore, the innovative entrepreneurship is related to the return of skilled migrants. Besides these young people, other emigrants who have stayed abroad for a long time have returned with the dream of opening a small lodging business, encouraged by the development of this activity in the country. The achievement of this goal is quite more complicated than it might seem while being abroad. The competition of foreign investment (which is also exempt from paying taxes for 5 years after the opening of the business), certain difficulties in accessing financing (despite the development of microcredit financial lines aimed at returnees), the lack of social and political contacts and the long period of investments recovery hinder this dream. In this sense, according to some interviews we conducted in Fogo, returnees who have opened their own tourism businesses pointed out how they apply the experience obtained abroad in the process of setting up their business and, in spite of all this, how difficult it is to run a successful activity. In several cases, these entrepreneurs will end up working in the tourist establishments launched by international investment in Sal or Boa Vista. In others, renting houses and rooms to tourists seems to be a more feasible option for what the returnees usually use the properties they built in the country during their stay abroad.

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11.4.3  Emigrants and Tourists A third aspect in the relationship between migration and tourism is due to the fact that some members of diasporic communities might become tourists in Cape Verde. The importance of these flows has been analysed in the case of Fogo (Bronze, 2007). Some studies suggest that it is not only about specific movements of a tourist nature, but that there is a certain circular mobility (Resende-Santos, 2016) in the sense of the creation of double identities or the maintenance of transnational links between Cape Verde and the receiving countries. Tourist visits of Cape Verdean emigrants have three fundamental causes. Firstly, the need of caring for their businesses. Secondly, it is common for emigrants to have a second residence in the country or to stay connected with family members living in the archipelago, so they also travel to the island to enjoy their properties and visit their family and friends. Finally, and with an upward trend, they visit the country with a tourism motivation linked to nostalgic travelling or the search for their roots. Emigrants and, mostly, their descendants, both second and subsequent generations, often visit Cape Verde in order to discover their origins and contact distant relatives, namely return to their roots as tourists. In many cases, they travel in periods in which cultural events or feasts are organised but, usually, these trips coincide with holiday times. Direct flights between Cape Verde and Lisbon and Boston are usually fully booked during those days. Tourists stay in their family houses or, in the case of second and third generations, in tourist establishments and rental apartments. We should keep in mind that the visits of children and grandchildren of emigrants in Cape Verde have mostly a tourism dimension, so they claim the same services and perform the same activities that they would have claimed and performed in any other holiday destination.

11.5  Urban and Tourism Development in Praia The relationships between Cape Verdean migration abroad and tourism, that we have exposed in the previous section, is present in Praia, to the extent that a large part of the migrants who have gone abroad have departed from the island of Santiago and the city of Praia itself. At the same time, its status as state capital and its greater economic dynamism have made it a destination for investments by the Cape Verdean community residing abroad, both through the opening of businesses and in the construction and acquisition of homes. The archipelagic perspective seems to emphasise the benefits that emigration has on the Cape Verdean economy. However, the analysis of this phenomenon in the city of Praia, on a more detailed scale, allows us to clarify this relationship that seems to be generating unfair competition with the tourist activity and impacting urban growth and the accessing condition to housing in the city.

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11.5.1  Urban Development of Praia Before analysing the relationship between emigration and tourism in Praia, in this section we will be presenting the main characteristics of the urban and tourist development of this city. Praia, the principal religious and political power centre since 1770, has been a small nucleus for two centuries. In 1964 there were still about 2000 inhabitants, mainly in the Plateau (a small plateau next to Santa Maria port, where the main urban functions and the colonial factual powers were concentrated), as well as in a few houses and small towns around it (Amaral, 1964). Since the 1970s, and especially after the independence of Cape Verde in 1975, the city began to grow rapidly by becoming a centre of attraction for internal migratory movements (Carneiro, 1996), boosted by its administrative, political, economic and cultural development (Piñeira et al., 2011). From 1969 to 2010, the growth of the built space was 742% (Pina da Silva, 2014) and the population rose to 132,317 inhabitants (INE, 2010). The 2015 Census estimates the population at 151,436 inhabitants, which is in line with the power of attraction of internal and external flows of the city, the latter one made up of Chinese, African immigrants and expatriates from the rest of the world (Marcelino & Oca González, 2019). This big growth recorded in the last 50 years has been based on the proliferation of irregular settlements and informal housings in the surroundings of the central areas of the city and the main roads (Tavares, 2012), so that the 50% of the urban population now lives in areas of spontaneous construction (Câmara Municipal da Praia, 2016), often located on hillsides with steep slopes. Around 70% of the city area is occupied by population with reduced resources, coinciding with those neighbourhoods of informal growth. The rest corresponds to middle or upper class spaces and other non-residential uses. Most of the formal growths or with a greater urban quality are concentrated in these former spaces: sectors of the Plateau, Cha d’Areia, Achada Santo António, Prainha, Quebra Canela, Palmarejo, Varzea, Terra Branca, Fazenda, Achadinha and Cidadela (Medina do Nascimento, 2003, 2009). In this sense, we must bear in mind that the urban growth of Praia, in response to the big population increase, has been conducted at two speeds: on the one hand, a formal, slow and unadjusted growth, mainly installed on the plateaus with privileged locations at the seaside and, on the other, a rapid and uncontrolled informal growth, located mainly in other areas unsuitable to house these city centres, besides the peripheral plateaus. As a consequence, in 19 out of the 31 neighbourhoods of Praia, the growth is informal, while in the rest it coexists with areas of formal growth (Medina do Nascimento, 2010).

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11.5.2  Tourism Development of Praia As Praia keeps growing in the context of its new status as capital city after the independence of Cape Verde, its tourism sector begins to develop slowly. The city’s tourist development is based on three key elements: firstly, the existence of a historic neighbourhood in which one could find colonial heritage and an attractive cultural environment regarding Afro-Cape Verdean music and identity. Secondly, the organisation of festivals and cultural events that favour the flow of visitors who come on business trips and for leisure; and, thirdly, the status as capital, which means the entry of tourists and visitors who must carry out administrative procedures in the Cape Verdean public institutions and in the foreign embassies, or move around to make purchases, visit relatives, study in the Higher Education Training Centres, etc. In addition to these three essential tourist attractions of Praia, a fourth element has been added in recent years: the coastline of the city, where one can find small beaches suitable for swimming like Playa Gamboa, Prainha or Quebra Canela. However, when explaining the size of the tourism sector in Praia, we cannot separate it from the territorial resources on the island of Santiago, given that together they form a coherent offer, especially for international tourism (Eusébio et  al., 2017). The island constitutes a tourist product known commercially as “Island with Essence”, in which culture, nature and return to the roots are combined, an idea of great potential, especially among African middle classes (Agunias & Newland, 2012). The territorial recourses and the market segmentation have led to the development of the regulated accommodation offer in Praia, which consists of 45 establishments that are located, mostly, in the historic district and administrative centre of the city (Plateau) and in the urban areas at the coast: Cha d’Areia, Prainha, Quebra Canela and Palmarejo Baixo. Besides, we should add the establishments that are located in some of the urban expansions of the city inland, adjacent to the coastal spaces: Achada de Santo António (the embassies district), Palmarejo, Palmarejo Grande, Terra Branca and Fazenda. These are spaces with a diverse level of real estate consolidation, but, generally, they have an acceptable degree of accessibility and urban services. In the rest of the urban spaces we can only find, if there are any, lower category extra-hotel or residential accommodations, such as tourist housings, apartments or guesthouses. Generally, except for some large establishments in the surroundings of the beaches (5 four-star hotels), the offer consists of hotels of medium or low category (16 hotels of 2 and 3 stars), aparthotels (13), residential units (similar to hostels) and small-sized pensions (11), not aimed at international tourism, so they are not run by large multinational tourism companies. In the surroundings of Gamboa, Prainha and Quebra Canela beaches, there are only four or five-star complexes. In the rest, the establishments are generally three or two-star. Hence, we can draw a map of the city with a large concentration of the highest quality offer in the neighbourhoods of Cha D’Areia, Prainha and Quebra Canela (Fig. 11.6). A surrounding zone with an offer that does not exceed three stars in the Plateau, Achada de Santo António, Fazenda, Terra Branca and Palmarejo

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Fig. 11.6  Regulated accommodation offer in Praia, in 2019. (Source: Elaborated by the authors)

neighbourhoods, where, depending on the area, business visitors coexist with national and international tourists. Finally, around these spaces, only lower categories establishments can be found, although usually there is no offer, coinciding with the most problematic neighbourhoods, both socially and urbanistically or with worse accessibility and centrality. The largest part of the city’s offer is owned or managed by Cape Verdeans, following family business models. Some of these hotels are the result of the entrepreneurial of returning emigrants, as the names of the establishments themselves sometimes prove (Hotel Roterdão, for instance), or of families related to migratory processes abroad. In addition, it is common to hire returnee family members in these establishments and that, as a qualification strategy, children and grandchildren of these families be trained in foreign universities, as we were told in some interviews conducted in hotels.

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11.6  R  eal Estate Investment, Tourism and Difficulties of Access to Housing in Praia The consolidation of Praia in certain tourist segments in the current setting means that, as it happens in many other urban tourist destinations, a new type of accommodation associated with P2P commercial systems is appearing in the city. Well then, the development of this accommodation modality seems to have clear links with the saving and investing behaviour of Cape Verdean emigrants. In 2019, according to AIRDNA, the city’s offer consisted of 224 houses of tourist use, 145 of which were entire homes offered for vacation rental, 73 were rooms for private use and 6 shared ones. These houses were managed mostly by Airbnb and other electronic pages, such as Vrbo. The offer consisted, mostly, of houses with 1 to 3 bedrooms and with a level of services equivalent to other destinations. 40% of the houses were available at least half of the year and only 10% managed to be occupied for more than 180 days. Besides, in 96% of the cases, they were booked for stays between 1 and 3 nights, and mostly for one-night stays. These exploitation data, that are similar to many other urban destinations (Domínguez-Mujica et al., 2020), do not reveal a specific characteristic of Praia’s tourist housing: its high level of informality. The tourist houses and apartments, booked through these electronic pages, are not usually registered as tourism establishments, they do not pay taxes and fees derived from their use as such and, therefore, the service they offer is not fully controlled. The informal nature of the activity is evident through a clear territorial invisibility, since, with few exceptions, the houses are not signposted at street level. What is more, even their geographical location being usually not accurate on the webpages. Despite the difficulties of creating an accurate mapping of the offer, the territorial distribution of the houses has been designed roughly. As we can see in Fig. 11.7, the distribution is similar to the one of the regulated tourist offer. Although with a wider spatial location, in general they tend to be concentrated in the same areas where regulated tourist establishments are or in their near surroundings, coinciding with the neighbourhoods of formal urbanisation of upper and middle classes. According to the interviews, the housing stock for tourist rent is made up of houses in multi-family development or condominiums acquired to be rent, single or multi-family dwellings for main residential use that are temporarily available for rent and other houses that are enabled for this use after a family process of self-­ construction or subdivision. The owners are usually Cape Verdeans, both residents and migrants who live abroad. Most Cape Verdeans tend to build their houses, even when they are able to buy them in the formal market. Accordingly, most emigrants usually invest their savings in the construction of a house and they even get loans taking advantage of better conditions offering to Cape Verdeans residing abroad (Ministério das Infraestruturas, Ordenamento do Território e Habitação y ONU-HABITAT, 2019a). In this context, it is common for emigrants to have properties managed by acquaintances and friends, making them available for tourist rental. Tourist housing is seen as a

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Fig. 11.7  Vacation rentals in Praia, 2019. (Source: AIRDNA, 2019. Elaborated by the authors)

business opportunity that allows, additionally, to redeem the loans requested for the construction of the houses. The same can be said for returned emigrants. This relationship between emigration, real estate construction and tourist rental in Praia is located in the urban-tourist spaces of the city where economic and urban formality is more important. Informal tourism development can be considered a mechanism of benefits redistribution, but this cannot make us ignore its social consequences derived from the increase in residential rents. Access to housing is already a complicated issue for most of the population in Praia. The lack of a housing policy that bridges the gap between the resources of the population and the prices in the formal market explains the residential structure of the city that we have described above, characterised by the predominance of

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informal neighbourhoods and self-constructive processes. In 2008, Praia concentrated 25% of the country’s housing deficit, because it was the destination of migratory flows from other islands and surrounding African countries, according to the government’s data in a diagnostic study conducted by the Ministério do Ambiente, Habitação e Ordenamento do territorio and the University of Cape Verde (2011). The policy developed in recent years (“Casa para todos” Program) has not enabled the carrying out of real estate developments in order to soothe the city’s residential problem (Ministério da Descentralização, Habitação e Ordenamento territorial, 2014). Besides, the new policy to be implemented has not begun to give significant results, yet (Ministério das Infraestruturas, Ordenamento do Território e Habitação y ONU-HABITAT, 2019b, 2019c). In this context, the recent development of tourism rental housing is making the situation worse, especially in the middle-class neighbourhoods. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation of Spain (2020), in recent years the rental price has increased significantly in Praia. Generally, a new one-bedroom and unfurnished apartment in a quiet and residential area (Achada de Santo António or Palmarejo) fluctuates between €450 and €950 per month in a monitored development. As the number of rooms increases, the price is rising accordingly. In the case of three-bedroom houses (T3) the price in these areas is around €700 at best. A detached house, depending on the location, can cost at least €1000 per month (to which the high current expenses of electricity, water and private security must be added). These prices are not aligned with the average income of the population, which means that certain social groups have difficulties in purchasing or renting their houses in middle-class neighbourhoods and are obliged to move to other zones, where prices are lower. We need only to remind that in 2018 the average GDP per capita, measured with purchasing power parity values, was just over €6109, which corresponds to a little more of €509 per month and person (The World Bank, n.d.). The relationship between tourism and the increase in the price of housing in Cape Verde has already been exposed in some studies regarding the perception of the effects of tourism activity (Castillo-Canalejo et al., 2012). Nonetheless, given the recent nature of tourist rental housing in Praia, it is needed to assess to what extent it is favouring the imbalance between income and housing in the city and, therefore, if the relationship between emigration and tourism is not only a positive factor of development in Praia, but also a possible cause in the increase of social problems.

11.7  Conclusions The conceptions of development usually classify developing countries in different phases, including stages in which GDP depends on international aid and remittances and others in which investment becomes the main factor of development.

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This has been the case of Cape Verde, which in the last decades has moved from one MIRAB model to another one in which tourism is the main factor of the production. Since foreign investment is the main responsible of the tourist development in Cape Verde, the role of remittances from emigrants in the structure of tourism GDP is often underestimated. However, in this article, we have discussed that a part of the structure of the production value results from remittances and the investment behaviour of diasporic communities. Therefore, it is necessary to emphasise that the economic behaviour of emigrants is also a factor that explains the current economic model in Cape Verde. Emigrants must be considered as developers in a triple sense: they start up businesses directly or through family networks, finance businesses of compatriots and capitalise on the Cape Verdean financial system. Additionally, when emigrants return, their influence in the tourist activity is even greater, since they often create enterprises or they are hired in tourist activities, providing the qualification and the company culture acquired during their stays abroad. Finally, the relationship between emigration and tourism is boosted by the fact that members of diasporic communities become tourists, especially when those are emigrants’ children or grandchildren, or carry out circular mobility between Cape Verde and their host country. The exposed relationships offer us an outlook in which migrations are shown as an asset in the development of Cape Verde. To some extent this is so, but we must not downplay to the economic and social imbalances generated by the investments of emigrants and returnees. This is the case of the consequences derived from the development of vacation rentals. The large-scale analysis in the city of Praia has allowed us to suggest how the investment of these emigrants may be affecting both the tourist accommodation and the conditions of housing access for the residents. All the above leads us to point out that the analysis of the relationship between diasporic communities and tourism in Cape Verde must be analysed at different scales and approached from different perspectives and that a diverse concept of international mobility have to be considered to understand socioeconomic and territorial consequences in developing countries. In this sense, Cape Verde is a very interesting example of the diversity of flows that characterises international mobility of these countries, including not only the outbound and return migrations for economic reasons with the developed countries, but also other situations in today’s globalised and interconnected world. In addition to circular movements, the maintenance of transnational relationships of people, capital and information must be considered as a key element. In this transnational context, the differences between international labour, residential and tourist mobility are diluted in the analysed case. Acknowledgements  This research was supported by the State Research Agency (AEI) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) with R&D project “Housing and international mobility in cities of the Canary Islands. The emergence of new forms of urban inequality” (RTI2018-093296-B-C21) (Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Spain).

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We would like to acknowledge the collaboration to Mr. Jorge Cólogan y González-Massieu (Delegate of FUCAEX-Government of the Canary Islands in Cape Verde), to the colleagues of the University of Cape Verde, specially, to Mr. Emilio Rodríguez, professor at the School of Business and Governance (ENG), and the selfless and valuable participation of all the interviewees.

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Chapter 12

The Contribution of International Residential Mobility to Tourism Development: Cienfuegos City, Cuba Manuel R. González-Herrera, Mercedes Á. Rodríguez-Rodríguez, and Cecilia Santana-Rivero

12.1  Introduction Reflecting on international residential mobility in times of mobility (Coles et al., 2005) is not an easy task for tourism researchers since tourism mobility is conditioned by multiple factors. Proof of this is the growing appearance of new complex social forms of residence and mobility of a real-estate nature, which involves various sectors and social actors (Aledo et al., 2007), and enhanced investment in infrastructure and services as an alternative to traditional tourist accommodation modalities. In some cases, these accommodations occupy heritage properties that add cultural historical value, which makes them very attractive and familiar environments for visitors, thereby modifying the conventionality of the tourist accommodation product. In general terms, residential mobility is defined as “those spatial practices that refer to activities and specific behaviours and, at the same time, display a symbolic dimension linked to the perceptions established around these practices” (Di Virgilio, 2014, 13). This definition is very broad, so it is necessary to narrow its scope for the purposes of this study. Residential mobility is understood as the product of housing opportunities (Cruz & Xavier, 2011), defined by the existence of new and/or vacant homes that result from the processes of rehabilitation and enhancement of the M. R. González-Herrera (*) Department of Tourism, Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] M. Á. Rodríguez-Rodríguez Department of Geography, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain e-mail: [email protected] C. Santana-Rivero University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_12

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central areas of the city (gentrification), the incorporation of urban land, the dynamics of the real-estate and land market (Di Virgilio, 2014). Housing needs and expectations, which in turn are conditioned by the position that the family occupies in production and consumption, their lifestyle, the preferences of its members, the networks of which they participate and the perceptions about their own social position and about the conditions of the surroundings. Taking into consideration the previous theoretical positioning, the object of study of this research focuses on international residential mobility towards family-owned houses (hostales) that are offered to the market as an option for tourist accommodation, and the place of intervention corresponds to the Cienfuegos city, located in the Central region of Cuba. The context in which Cuban tourism activity is currently inserted is characterized by the state monopoly of foreign trade (few companies); given this situation that characterizes the current scenario, in the short term completely different, more concrete, measurable and hopeful measures should be applied, while requiring the publication and implementation of the Enterprise Law and the Cooperatives Law as a necessary way for the legitimization of all forms of property (Everleny Pérez, 2019). In the opinion of Everleny, former director of the Center for the Study of the Cuban Economy (CEEC) of the University of Havana, and prominent Cuban economist, greater proactivity is necessary in the search for external capital from Cuban individuals or families residing abroad. At the same time, the creation of wholesale input markets with foreign companies or foreign commercial firms for all forms of property is necessary, thus avoiding the outflow of foreign currency to buy inputs abroad (Everleny Pérez, 2019). This specialist acknowledges that, when there is financial fragility there is a tendency to treasure USD, which is why, removing the state tax from the United States dollar would make the conversion more attractive, in this way, and part of the remittances received by the population could be changed in CADECA or in Banks with more favourable interest rates. According to the possible relationship between international residential mobility and the development of the real-estate sector for tourism use, this study assumes the following research question: how has international residential mobility contributed to the revitalization of the residential real-estate sector for tourist accommodation in private rental houses (hostales) in Cienfuegos City? Different findings from previous research recognize the contradictory relationships between international residential mobility and its contribution to the generation of new housing opportunities for international tourism, as well as the impact on the revitalization of the residential real-estate sector for tourist use, both in first residence and in second private residences (Müller, 2002, Casado et al., 2004, Díaz & Lourés, 2006, Benson & O’Reilly, 2009, Fernández & Barrado, 2011, Williams & Hall, 2012). Such learning experiences developed in different countries of the world explain international mobility of a residential nature favoured by both internal and external factors, which seem to contrast with the experience of Cuba. In Cuba, the formation and consolidation of tourist accommodation in private accommodation houses (hostales) seems to be more associated with external support generated by

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economic income derived from visits by foreign and Cuban tourists residing abroad, as well as other external support associated with remittance flows from abroad. This fact justifies the need to know, in the specific case of the Cuban reality, the relationship between international mobility represented by Cuban residents abroad and other groups of foreigners regarding real-estate development that has allowed the revalorization of private homes as an option for tourist accommodation. That is why the general objective of this study is to assess the contribution of international residential mobility to the revitalization of the residential real-estate sector for tourist accommodation in private rental houses (hostales) in Cienfuegos City, Cuba. In correspondence with the previous components of the theoretical research design, it was assumed as a working hypothesis that international residential mobility promoted by Cuban residents abroad and other foreigners has encouraged residential real-estate investment for tourism purposes in Cienfuegos city. Consequently, enhancing the supply of an alternative type of accommodation in family-owned houses (hostales), which favours the enjoyment of this historical-cultural destination, and its surroundings. The main limitations of the study were caused by difficulties accessing information due to the lack of data on tourism in Cuba and the city of Cienfuegos, in particular, published on the ONEI website. The last published statistical yearbook corresponds to 2015 and contains only the data until 2014. This limitation was accentuated since there is no updated database to consult and there is no tourism observatory with tourism information, neither from the public nor private sectors; specifically regarding self-employed activities there is no officially systematized information published, the data is widely dispersed and restricted for use in research activities. In addition, it is important to recognize that the subject under study is very susceptible for Cuban entrepreneurs, who must demonstrate financial solvency to be able to maintain their business, without outside help, so the answers may have a certain masking tone. Future implications of research work on this topic should be oriented to the methodological, management and operational definition of the concept of the private rental house (hostal) as a modality of accommodation for the non-state tourism sector in Cuba, its typologies and categorization appropriate to the national context of tourism in this destination. It is also recommended to extend this type of study to other cities and tourist regions of the country where this type of accommodation has gained relevance. This would promote better management of these establishments in terms of quality and sustainability in an integrated way with the rest of the types of accommodation of the state sector.

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12.2  Tourism, Mobility and Accommodation 12.2.1  Tourism and Human Mobility Tourism and human mobility are integrated as a spatial phenomenon (Boullón, 1997; Carranza & Serrano, 2005; Di Virgilio, 2014; Vera et al., 1997; Vogeler & Hernández, 2000) associated with residential mobility, through which housing opportunities are generated (Cruz & Xavier, 2011). Such opportunities are in new or vacant houses as a consequence of the processes of rehabilitation or enhancement of different types of properties with the participation of the real estate market and the land market. In fact, the term tourism itself comes from the Latin word “tornare” or “tornus” meaning, in terms of action, the activity of “going and returning”, which in essence constitutes the basis of tourist trips (Acerenza, 2000; Gallego, 2002). Different authors recognize that tourism is a phenomenon that has been the subject of various conceptualizations with divergent approaches and meeting points (Acerenza, 2000; Bigné et al., 2000; Figuerola, 2000; Gallego, 2002). However, a set of terms commonly used for its definition appear, such as travel, change of place, temporary stay, as well as social, economic, and territorial environmental relations and phenomena. During the last decades the approaches related to it have evolved with respect to aspects such as the temporary movements of people (trips), the economic significance of tourism as a productive activity, the psycho-sociological, cultural and environmental scope, or the operational components of the tourism process. The pioneering definition for its connotation and acceptance is provided by Swiss professors Kurt Krapf and Walter Hunziker (1942) who defined tourism as a set of relationships and phenomena produced by the displacement and permanence of people outside their place of residence, as long as these displacements and permanence were not motivated by a lucrative activity; note that it is a definition that focuses on the trip and the social processes that are generated. In correspondence with the previous premises, the authors of this chapter understand tourism as the set of industrial and commercial activities that produce goods and services consumed by tourists during the realization of a tourist trip. In turn, temporary migrations and a set of social and economic relations and phenomena are generated in the double tourist-host direction. In this sense, tourism is a complex economic and social activity that occurs in a specific place, namely a tourist destination, which is characterized by a type of environment and a specific technological base. This tourist destination constitutes a geographical or perceived place in which the supply of certain tourist products is located and towards which the demand flows are directed from the emitting markets in which the tourist flows. Assessing the complexity of the concept, it can be considered that it is a delimited area, physically and socially arranged to receive tourist visits (Cohen & Franco, 2000), a geographical portion in which the factors of production and consumption that enable the generation of tourism products are located. It is continuous, with heterogeneous components, whose limits are imprecise and reach as far as the aspirations,

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proposals and/or possibilities of the supply reach, and the image and use that it has (Valls, 2004; UNWTO, 2007; Ivars i Baidal et al., 2013). Associated with the definitions and scope of the terms of tourism and tourist destination mentioned above, it is inferred that residential mobility for tourism purposes requires tourist accommodation as a receptive base for the duration of stay in the destination (tourists who need to spend the night). As an associated function, different services are provided in hotel establishments and with other typologies, such as the modality of private houses or hostels developed in Cuba, in which regular temporary lodging services are offered, which may include food and beverage services, and other facilities. Formal family tourism companies offer this type of service, which means the operation of business institutions based on the concept of family management. Regarding tourism and human mobility, Coles et al. (2005) contend that there has been a paradigm shift in tourism studies, under which it is necessary to understand tourism as a form of human movement within a much broader spectrum of social and physical mobility. They argue that mobility patterns must avoid all orthodox inter and multidisciplinary approaches in favour of a more flexible production, dissemination and consumption of knowledge due to the transgression of disciplinary boundaries and the movement towards a post disciplinary scenario. According to Williams and Hall (2012) new forms of international mobility can be found at many scales from the local and national to the global. All age ranges are included, but particularly those near the polar extremes of the life course like young, single adults and the active elderly, in contrast, families with young children and the frail elderly tend to be some of the least mobile socio-demographic groups. These groups include for example, young New Zealanders or Australians taking their Big OE (Overseas Experience) in Europe, or the partly retired Canadian living a peripatetic lifestyle between Toronto and Florida, or the German and Swedish long-term travellers visiting organic farms around the world. These forms of international mobility are associated both with the concept of long-stay tourism and residential migration. In this regard, Huete and Mantecón (2010) recognize new lifestyles related to the phenomena of a sometimes tourist and sometimes migratory nature through the study of international mobility processes of retirees from northern Europe to the Mediterranean coasts. Such mobilities hinder their categorization as tourists or immigrants, based on which differences between long-stay tourism and residential migration can be determined.

12.2.2  T  ourism Model Based on Private Rental Houses and Second Residences There is a complex relationship among tourism, mobility and private houses used for tourism accommodation (Hall & Müller, 2004), which is characterized by an increasing quantitative importance of the tourist use of family or private houses as

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part of the accommodation supply (Martínez et al., 2003) and real estate development (Díaz & Lourés, 2006). In this context, two types of development could be identified. The first one corresponds to the tourism model of construction and/or rehabilitation of housing for tourist use. The second one relates to the model of second residences, giving rise to the consolidation of international tourist destinations of residential specialization in different regions (Fernández & Barrado, 2011), like the case of exponential housing construction for tourist use on the Spanish Mediterranean coast (Huete, 2008). Especially in the case of Cuba, it seems to be that the prevailing model is the proliferation of the tourist use of private houses that generally rent one or more rooms shared with resident local families. Such houses have undergone modifications, transformations or reconstructions for their use as specialized spaces to accommodate the foreign visitors they receive. It is important to note that within the context of contemporary human mobility second houses or residential tourism (Aledo, 2008; Casado, 1999; Gili, 2003) are an important part of the tourism and leisure lifestyles of many people in the developed world (Hall & Müller, 2004; Serrano, 2003), and also in underdeveloped countries where the tourism of second houses has been growing, like in rural Mexico (Cestur-­ Sectur, 2004). Particularly, the study of lifestyle migration has been used to refer to an increasing number of people who take the decision to migrate based on their belief that there is a more fulfilling way of life available to them elsewhere. This mobility is particularly important in the current era given the impact such moves have on places and people at both ends of the migratory chain (Gullette, 2007, Aledo et al., 2007, Benson & O’Reilly, 2009). Residential migration towards tourist spaces leads to participation in the production and consumption of new places that implicate the construction of a new life in places of coexistence far from their regions or countries of origin, which entails the affirmation of new identities (Mazón et al., 2011). In particular, international retirement migration is an important process closely related to the development of tourism. Researchers from Germany, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom recognize that during the last two decades, northern European retirement residence in the southern European sunbelt has grown strongly and its forms have rapidly changed. Yet standard demographic and social statistical sources provide no information about the flows, the migrants or their increasingly mobile and complex residential patterns; this international retirement migration (IRM) is characterized by different socio-economic backgrounds, motivations and behaviour of the various migrant groups and their relationship with the host and home countries (Casado et al., 2004). The tourism of second homes has acquired great importance within the Spanish tourist scene. At the same time, studies reflect significant differences between residential tourists and other groups of tourists in relation to sociodemographic profile, perspectives and future behaviour (Sanz, 2008). For example, groups of citizens from the United Kingdom and Germany have been migrating to Spain’s coastal towns in increasing numbers since the 1980s (O’Reilly, 2007) and destinations like the Region of Murcia show the predominance of second homes as a proportion of overall accommodation (García et al., 2002).

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In other countries like Mexico, the tourist model of second houses is a phenomenon of growing importance, both in large tourist centres, and in less important destinations that maintain a strong boost in the production of second residences. This phenomenon is associated with a segment of tourism activity that mobilizes strong real estate investments from the private sector, as well as infrastructure from government authorities (Hiernaux, 2005, 2010). Therefore, it is clear that tourism of secondary residences has become fashionable, reflecting the evolution of ways of life especially in Western societies; so, it is worth asking whether these owners who share their time between two residences should be considered as tourists or migrants (Aledo et al., 2010; Müller, 2002).

12.3  Methodology Approach This study proposes a methodology that aims to generate information on the contribution of the international residential mobility of Cubans living abroad and other foreigners to the revitalization of the real estate sector for tourist accommodation in private rental houses (hostales). A quantitative - qualitative approach was used, and the deductive methodological route was applied from part of the general explanatory theory to the particular; the study design was based on applied, observational, descriptive and transversal research, in which mixed information sources were used. The methodology tried to generate a deep understanding about a particular situation that has occurred in the city under study, through democratic participation, sustained communication and cooperation of the actors involved, represented in this case by the owners of a group of selected private rental houses (hostales) in the city of Cienfuegos. The method used to obtain the information was based on the implementation of a structured survey through the application of a questionnaire. The selection of the method was supported by its wide use as a research procedure in the social sciences, facilitating the collection and elaboration of data quickly and efficiently. The applied questionnaire resulted from previous research (González-Herrera et  al., 2019; González-Herrera & Castro-Acevedo, 2015), adapting it to the Cuban environment, and especially to the phenomenon under study. The unit of analysis corresponds to human groups, considering as subject of interest for this research the owners and operators of the private rental houses, the investors of the residential real estate sector representing the external support, and emigrated Cubans living abroad. The sample size was 122 questionnaires, so it was determined to conduct the survey of 150 owner entrepreneurs or private rental houses administrators. The survey was conducted between July and August 2019, face to face with the owners of the private rental houses in their own homes. The surveys were partially anonymous, because, although the analyses are depersonalized, there is a numerical registry according to property, with the previous consent of the participants.

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The variables of the study were: entrepreneur profile; construction time, reconstruction and beginning of business; style profiles, decoration and business size; business services; composition of visitors by nationality and gender; travel motive of visitors; competitiveness of the private rental houses sector; and contribution of foreign capital. These variables were used to obtain a better understanding of the contribution of international residential mobility to the revitalization of the residential real-estate sector for tourist accommodation in private rental houses (hostales) in Cienfuegos.

12.4  Results and Discussion 12.4.1  Research Setting This study is framed in the urban space of the city of Cienfuegos; this is a town and municipality of Cuba, which constitutes the capital of the Cienfuegos province. The population of the city is 174,769 inhabitants (ONE, 2016), it is predominantly urban (93.8%), and concentrates 43% of the population of the province. French settlers founded it on April 22, 1819; it was the only town of Latin-America with this characteristic during the stage of the Spanish colonization. Its strategic location in the central southern part of the Island of Cuba and the presence of a wide bay (approximately 90 km2), have favoured from the beginning its vertiginous socio-economic development and extensive commercial exchange (Fig. 12.1). The city is magnificent in architectural terms influenced by neoclassicism. It has wide sidewalks running from north to south with the straight lines, intersecting between themselves, reaching perfect harmony. The first block, which was reserved for the Arms Square (today José Martí park), marks the centre of the first 25 blocks traced, which determined the urban concentration surrounding this initial centre of the town, the place in which most services are concentrated. In 1995, the urban historical centre of Cienfuegos was declared a National Monument; 10 years later 70 hectares (70 square blocks) were declared Cultural Heritage of Humanity, which makes it the only town in Latin America founded in the Nineteenth Century that has UNESCO recognition (Batista, 2015; Xinhua Español, 2017). Its beauty and impressive stateliness make Cienfuegos and its historic centre an outstanding heritage destination for its urban, architectonic, landscape, environmental, natural and commercial values both nationally and in the Americas context and a privileged destination for tourists visiting Cuba, who may feel motivated by these attractions, while stimulating the development of local tourism (Figs.  12.2 and 12.3).

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Fig. 12.1  Location of Cienfuegos city, Cuba. (Source: Own elaboration)

12.4.2  Sociodemographic Profile of Respondents The sociodemographic characteristics of the people surveyed show that the predominant age is between 41 and 65 years old (68.6%), followed by another group between the ages of 24 and 40 years old (16%), and older than 65 which are the least represented group (14.1%). The sample is feminized, 87 women and 63 men. It is also seen that three quarters of entrepreneurs who cooperated in the study, present a university level or technical school level of education, which shows the high qualification of entrepreneurs, very much in relation to the average level of the population of Cuba for these age groups, which corresponds to High School and University (ONE, 2016).

12.4.3  C  haracteristics of the Private Rental Houses (Hostales) in Cienfuegos City In the methodological and operational order no precise definition was found about the term private rental houses (hostales), since in the methodological definition of the main indicators of the statistical yearbook (ONEI, 2015) only the state sector entities are defined, without dedicating a section to these new accommodation modalities. In general terms, it is considered that a private rental house (hostal) is an

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Fig. 12.2  Palacio de Valle, emblematic building of Cienfuegos city. (Source: Own elaboration)

“establishment” of accommodation with a small number of rooms, generally located in the tourist centre of the city, all of these based on the concept of a familiar atmosphere. In support of this definition, it is indicated that this establishment is intended for accommodation as a fundamental activity, classified by modalities and categories, which offers rooms furnished with complementary services such as food and drinks (ONEI, 2015). Therefore, in the case of Cuba, private rental houses in family properties constitute private tourist accommodation establishments that generally have a location close to areas of architectural, cultural, or landscape attractions. They are usually located in buildings or houses of different characteristics, although in many cases the equity value of the construction itself is exploited. The date of construction of the properties occupied by the private rental houses (hostales) varies depending on the geographical area in which they are located. In Cienfuegos city there is a greater concentration of private rental houses (hostales) in areas of the historic urban centre and in Punta Gorda; in these urban spaces the buildings built in the first half of the last century predominate. However, because of the physical deterioration of many of them it has been necessary to demolish and rebuild them under new concepts and styles that have nothing in common with what they were originally. According to the sample selected for this study, 72% of the private rental houses (hostales) were built in this period– the first half of the

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Fig. 12.3  José Martí Park, former Plaza de Armas, Cienfuegos. (Source: Own elaboration)

twentieth century - even more than half of them are dated before 1935. As for the time of the reconstruction, it varies depending on the year in which they were opened as private rental houses (hostales), although all of them were generally rebuilt before opening as accommodation services. The opening of the private rental houses (hostales) studied in Cienfuegos city has been asynchronous, which has been related to the changes in the regulations of the country,1 especially in relation to the permits for rental of private homes for tourism purposes. This process has been favoured by the designation of Cienfuegos city as a world cultural heritage. According to the results of this study, two stages related to the opening date of the private rental houses (hostales) could be distinguished, that is to say, they were grouped as follows: from 1997 to 2005: 33%; and from 2005 to 2018: 66%. For the integrated analysis of the three mentioned variables (construction year of the house, last repairs to the property, and business start) a grouping of the cases was carried out using the hierarchical cluster technique. The distance was measured through the quadratic Euclidean distance and the centroid grouping method was  Decree Law No. 171 dated May 15, 1997 and modified by Decree Law No. 275 dated September 30, 2010, on the lease of homes, rooms or spaces. Due to the large number of regulations, it is advisable to review and unify in a single legal body the contraventions related to the exercise of self-employment. 1

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used. The dendrogram showed the process of grouping, differentiating two large groups. The non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test was used which tests the hypothesis that the variables are independent of the dependent variable for two samples. In this case, the null hypothesis is rejected, demonstrating that there is dependence between the variables and the group. As can be seen in the cash charts of Fig. 12.4, group 1 shows a greater variability with respect to the opening of the business, some opened since the beginning of 2000, while the median was in 2010 (year in which the regulations on housing leases were changed). This group of private rental houses (hostales) represents the oldest construction of houses, with a median always below 1950. This fact explains how the location of most of the private rental houses (hostales) begins in preferential areas of Cienfuegos city located in the historic centre and in Punta Gorda, places with valued houses built in the first half of the twentieth century, with an attractive location for tourists. The opening of new properties as private rental houses (hostales) has occurred to the extent that tourism has grown enough to generate more demand and occupation, as well as in response to the flexibility of policies to practice private self-­employment. These constructions are part of group 2, which is made up of houses of recent construction and with an average opening date after 2010. As far as remodelling is concerned, the oldest houses have modifications in years close to the year 2000 (Figs. 12.5 and 12.6), while the most modern buildings have not undergone major modifications. Another criterion assessed in the questionnaire was the construction typology of the property. Regarding this aspect, the results obtained express a differentiation related to the evolution and particularities of the territory (Fig. 12.7). In the case of Cienfuegos city, a neoclassical architecture was developed, predominantly eclectic (nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century). However, as in the case of a large number of the Spanish colonial cities and especially in Cuba, this city has a mixture of styles, which are nuanced with the constructions of the revolutionary

Fig. 12.4  Grouping of the private rental houses (hostales) by year of opening (on the left) and year of construction (on the right). (Source: Own elaboration)

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Fig. 12.5  Private rental houses (hostales) of group 1 (year of construction 1930). (Source: Own elaboration)

period,2 and with self-constructed homes of architectural style, determined by the owner’s resource availability. In more than 91.3% of the private rental houses (hostales) two or more rooms are rented, the percentage in which only one room is rented being very low. This could be explained by several factors. On the one hand, the predominance of neoclassical and colonial style properties (63.9% of the houses) which are characterized by their size and large number of rooms; and on the other, by the cumbersome and expensive nature of the process of permits and maintenance of the private rental houses (hostales), which is why in practice it is not economically feasible for an entrepreneur to assume the rent of only one room.

 Revolutionary style: corresponds to the period of the socialist revolution (after 1959 until now) that do not have a well-differentiated nomenclature and elements that make a distinction (interview with Fernández, 2019). Spanish colonial style: architecture and decoration style of the Spanish colonies in the Americas adapted to local demands and materials. Retrieved from https://www. parro.com.ar/definicion-de-estilo+colonial+espa%F1ol 2

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Fig. 12.6  Private rental houses (hostales) of group 2 (year of construction 2010). (Source: Own elaboration)

According to the answers of the surveyed business owners, the private rental houses (hostales) supply other services in addition to the lodging service, such as breakfast, meals and drinks (86%), and Internet (61.3%). To a lesser extent, they provide transportation services, and very few provide entertainment services such as a pool table, Latin dance classes, or scheduled trips, among others (Fig. 12.8). The spatial analysis of this type of accommodation shows that the distribution of the private rental houses (hostales) is geographically concentrated in the old areas of the city, with high patrimonial value, around the Paseo del Prado and in the area of Punta Gorda (Fig. 12.9). It is important to highlight that the buildings reflect a

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Fig. 12.7  Constructive typology of the private rental houses (hostales). (Source: Own elaboration)

Fig. 12.8  Services provided by private rental houses (hostales). (Source: Own elaboration)

mixture of styles and times, so the homogeneity of the groups differentiated above is not maintained. This heterogeneity is determined by the total reconstruction of several properties due to the state of destruction caused by the passing of the years, meteorological phenomena or by the new constructions developed in spaces that allowed it, given the existence of unoccupied lots, like in the area of Punta Gorda.

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Fig. 12.9  Spatial distribution of the private rental houses (hostales) in Cienfuegos city. (Source: Own elaboration)

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12.4.4  M  ain Characteristics of Tourists Visiting the Private Rental Houses (Hostales) in Cienfuegos City The number of tourists who have visited Cienfuegos city in recent years has been increasing, which is in correspondence with the trends that Cuba has experienced as a tourist destination, as shown in the statistical series on tourism published in official sources (ONEI, 2015). Despite this, the current tourist crisis that the destination is going through has been affecting the arrival of visitors, a fact that is reflected in the breach of the projections of receiving 5  million tourists in 2019 (Periódico Cubano, 2019). In 2016, 346,210 tourists were received in Cienfuegos city, whose composition is made up of 58.2% foreigners, and 41.8 of Cubans residing abroad (Martínez-Molina, 2016); these data represent around 11% of the tourists who arrived in Cuba in that period (ONEI, 2019). The analysis of the profile of the tourists who visit the private rental houses (hostales) in Cienfuegos city showed that there is no tendency of any particular gender; 88% of the business owners state that one sex or the other visits them interchangeably. The age groups to which they belong are the same as the rest of the tourists who visit the country, showing a predominance of young people and young adults (ONEI, 2019) as reflected in the following data: between 25 and 44 years, 34%; between 45 and 60 years, 28%; and over 60 years, 21%. Respondents have the perception that the tourists who most use the services of the private rental houses (hostales) are foreigners who most often travel alone (34.7%), although also in an important proportion are those traveling in pairs (27.3) or in groups (26.7%). They perceive that Cubans residing abroad use their services to a lesser extent than foreigners do (11.3%) since mainly during their visit to Cuba they stay in the houses of relatives and/or friends. By nationalities, there were no notable differences with respect to tourists from the rest of the country who stay in private rental houses (hostales) and Canadians, Mexicans, Italians, French and Spanish predominate. The main reasons why tourists travel to Cienfuegos city are, in first place sun and its beach/coast destination (87%), in second place due to the fact it is a city with cultural and historical heritage attractions of tourist interest (75%), and in third place for the nightlife of the city (50%). The rest of the reasons in lower percentages are related to cruise tourism that arrives to the city (12%), event tourism (9%), and business tourism (8%).

12.4.5  R  esidential Real Estate Associated with Tourism in Cienfuegos City The development and expansion of tourism in Cuba during the last decades has been largely managed by foreign companies and professionals, unlike that which happened with other sectors of the Cuban economy. According to Mateos-Cuesta (2017,

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n. p.): “Non-state activity in accommodation, gastronomy and other services, as a complementary tourist supply to the State, expressly admitted by Cuban legislation as an economic activity on its own, has experienced a great boom and importance from the sharp increase in tourist demand experienced in Cuba in recent years. However, so far and despite the many initiatives in this regard, the participation of capital and foreign investors in these private initiatives is not legally admitted.” Non-state tourism (where private rental houses are classified) had around 21,000 rooms at a national level in 2017, and received around 25% of foreigners arriving in Cuba (CUBAAHORA, 2017). These numbers have been increasing, and although official statistics are lacking, it is estimated that more than 10% of these rooms are located in Cienfuegos city. Therefore, the residential real estate sector associated to non-state tourism in this city and the investments made through it have strengthened the capacity of tourist accommodation in this territory, information validated by 97% of the respondents in this research. Similarly, this study has shown that the percentage of tourists who prefer private rental houses (hostales) instead of hotels in Cienfuegos city is unknown, although it is supposed according to unofficial sources that it exceeds a third of those who arrive at the city. The surveyed entrepreneurs recognize that in 98% of the cases, guests argue that they have selected this type of accommodation because it is cheaper, more welcoming and familiar, more personalized, as well as having more privacy with respect to traditional hotels.

12.4.6  I nvestment Process and Forms of Collaboration in the Tourist Business of Residential Private Houses (Hostales) in Cienfuegos City Private rental houses (hostales) require a systematic investment process, determined by the need for maintenance, promotion, marketing, etc. Family and friends of the owners of the tourist accommodation establishments support these investments, but in an unofficial way, that is, without legal participation in the business, although many owners reserve that information. According to the data collected by this study, 70% of the entrepreneurs surveyed said they had the support of residents abroad, of which nine out of ten are Cuban, without specifying the country where they reside, nor the origin of foreigners who cooperate in the private rental house (hostal) business. On the other hand, the degree of participation of residents abroad varies according to each of the private rental houses (hostales). A third of respondents argue that the high degree of participation of their relatives/friends residing abroad in their business has allowed the investment capacity in their houses (hostales); another third state that this participation has been little or very little, while the remaining group declares not having received foreign help.

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A more detailed analysis of this phenomenon was carried out to understand the contribution of foreign capital to the investment process in private rental houses (hostales); this study was developed through a cluster analysis with quadratic Euclidean distance and the centroid grouping method, which allowed differentiation of the private rental houses (hostales) into two large clusters or groups. To validate this result, a discriminant analysis was carried out, which allowed adjustment of a model that classifies them according to the previous grouping, in this case the one obtained in the decision of the hierarchical cluster. As shown in Table 12.1, a correlation test is also performed between the results of the classification of the hierarchical cluster analysis and the discriminant, which denotes almost 90% correlation, significant for 99% confidence between the two results, which means that the decision to obtain two groups is correct. With the purpose of checking if all the variables contribute to the formation of groups, the Mann-Whitney U test is performed, where the null hypothesis that the variables are independent of the groups is tested, demonstrating that in all cases the variables contribute to group formation (Table 12.2). Residents abroad collaborate with the business of their relatives and/or friends’ rental houses (hostales) in different ways. Figure 12.10 shows in a stacked bar chart the number of collaborations according to the sections assessed in the survey, in those private rental houses (hostales) that showed support for this research (105 hostales). According to an elaborated Likert scale, business components that have received important and very important collaboration from abroad are those related to the promotion (81.9%) and commercialization (67.2%) processes of private rental houses (hostales). This is practiced fundamentally through social networks and webpages enabled for it, such as Booking, Tripadvisor, Trivago, Airbnb, etc. However, given the difficulties of internet connectivity in Cuba, it is difficult and expensive to face these tasks from within the country. A non-negligible number of private rental houses (hostales) also receive support, though to a lesser extent, during the investment process (55.2%) and in the organization of tour packages Table 12.1  Correlation between the results of the classification of the hierarchical cluster analysis and the discriminant

Centroid method

Predicted group for analysis 1

Pearson correlation Sig. (2-tailed) N Pearson correlation Sig. (2-tailed) N

Centroid Method 1

Predicted Group for Analysis 1 .899a

150 .899a

.000 150 1

.000 150

150

Source: Own elaboration a Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)

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Table 12.2  Hypothesis test summary N° Null Hypothesis 1 The distribution of design of tourist packages is the same across categories of centroid method 2 The distribution of as an investor is the same across categories of centroid method 3 The distribution of In the promotion of the hostel is the same across categories of centroid method 4 The distribution of Design of tourist packages is the same across categories of centroid method 5 The distribution of Design of tourist packages is the same across categories of centroid method 6 The distribution of Design of tourist packages is the same across categories of centroid method 7 The distribution of Design of tourist packages is the same across categories of centroid method

Test Independent – Samples Mann – Whitney U test

Sig Decision .000 Reject the null hypothesis

Independent – Samples Mann – Whitney U test

.000 Reject the null hypothesis

Independent – Samples Mann – Whitney U test

.000 Reject the null hypothesis

Independent – Samples Mann – Whitney U test

.000 Reject the null hypothesis

Independent – Samples Mann – Whitney U test

.000 Reject the null hypothesis

Independent – Samples Mann – Whitney U test

.000 Reject the null hypothesis

Independent – Samples Mann – Whitney U test

.000 Reject the null hypothesis

Asymptotic significances are displayed. The significance level is .05 Source: Own elaboration

(40.0%), as well as in the formation of alliances with national and international tour operators, and in the organization of tour groups. In these last aspects, collaboration is only recognized by a third of the surveyed entrepreneurs.

12.5  Conclusions The theoretical research implications of this study are related to the analysis of the main conceptual and operational categories that serve as the basis for the management of the tourist accommodation modality in private rental houses (hostales). The methodological contribution of this research is related to the testing of the instrument for collecting information, which combines quantitative and qualitative techniques, and could serve as a guiding model in other studies, such as those that are intended to continue in other cities of Central Cuba, like Caibarién and Remedios. The exploration and analysis of different variables have answered the central research question of this study, demonstrating that there is a close relationship between international residential mobility and the development of the real-estate sector for tourism use in Cienfuegos city, which has contributed to the generation of tourist accommodation opportunities in private rental houses (hostales), opening new capacities for receptive tourism in family residences. However, the case of

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Fig. 12.10  Kind of activity in which residents abroad collaborate with family and friends’ business. (Source: Own elaboration)

second private residences in Cuban tourism like in other countries is not so significant, as different authors have reported in their studies (Gullette, 2007, Benson & O’Reilly, 2009, Aledo et al., 2010; Cruz & Xavier, 2011, Williams & Hall, 2012, Di Virgilio, 2014). It is significant to note that the participation of Cubans residing abroad is much less than that assumed by the team of researchers (with experience in urban revitalization and tourism studies in Cuba) and other experts on the subject residing in the country, focusing mainly on aspects such as promotion, marketing and as investors, this last aspect has been reduced to remittances. Moreover, the external capital from Cuban individuals or families residing abroad and other tourists from different markets visiting Cuba has been one of the most important sources in the investment processes in private rental houses (hostales) in Cienfuegos city, albeit without legal recognition in the business. This thesis coincides with the exposed arguments made by other authors in relation to the best practices for improvement of the national economy (Everleny Pérez, 2019). The main forms of collaboration of residents abroad with the business of private houses (hostales) in the city of Cienfuegos correspond to the promotion and online marketing, organization of tour packages, formation of alliances with tour operators, and the organization of groups. Practical research implications of this study recognize that the residential real-­ estate sector for tourist accommodation in the city of Cienfuegos has grown continuously since the end of the 1990s, reaching the highest values after 2010. This is due, principally, to two causal factors, on the one hand, the changes in regulations

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that make it possible and on the other, the increase in tourism towards the city, favoured by its declaration as a Cultural Heritage Site in 2005. Based on the synthesis of the information it is possible to conclude that private rental houses (hostales) in the city of Cienfuegos are classified in the modality of non-state tourism and tend to form geographic concentrations associated with the patrimonial zone of the downtown area, the axis that forms the “Paseo del Prado” and the area of “Punta Gorda” that extends towards the homonymous bay. They offer an attractive heritage characterized by residences with a colonial and neoclassical architecture with a predominantly eclectic tendency, although in some cases there are mixtures of epochs and styles, including constructions of the revolutionary period with diverse characteristics and materials, as well as aesthetic values associated to the reconstruction or modification made by their owners. The accommodation infrastructure corresponds to fully furnished residential rooms, in a shared family-owned home environment, but with small numbers of rooms, while combining with the supply of food & beverage services, internet and in some cases transportation. This affirms that this offer is based on the concept of a tourist multiproduct. The main trends related to the composition of the demand are coincident with the behaviour of these indicators at the national level, both in terms of composition by sex and ways of organizing the trip, as in terms of motivations for visiting the city. The preferences for this type of tourist accommodation establishment are also coincident at the national level, and these are related to a tendency that shows the important growth of private rental houses (hostales) in Cienfuegos city, and other tourist destinations in Cuba.

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95–114. Retrieved from https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Imagen-­global-­e-­ intenciones-­futuras-­de-­del-­turista-­Blas/1b96a9d806efdbcb015af50d25602a6f75fe47e2#pa per-­header Serrano, J. (2003). Las viviendas de segunda residencia en la sociedad de “bienestar”. El caso de un país turístico: España. Cuadernos de Turismo, 12, 53–75. Retrieved from https://revistas. um.es/turismo/article/view/19241 United Nations World Tourism Organization, UNWTO. (2007). A practical guide to tourism destination management. UNWTO. Valls, J. F. (2004). Gestión de Destinos Turísticos Sostenibles. Barcelona. Vera, J.  F., López, F., Marchena, M., & Antón, S. (1997). Análisis Territorial del Turismo. Editorial Ariel. Vogeler, C., & Hernández, E. (2000). El mercado turístico: estructura, operaciones y procesos de producción. Centro de Estudios Ramón Areces. Williams, A. M., & Hall, C. M. (2012). Tourism, migration, circulation and mobility. The contingencies of time and place. In C. M. Hall & A. M. Williams (Eds.), Tourism and migration: New relationships between migration and consumption (pp.  1–52). Kluwer. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281560298_Tourism_Migration_Circulation_and_ Mobility_The_Contingencies_of_Time_and_Place XINHUA Español. (2017). Especial: Cienfuegos, la única ciudad de América Latina fundada por franceses. Retrieved from http://spanish.xinhuanet.com/2017-­10/24/c_136700718.htm

Part IV

Migrations and Tourism in Urban Spaces: Processes of Gentrification

Chapter 13

Geographies of Gentrification in Barcelona. Tourism as a Driver of Social Change Dolores Sánchez-Aguilera and Jesús M. González-Pérez

13.1  Introduction Gentrification has ceased to be a process that is specific and exclusive to certain command-centre cities and has become generalized, both spatially and sectorally, as an urban strategy that has replaced liberal urban policy (Smith, 2002, 2006). Since the 1990s, an extensive body of literature has shown that, in common with other consumer spaces (shopping centres, cultural and leisure complexes and entertainment landscapes), tourism too produces gentrification (Smith, 1996; Judd & Fainstein, 1999; Wilson & Tallon, 2011; González-Pérez, 2020). Huning and Novy (2006, 2) moreover identify a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting as well that “tourists don’t only ‘push’ into neighbourhoods beyond the beaten path but are also increasingly ‘pulled’ into these areas”. The influence of gentrification extends beyond bullish economic cycles and is even apparent at times of crisis (1973–74, 1981–82, and 1991–92). Initially, the academic a literature had us believe that economic recession reduced capital flows towards gentrified neighbourhoods and would lead to a reversal of the process or to “degentrification” (Wilson & Tallon, 2011). Yet, Lees (2009) confidently argued, a year after the onset of the 2008 economic crisis, that while gentrification may have temporarily slowed down, it was unlikely to be stopped. Likewise, in the cities of southern Europe, economic crises open up new possibilities for speculative investments, in this instance in the form of the tourist flows and property investments from northern and central Europe.

D. Sánchez-Aguilera (*) Department of Geography, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain J. M. González-Pérez Department of Geography, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Majorca, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_13

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Thus, the gentrification of certain neighbourhoods can actually continue apace during years of economic crisis, above all in those cities of the tourist periphery that are dependent on the dynamics generated from abroad (notably the Global North). A good example of this is provided by the cities of Greece, which underwent some of their most intense processes of gentrification during the last crisis. In Athens, against the backdrop of the urban crises after 2008 (Koutrolikou, 2016), gentrification processes went uninterrupted in the city’s central areas of Gazi and Psirri (Stergiou & Sidiropoulos, 2014). In short, during the period of neoliberalism of the crisis and post-crisis era (the years since 2007), we have been witnesses to a new wave of revalorization, speculation and expulsion of resident populations (Cócola-­ Gant, 2018), deepening the processes of gentrification and urban inequality (Janoschka, 2018). Gentrification came to Spain late and differed substantially from the processes observed in the Anglophone world. In academic studies, it has been addressed primarily in terms of a critique of the neoliberal model and, in recent years, associated primarily with tourism; as a result of which, it is Spain’s tourist cities that have received most attention in the literature. Since 2000, interest in the phenomenon has increased markedly, but it is primarily after 2010 that it became established as one of the main lines of research in urban studies (González-Pérez, 2020). In light of available references, the literature in this field can be classified into two main periods. The earliest works were carried out during the years of the housing bubble (1996–2007) and focused their attention on the study of the impacts of urban mega-events and mega-projects promoted by the public administration and developed within the framework of public-private mix initiatives. After 2007, during the crisis and post-crisis, the focus shifted and the debate came to centre on urban tourism and the impact of new channels for the commercialization of tourist rental property on the internet or using computer apps, above all as a result of the emergence of Airbnb. In the case of tourism gentrification, the cities attracting most attention in the literature are the tourist cities of the Mediterranean (Palma and Valencia), those of the Canary Islands (Domínguez-Mujica et al., 2020) and Bilbao (Janoschka et al., 2013, 2014). In contrast, studies concerned with the relations between immigration and areas subject to processes of renewal and gentrification have focused on other cities, primarily those at the top of the Spanish urban system, i.e. Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao (Janoschka et al., 2013, 2014). Barcelona, second only in Spain’s urban system to Madrid, is an ideal city in which to study these processes. Indeed, the city has been widely publicized, above all after the 1992 Olympic Games, and because of its renowned, although widely criticized, “Barcelona Model” (García-Ramón & Albet, 2000; Monclús, 2003; Marshall, 2004; Capel, 2005; Delgado, 2007). The Catalan capital is a city in which the closely related variables of mass tourism and tourism gentrification take leading roles in one of the liveliest debates at the urban scale. The importance of Barcelona to tourism is undeniable: it is the Spanish municipality that receives the most foreign tourists (7.05 million in 2019); its port handles the largest number of cruise passengers in Spain (3.1 million in 2019); it is ranked number two in terms of the

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number of tourist beds on offer (83,849 in 2019) and number one in terms of number of hotel establishments open during the summer (698 in August 2019); and its Spain’s leading city (eighth in the world) as regards the number of offers on Airbnb (18,302 in November 2019). The literature analysing the changes to the Barcelona landscape and the social and functional transformations of the city or of one of its neighbourhoods, attributable to the processes of gentrification, is broad and not easily quantifiable. For this reason, on the one hand, in this chapter we do not aim to draw up a list of all the contributions that have been published on this subject in relation to Barcelona, not least because we are likely to fail to take some of them into account. However, here, based on a systematic search of this literature, our review of roughly 50 published studies on gentrification in Barcelona makes it possible to identify their basic lines of research from both a temporal and spatial point of view. On the other, our work does not focus on studying a single type of gentrification. That is not the objective. Rather, our idea is to publicize the gentrification process in Barcelona, probably the most and best-studied city in Spain, through scientific literature, and focusing on two main variables: evolution of the themes and territories studied within the city. This allows us to identify the presence and weight of both the different types of gentrification according to the stage considered, as well as the most gentrified neighbourhoods if we look at the number of publications. Note that earlier analyses undertaken of gentrification and associated lines of research in Spain by García Herrera and Díaz (2008) and in Spain and Latin America by Janoschka et  al. (2014) constitute valuable methodological precursors to our work here. Unlike these, ours is the first to be carried out on a Spanish city and on an intra-urban scale. In this sense, we understand that our chapter represents a remarkable methodological contribution, which can be easily extrapolated to other cities. Thus, the primary objective of this chapter is to study the geographies of gentrification in Barcelona based on a review of academic findings related to this process. We begin by reviewing the main discourses, themes and lines of research, before moving on to describe the location of those neighbourhoods or urban areas that have attracted most attention. Finally, we report a case study of the Ciutat Vella, Barcelona’s old town and one of the city’s districts that has been the subject of the most frequent and insightful studies, but which conceals a number of interesting internal contradictions.

13.2  Methodology This chapter is structured in two main parts. The first, and what might be considered the most important, is a review of the published literature. The second is a case study, aimed at evaluating current processes of gentrification and at identifying new areas of debate. Together the two parts dictate the use of two types of methodology and sources.

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The first involves a bibliographic search and the subsequent systematization of the information collected. Although it falls outside the scope of our remit here to quantify exactly the number of studies published on gentrification in Barcelona, we undertook an exhaustive search in the bibliographic databases of Dialnet and Google Scholar between January 1990 and January 2020. Having identified the publications, we then classified them according to the following indicators: year of publication, type of gentrification described, line of research, scale and territory of study. Our diagnosis and representation of the geographies of gentrification in Barcelona are then based on this information. From the bibliographic search it emerges that the Ciutat Vella is one of the districts to have undergone the greatest transformations as a result of gentrification and, in addition, the one that arouses most interest among researchers. We measured the social change and the revalorization of property in this district by undertaking an analysis over time of economic (income), population (demographic change, foreign population, level of education) and housing (residential rental and sales market) indicators. This we undertake at the neighbourhood level, in order to detect contractions, processes of segregation and intra-urban diversity. This analysis has drawn primarily on statistical sources, based on data made available by the municipal statistical service.

13.3  G  eographies of Gentrification: Lines of Research and Territories of Study In 2001, Rodríguez et al., reported that the phenomenon of gentrification had barely been studied in any structured fashion in Spain, compared, that is, to other processes such as urban regeneration and renewal which, although linked to it, cannot strictly be considered gentrification (Rodríguez et  al., 2001). Some years later, García Herrera and Díaz (2008) once more lamented the paucity of studies and the little progress made in the period of their study (that is, 1999–2008), both from a theoretical and empirical point of view. This idea was further ratified by Janoschka et al. (2014) who, in a comparative review that included Latin America, stressed that very few researchers were interested in this phenomenon in Spain. These negative diagnoses are probably not only due to the time lag in the development of gentrifying processes in Spain compared to the Anglophone countries, but also to an academic literature that, during the 1980s and 1990s, was more interested in other socio-urban trends: the problems of degradation that affected large urban areas (from historic centres to peripheral neighbourhoods and housing estates) and the territorial and environmental impacts of the major urban operations of the housing bubble years (1996–2007). However, studies of both urban regeneration and renewal paved the way to some extent for the expansion of studies of gentrification after 2000. The crisis and the post-crisis policies, from 2007 onwards, aroused

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the interest of geographers around the world, as well as that of Spanish researchers, in the ‘return of capital to the city’, to paraphrase Neil Smith (1996). Taking a chronological perspective, among the pioneering studies to tackle the question of gentrification in Spain, mention should be made of Gavira (1985), who examined tertiarization and social change in Madrid; López Sánchez (1986), who, despite not explicitly mentioning gentrification, analysed the processes of expulsion of the proletariat from two city centre neighbourhoods of Barcelona from the perspective of social geography; and Vázquez (1992), who studied urban policies and gentrification trends in Madrid’s historic centre, a subject he developed further in his PhD thesis (Vázquez, 1996). With the change of century, however, interest in studying gentrification increased, above all in Barcelona and Bilbao, two cities that dominated the international representation of gentrification processes in Spain until the mid-2010s (Janoschka et al., 2014).

13.3.1  L  ines of Research. Two Decades of Academic Study: 2000–2020 The discourse on gentrification in Barcelona forms part of a critique of the neoliberal city model and of the capitalist system; and, to a greater or lesser degree, public policies, as exemplified in plans for urban regeneration and renewal, and the impact of tourism are present in most published research. The number of academic studies of gentrification in the city of Barcelona peaked in around 2015; however, lines of research, the specific topics addressed, and the territories studied have each evolved over these last 20 years (Table 13.1). 13.3.1.1  Stage 1: 2000–2009 In this stage, the number of studies published remained low and appeared mainly in Spanish publications with little international reach. The subjects addressed were quite diverse, without a very clearly defined line of research: influence of urban regeneration plans on the gentrification of Barcelona’s old town (Martínez Rigol’s, 2000 thesis; Tabakman, 2001; Ter-Minassian, 2009); the construction of newly promoted areas of the housing market (Marrero, 2003); an initial, very general reflection, on the impact of tourism (Palou i Rubio, 2009); commercial gentrification in Ciutat Vella (Pascual-Molinas and Ribera-Fumaz, 2009); and, while there is no clear methodology as to how to measure these processes, in almost all of them data on immigration are used as an indicator of gentrification (Sargatal, 2001). Thus, it becomes evident that various groups of high-income foreign residents share the territory with labour immigrants from the countries of the South, reproducing

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Table 13.1  Academic literature on gentrification in Barcelona. Perspectives and debates STAGE: 2000–2009 Type Scale: district/ neighbourhood Urban regeneration Ciutat Vella and gentrification Tourism Barcelona gentrification Commercial Ciutat Vella gentrification Immigration and El Raval gentrification Poblenou Urban renewal: Housing and property development STAGE: 2010–2014 Type Scale: district/ neighbourhood Urban regeneration El Raval, Santa and gentrification Caterina, Sant Pere, La Barceloneta Commercial Ciutat Vella (Santa gentrification Caterina) Poblenou Urban renewal: Cultural and productive gentrification Citizen resistance to Ciutat Vella, el Raval, gentrification la Barceloneta STAGE: 2015–2020 Type Scale: district/ neighbourhood Ciutat Vella, Commercial and Barcelona, el Raval cultural gentrification Poblenou Urban renewal: Cultural and productive gentrification Barcelona, Ciutat Tourism Vella, Barceloneta, gentrification (and Vila de Gràcia, public policies) Poblenou

Citizen resistance to gentrification

Barcelona, Poblenou

Authors Martínez Rigol (2000), Tabakman (2001) and Ter-Minassian (2009). Palou i Rubio (2009) Pascual-Molinas and Ribera-Fumaz (2009) Sargatal (2001) Marrero (2003)

Authors Tapada-Berteli and Arbaci (2011), Arbaci and Tapada-Berteli (2012) and Pareja and Simó (2014). Hernández (2014) Dot-Jutgla et al. (2010, 2012), Pallarès-Barbera et al. (2012) and Barber and Pareja (2010).

Cuesta (2011), Rius (2014) and Pahissa (2014).

Authors Hernández (2015, 2016), Cócola-Gant (2015), Rius and Posso (2016) and Vila Márquez (2016). Limón (2015, 2018)

Arias-Sans and Quaglieri (2016), Cócola-Gant (2016b, c, d), Gutiérrez et al. (2017), Quaglieri and Scarnato (2017), Arias-Sans (2018), Blanco et al. (2018), Crespi-Vallbona and Mascarilla-­ Miró (2018), Zaar and Pontes de Fonseca (2018) and Mansilla and Milano (2019). Colomb and Novy (2016), Cócola-Gant and Pardo (2017) and Mansilla (2018). (continued)

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Table 13.1 (continued) Green gentrification

Gentrification: Inequality and impoverishment Anti-gentrification urban policies Indicators of gentrification Socio-demographic changes and gentrification

Ciutat Vella, Sant Martí, Sant Andreu, Nou Barris, Horta-Guinardó Metropolitan Area, Barcelona, Ciutat Vella, Sant Antoni Metropolitan Area

Anguelovski et al. (2018)

Barcelona, Vallcarca

Riera (2018) and Antunes et al. (2020).

Cócola-Gant (2016a), Caballero (2018), Donat (2018), Porcel et al. (2018) and Mendoza (2019). Nel.lo (2018)

Barcelona, Barri Gótic López-Gay and Cócola-Gant (2016) and López-Gay (2018).

Source: Study authors

processes of degradation and chabolización (slum creation) in the historic centre, at the same time as those of incipient gentrification. In 2009, the French geographer, Ter, defended his doctoral thesis on gentrification in Barcelona in which he analysed the situation in the city district of Ciutat Vella. In it, rather than presenting an analysis of types of gentrification, he studied the factors characterizing the process. He used the neighbourhood as his primary unit of study, applying this approach to two areas that have become the most frequently cited in the literature to date: on the one hand, the historic centre (the district of Ciutat Vella and more specifically the neighbourhood of el Raval) and, on the other, Poblenou, a peripheral neighbourhood in which the City Hall launched an ambitious action program called Plan 22@. Poblenou, a former industrial area, characterised by a large number of abandoned buildings – occupying almost 2 million square metres – that could serve as premises for a range of economic activities, is the subject of a renewal plan aimed at the reconversion and specialization of this neighbourhood for uses related to information technologies and culture. 13.3.1.2  Stage 2: 2010–2014 In this stage, the number of studies published was similar, with the difference that the lines of research related to the types of gentrification under study were gradually consolidated. Moreover, the role played by public policy as both an element and cause of gentrification was confirmed. Urban planning became the usual strategy of study: urban regeneration plans promoting touristification and new commercial models in the historic centre (Tapada-Berteli & Arbaci, 2011; Arbaci & Tapada-­ Berteli, 2012; Pareja Eastaway & Simó, 2014; Hernández, 2014), as well as strategies for urban renewal in declining industrial areas, promoting new types of cultural and productive gentrification (Barber & Pareja, 2010; Casellas et al., 2010, 2012). Interestingly, this stage saw one of the first studies of urban resistance to

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gentrification among the citizens (Cuesta, 2011). Taking a different perspective, Rius (2014) explored the role of culture as a gentrifying element in Ciutat Vella. The author argued that culture can contribute to the revalorization of marginal neighbourhoods by constructing a more positive image and empowering citizens against gentrification. The stage was marked by the introduction of studies that compared neighbourhoods in two different cities experiencing similar problems: for example, el Raval in Barcelona vs. Cabanyal in Valencia; Eastside in Birmingham vs. 22@ in Barcelona. The delayed identification on the part of the public administration of processes linked to gentrification accounts for the fact that there are no studies examining the very few anti-gentrification urban and sectoral measures taken by the Barcelona City Hall and the regional government, the Generalitat de Catalunya. As in the previous stage, the scale of study was intra-urban, and centred on the same districts: Ciutat Vella (Barri Gótic, el Raval and, for the first time, Barceloneta, Sant Pere i Santa Caterina) and Poblenou (linked again to the Plan 22@). This lack of diversification in the territories under study often meant the research repeated the same discourse and even used the same methodologies to identify and analyse gentrification. 13.3.1.3  Stage 3: 2015–2020 This stage has witnessed a veritable boom in studies of gentrification in Barcelona. Some 30 academic studies can be identified as well as numerous undergraduate and master’s dissertations, two doctoral theses (Hernández, 2015; Limón, 2015), a special issue in an academic journal (Papers: Regió Metropolitana de Barcelona) entitled “Gentrificació i dret a la Ciutat” [Gentrification and the Law in the City] (2018), and a book that designed and applied an index of gentrification index to the city (Riera, 2018), among other notable contributions. At the same time, there has occurred a marked internationalization of research with the publication of studies in leading journals in English (Arias-Sans & Quaglieri, 2016; Cócola-Gant and Pardo, 2017; Gutiérrez et al., 2017; Anguelovski et al., 2018; Blanco et al., 2018; Mansilla & Milano, 2019; Antunes et al., 2020), and comparative analyses with neighbourhoods in other cities have flourished: Barcelona and Madrid (Hernández, 2015); Barcelona and Berlin (Novy, 2016); Getsemaní (Cartagena de Indias) and el Raval (Barcelona) (Rius & Posso, 2016); Hortaleza (Madrid) and Poblenou (Barcelona) (Limón, 2018). In addition, the analyses have incorporated a new scale, the metropolitan level (Nel.lo, 2018; Porcel et al., 2018), and hitherto ignored neighbourhoods, both in Barcelona’s Eixample (Sant Antoni) (Caballero, 2018), and in the periphery (Vila de Gràcia) (Mansilla & Milano, 2019). However, Ciutat Vella and Poblenou continue to be, by far, the preferred areas of study. The range of subjects addressed have become more diverse, but in practically all cases  – and regardless of the type of gentrification analysed  – urban tourism is understood as the primary factor influencing all the different processes of

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gentrification. The rapid expansion of peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms, with spatial distribution patterns that exert considerable pressure on certain traditionally residential neighbourhoods, has become a key factor in the interpretation of gentrification in recent years (Gutiérrez et  al., 2017). Thus, the analysis of tourism gentrification has been consolidated and, to a lesser extent, progress has been made in studies of commercial, cultural and productive gentrification. Although present in many publications, studies of urban regeneration and gentrification, one of the most frequent focuses in previous stages, have lost importance. Likewise, new perspectives have appeared, such as studies of green gentrification, linking socio-environmental and fundamentally socio-urban issues framed in the search for equitable access to the city and environmental justice. An example of the former is provided by Anguelovski et al. (2018), who study sociodemographic gentrification based on the proximity and influence exerted by urban green spaces. In addition, the effects of the 2007 crisis and post-crisis policies have been incorporated in analyses of gentrification by focusing on their dual impact: the increase in segregation and inequality in the city, on the one hand, and governance and citizen responses, on the other. In the case of the former, inequality is measured from different points of view: access to housing, displacements and evictions (Cócola-Gant, 2016a; Caballero, 2018; Donat, 2018; Mendoza, 2019), and poverty and social stratification (Porcel et al., 2018). In the case of the latter, Nel.lo (2018) examines the solutions offered by public urban and housing policies designed to fight against segregation and gentrification. In a similar vein, other authors (Arias & Quaglieri, 2016; Cócola-Gant, 2016b; Cócola-Gant and Pardo, 2017; Quaglieri & Scarnato, 2017; Blanco et  al., 2018; Crespi-Vallbona & Mascarilla-Miró, 2018; Mansilla, 2019) have studied tourism gentrification, primarily via the holiday home phenomenon (the so-called ‘Airbnb syndrome’) and the social responses and/or urban regulations introduced in Barcelona. In this line of research, it is common to find in the same article an analysis of the strategies of the anti-gentrification social movements and of the urban and tourist policies developed by public administration. That is, in this stage, the analysis of tourism gentrification usually concludes with a description of the corrective measures being taken. In short, the stage of development reached by studies of gentrification since 2015 has been accompanied by the publication of articles that make outstanding methodological contributions, and which extend well beyond the simple interpretation of indicators. Bravo (2018) has studied the meanings of the term gentrification, using as examples its impacts and processes as manifest in Barcelona. Porcel et al. (2018) have described the evolution of gentrified neighbourhoods over a 10-year period (1991–2001) by using a set of indicators. And Antunes et  al. (2020) have linked critical cartography and cognitive mapping with more traditional gentrification studies, with the aim of detecting, in the neighbourhood of Vallcarca, areas perceived as being affected by gentrification or at risk of gentrification, and symbolic places in the fight against gentrification.

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13.3.2  T  erritories of Gentrification. Districts and Neighbourhoods in the Academic Literature Antunes et  al. (2020) recently wrote that scholarship about gentrification in Barcelona has specifically focused on the old town and the 22@ District in its analyses of the Barcelona Model and the politics of transformation to a tourist-oriented global city. The systematic review that we have carried out here, analysing academic studies published over the last 20 years, confirms this view: of a total of 45 papers that have as their area of study a district or neighbourhood of Barcelona, a total of 22 focus on the district of Ciutat Vella or on one of its four neighbourhoods (Barri Gòtic, el Raval, Barceloneta and Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera), and 14 focus their attention on Poblenou. Barcelona as a whole or as an intra-urban space is also a frequent focus (11 publications) and, only very recently, and largely insufficiently, has the metropolitan scale been taken as the scale of study by two papers. Neighbourhoods outside the urban centre have rarely been the focus of gentrification research. This section aims to map out the way in which the research makes Barcelona’s neighbourhoods visible as areas or territories of study according to the typology of processes to which they are exposed: gentrification, regeneration and urban renewal; tourism gentrification; commercial, productive and cultural gentrification; citizen resistance and urban anti-gentrification policies; sociodemographic changes and gentrification; gentrification, inequality and urban impoverishment. A summary map is provided. The map, however, has a series of limitations that should first be pointed out. First, it does not include the territories referred to in publications on green gentrification (which, as a matter of fact, constitute a relatively small number of contributions); second, it does not consider contributions that use indicators; and, finally, papers that have as their area of study the city of Barcelona as a whole or its metropolitan area have been left out. Likewise, it should be noted that most of the works consulted (around a dozen) have the district of Ciutat Vella as their area of study, a fact that has been taken into account when summing the neighbourhoods that make up this district. Historic centres have been found to be the most suitable places for studying the theory and practice of urban processes in the twenty-first century. This is borne out here by studies of gentrification in Barcelona. The Barcelona Model, so widely admired and internationally acclaimed in the 1990s, is the source of multiple re-­ evaluations in the first decade of the new century. And probably most of these reappraisals focused on one neighbourhood: Poblenou and its urban renewal policies. As many as 14 studies use Poblenou in their critical assessments of gentrification in Barcelona. Based on the interest shown by social scientists, the Eixample, with the sole exception of a study of Sant Antoni, and the city’s peripheral districts have not experienced significant processes of gentrification (Fig. 13.1).

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Fig. 13.1  Territories of study in publications examining gentrification in Barcelona by typology and neighbourhood. (Source: Study authors)

13.4  Ciutat Vella. Social Change and Property Revalorization In the collective imaginary, Barcelona is seen as an emblem of success, of a city that has managed to lead a process of urban change and which enjoys a position of advantage both nationally and internationally. The building of this image has been helped by evaluations of the processes underpinning its transformation,

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characterised by active policies of urban renewal and regeneration and its projection as a global city in the tourism sector. However, when the city’s socio-urban changes are put to scrutiny, a series of internal contradictions are detected that have to be taken into consideration in studies of the city and, in particular, of districts such as Ciutat Vella. This district is made up of four historic neighbourhoods – Barri Gòtic, Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera, el Raval and Barceloneta – and it constitutes the heart of the city, corresponding to the area contained between the walls of the ancient city of Barcelona. Its neighbourhoods have been subjected to intense process of change over the last few decades. In fact, if we travel back in time to the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, the conditions of the district were typically described as atrocious. This sector of the city was characterised by badly rundown housing, and found itself in a state of dereliction and disrepair, and in demographic freefall, both because of the ageing of its residents and because of the exodus of its other inhabitants, a flight that was not offset by the arrival of new neighbours. This situation of general degradation was accompanied by a notable economic and social downswing, which led to the progressive stigmatization suffered by some of its neighbourhoods. In response to the situation, plans were launched by the public administration in the hope of breathing new life into the neighbourhoods and, in the case of Ciutat Vella, two PERIs (Planes Especiales de Reforma Interior or Special Plans for Internal Reform) were passed by the City Hall in the mid-1980s, aimed at carrying out what was known as “urban surgery”: one for el Raval (with the Rambla del Raval – a broad boulevard – as its emblematic figure) and a second for Santa Caterina (with the redevelopment of its market as the jewel in the crown). While these policies represented an initial impulse to change, their actual impact on processes of gentrification was quite limited. In fact, the first studies of el Raval and Santa Caterina conducted at the turn of the century suggest that gentrification at that time was in a stage that is best described as incipient. The next step of significance was the implementation of policies under the new Neighbourhood Law in 2004, at the instigation of the left-wing tripartite in the regional government, the Generalitat (Llei 2/2004). Between 2004 and 2010, in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, a total 36 neighbourhood plans were adopted, a third of which were implemented in the municipality of Barcelona. The district of Ciutat Vella concentrated much of the attention, with initiatives being taken in three of its neighbourhoods: Santa Caterina i Sant Pere, Barceloneta and el Raval Sud. However, subsequent evaluations of the outcomes achieved in this district were not excessively satisfactory and significant deficits were detected in relation to the targets set by the plans according to the Actualización de los indicadores de la Ley de Barrios de 2011 (Update on the indicators of the Neighbourhood Law 2011). Finally, following the economic crisis, public policy initiatives were resumed in 2016 with a new Neighbourhood Plan, led in this case by the Barcelona City Hall. This time 16 neighbourhoods were earmarked for action, two of which are in the Ciutat Vella district: el Raval Sud and el Gòtic Sud. As can be seen, political initiatives and action plans have been constantly present in one of the most internally segregated districts of the city. But these initiatives

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have not been the most decisive force in play, given that the contribution made by tourism has been far from negligible in the transformations – uneven, it should be noted, in spatial terms, but significant nonetheless – that have come to characterise the Ciutat Vella over the last two decades. Different indicators identify the district as being the one facing the highest rates of overtourism in Barcelona. According to AirDNA data, Ciutat Vella has 4385 holiday homes (Airbnb, HomeAway, etc.), that is, a density of 10.03 holiday homes per hectare compared to 1.84 for Barcelona as a whole. The 2018 municipal census of tourist accommodation reported that there are 27,436 tourist beds in Ciutat Vella, of which 18,814 are provided by hotels. However, this process of touristification has not led to its gentrification or elitization: first, the district has the second lowest average annual income in the municipality, both per household (28,384 euros) and per person (12,832 euros); second, the district’s resident foreigners are dominated by labour immigrants from the South, mainly Asia; and, third, the growing supply of holiday homes has not affected the number of residential rental homes, which has grown during the housing bubble and the crisis, in parallel with the boom in tourist accommodation. The increase in supply has, however, been accompanied by a hike in prices, possibly because of the constant increase in demand and the pressure exerted by the rental holiday property (Table 13.2). In what follows, we study the sequence taken by these processes by undertaking an analysis of the social changes (measured by indicators of income and foreign population), and changes in the property market (based on supply and house prices) at the neighbourhood scale.

Table 13.2  AirBnB accommodation listed in Ciutat Vella, 2019

Indicator Population 2019 Accommodation offer AirBnB – A Entire home, Apprt – B Entire home, Apprt./ accommodation AirBnB (%) % Accommodation AirBnB/total AirBnB BCN Entire home, Apprt./ total BCN (%) Accommodation AirBnb/1000 inhabitants

el Raval 48,297 1498

el Barri Gòtic 19,180 1184

la Barceloneta 15,173 393

Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera 23,170 1030

Ciutat Vella 105,820 4105

Barcelona 1,650,358 18,302

592 39.52

511 43.16

242 61.58

538 52.23

1863 45.38

8912 48.69

8.18

6.47

2.15

5.63

22.43

100

6.64

5.73

2.72

6.04

20.90

100

31.02

61.73

25.90

44.45

38.79

11.09

Source: Based on data from the AirBnB Inside (noviembre, 2019) and Ajuntament de Barcelona: Estadística Municipal

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13.4.1  Social Changes in Ciutat Vella As highlighted above, Ciutat Vella is the district with the highest rate of overtourism in the city and is one of the most exposed to the processes of gentrification; yet, it has a disposable household income (DHI) below that of the municipal average. At the neighbourhood level, the last decade has been marked by an overall upward trend in DHI, above all in the main tourist neighbourhood of the Barri Gòtic, which is the only one to exceed the city average. Two of the key factors accounting for this apparent contradiction are the notable weight of the working-class population in Barceloneta and the high numbers of foreign labour immigrants in el Raval. These two factors explain what a slow improvement in income levels in these two neighbourhoods is only (Fig. 13.2). Overall, Ciutat Vella presents a positive demographic trend between 2001 and 2019, growing by more than 20,000 inhabitants over these two decades. This growth was particularly high between 2001 and 2007, being coupled with the arrival of foreign immigration that contributed to changing the face of the city. The economic recession marked a new period of demographic decline, but since 2015, the positive dynamic was restored and the previous upward trend has been consolidated (Table 13.3). An analysis of foreign population data indicates the importance of immigrant influxes: Barri Gòtic and el Raval presenting the highest proportions of foreign-­ born residents in Barcelona: 62.0 and 60.26%, respectively. At a somewhat lower level we find Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera (45%) and Barceloneta (39.06%) (Tables 13.4 and 13.5).

Fig. 13.2  Distribution of household income in the neighbourhoods of Ciutat Vella, 2000–2017. Barcelona DHI index = 100. (Source: Based on data from the Departament d, 2Estadística del Ajuntament de Barcelona)

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Table 13.3  Demographic evolution by neighbourhood, Ciutat Vella 2001–2019 Population growth 2001–2019 Year el el Barri la Raval Gòtic Barceloneta 2001 36,282 15,199 14,252 2007 46,595 27,946 15,921 2010 48,767 18,720 16,261 2015 47,617 15,269 15,036 2019 48,297 19,180 15,173 Annual rate of growth 2001–2019 (%) Period el el Barri la Raval Gòtic Barceloneta 4.26 10.68 1.86 2001– 2007 2007– 1.53 −12.50 0.71 2010 −0.48 −3.99 −1.55 2010– 2015 2015– 0.36 5.87 0.23 2019

Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera 19,444 22,572 23,101 22,305 23,170

Ciutat Vella 85,177 113,034 106,849 100,227 105,820

Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ciutat Ribera Vella 2.52 4.83 0.78

−1.86

−0.70

−1.27

0.96

1.37

Source: Based on data from the Ajuntament de Barcelona: Padrón de Habitantes. Estadística Municipal Table 13.4  Evolution of the proportion of foreign-born residents by neighbourhood (2001–2019) Neighbourhood el Raval el Barri Gòtic la Barceloneta Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera

2001 28.71 28.59 12.46 21.04

2007 49.94 60.99 28.97 37.63

2010 54.16 47.83 33.52 41.95

2015 56.78 48.58 36.75 45.96

2019 60.26 62.00 44.89 51.78

Source: Based on data from the Ajuntament de Barcelona: Padrón de Habitantes. Estadística Municipal

The demographic evolution of the main nationalities underscores the growth of the foreign-born population, which increased in all neighbourhoods between 2001 and 2019, but it also points to some changes that are indicative of differential gentrification. In 2001, the main nationalities present in the neighbourhoods of Ciutat Vella were people from Morocco and various Latin American countries (Ecuador, Colombia and the Dominican Republic). The proportion of Asian immigrants is only predominant in el Raval (from the Philippines) and of secondary importance in Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera. Thus, what we observe is predominantly labour migration, primarily from the South. As of 2010, there was a two-way development in immigration: on the one hand, other Asian groups, especially Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, began to acquire importance, while on the other, certain European nationalities emerged among the largest groups (Italians are ranked first in three of Ciutat Vella’s four neighbourhoods,

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Table 13.5  Demographic evolution of the main nationalities by neighbourhood (2001–2019) 2001 el Raval

Barri Gòtic

la Barceloneta

Nationality n° Philippines 1913 Morocco 1236 Ecuador 927 Dominican R. 386 Colombia 333 2010 el Raval

Nationality Morocco Ecuador Colombia Argentina Philippines

n° 378 378 224 208 168

Nationality Morocco Ecuador Colombia Bolivia Dominican R.

Barri Gòtic

la Barceloneta

Nationality Pakistan Philippines Bangladesh Morocco Italy 2019 el Raval

n° 5036 4261 4085 1842 1270

Nationality n° Italy 1007 Pakistan 1003 France 554 Morocco 406 Bolivia 328

Nationality Italy Morocco Pakistan France Germany

Barri Gòtic

la Barceloneta

Nationality Pakistan Philippines Bangladesh Italy Morocco

n° 4360 4021 3050 1974 1389

Nationality n° Pakistan 1549 Italy 1265 Bangladesh 812 France 656 India 538

Nationality Italy Pakistan Morocco France UK

n° 245 156 126 72 67

S. Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera Nationality n° Morocco 769 Dominican R. 437 Ecuador 219 Philippines 179 Italy 154

n° 662 499 396 273 195

S. Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera Nationality n° Italy 1045 Morocco 778 France 685 United Kingdom 433 Pakistan 411

n° 1146 418 354 323 221

S. Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera Nationality n° Italy 1721 France 838 Morocco 764 United Kingdom 588 Germany 420

Source: Based on data from the Ajuntament de Barcelona: Padrón de Habitantes. Estadística Municipal

while the French gained in importance). Figures for 2019 ratify these trends so that the strong Asian presence has been upheld along with a growing representation from Europe. Thus, the data serve to confirm the hypothesis of segregation and the coexistence of gentrified areas with others that are more vulnerable and rundown. Pakistan and Italy are two of the most frequently represented nationalities, the Italian being the only one to have grown between 2010 and 2019 in el Raval. It is also worth noting the changes that have taken place in the neighbourhoods of Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera, on the one hand, and Barceloneta, on the other. In both cases there has been a certain fall-off in the number of those nationalities associated with labour immigration (less weight attached to Moroccans) and a greater relevance acquired by European immigration (Italians, French, British and even Germans). In the first of the neighbourhoods mentioned above, only the Moroccan community remains among the top-ranked non-European nationalities. Indeed, the most relevant processes of social change are occurring in these two

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neighbourhoods, which are precisely those that have generated most interest among scholars of gentrification. A further factor that ratifies the trends described is the proportion of people with higher education (university or advanced vocational training) in the Ciutat Vella neighbourhoods. These figures can be used as a further indicator of gentrification, since in 2001, all the neighbourhoods of Ciutat Vella presented a proportion of inhabitants with higher education well below the average for Barcelona, and in two of them – el Raval, but above all in Barceloneta – these percentages were decidedly lower. The changes detected in the district as a whole indicate a notable shift in this indicator, which since 2010 has exceeded the average for Barcelona in el Barri Gòtic and in Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera. The arrival of new inhabitants in the neighbourhoods has seen an increase in the qualifications of its inhabitants, which ratifies the idea identified above of gentrification processes occurring at different speeds in different parts of the district (Table 13.6).

13.4.2  Housing Revalorization in Ciutat Vella In an area of the city characterized by such a degree of overtourism and the significant presence of holiday rental properties, the residential rental market is, of necessity, dynamic. An increase in the number of rental contracts can be detected almost without interruption, even throughout the crisis and at the time of the bursting of the housing bubble. With the exception of a parenthesis between 2010 and 2015, rental prices evolved in correlation with the number of signed contracts, that is, the more contracts entered into, the higher the rental prices rose. Probably, this rise in demand, which since 2008 has had to compete with the new holiday rental platforms, has caused prices to increase. These trends coexist with another phenomenon that is common in most gentrification processes: evictions as an antecedent of social change. In 2017, Ciutat Vella was, together with Nou Barris, the district with the highest number of eviction orders in Barcelona. In that year 605 evictions were registered, that is, an increase Table 13.6  Evolution of the weight of the population with higher education by neighbourhood (2001–2019) Neighbourhood el Raval el Barri Gòtic la Barceloneta Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera Barcelona

2001 % 15.72 24.32 9.87 20.61

BCN = 100 57.95 89.64 36.39 75.98

27.13 100

2010 % 18.68 28.74 19.03 30.20

BCN = 100 78.06 120.08 79.51 126.22

23.93 100

2019 % 26.69 36.36 30.05 41.76

BCN = 100 81.33 110.80 91.56 127.25

32.82 100

Source: Based on data from the Ajuntament de Barcelona: Padrón de Habitantes. Estadística Municipal

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of 380.16% on 2015’s figure and representing the highest rate of growth in the city’s ten districts. Coinciding with the approval of the Plan Especial Urbanístico de Alojamiento Turístico or PEUAT (Special Urban Plan for Tourist Accommodation) in March 2017 by the left-wing government of Barcelona En Comú, the upward price trend was checked at the same time as the number of contracts signed presented a slight upturn. In addition to forcing owners to obtain a Tourist Licence, the PEUAT introduced a four-area zoning plan to regulate the operation of hotels and rental properties for tourist use (Fig. 13.3). Therefore, the pressures of gentrification in such diverse and, at times, socially segregated neighbourhoods are manifest most typically in the increase in housing prices. This increase not only encourages speculation, but it usually goes hand in hand with the expulsion of the longstanding residents or the more vulnerable, in many cases groups of foreign nationals, from the South who, as pointed out, have been displaced by Europeans from some of the neighbourhoods. The evolution in sale and rental prices at the neighbourhood level (Figs. 13.4 and 13.5) are two of the best indicators of this process. In this regard, it is significant, first, that the trend taken by housing sales prices was higher in three neighbourhoods of Ciutat Vella (the exception being el Raval) than in Barcelona as a whole, between 2013 and 2019. Second, throughout the period analysed, Barcelona records lower rental prices than the four neighbourhoods of Ciutat Vella. Third, note the general upward trend in sales prices, with a fall in average prices in the last quarter, with the exception of

Fig. 13.3  Residential rental property market in Ciutat Vella: number of contracts signed and rental rates, 2000–2019. (Source: Based on data from the Ajuntament de Barcelona: Departament d, 2Estadística)

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Fig. 13.4  Evolution in housing sales prices (euros/m2) in the neighbourhoods of Ciutat Vella (2013  – second quarter of 2019). (Source: Based on data from the Ajuntament de Barcelona: Departament d, 2Estadística)

Barri Gòtic. Thus, the neighbourhoods with the highest rates of overtourism and most exposed to gentrification present the highest housing prices and the most regular evolution of these prices. Finally, note that residential rental prices also present an upward trend. However, coinciding with the approval of the PEUAT, this growth has slowed in all the neighbourhoods, and in some of them prices have even fallen. Today, there is a sense that price trends have stabilized somewhat. Barceloneta is, far and away, the neighbourhood with the highest rental prices, exceeding 20 euros/ m2 in the first quarter of 2017. In response to these trends, discontent has grown among the citizens. They consider tourism to be one of the main elements destabilising the property market and these sentiments have given rise to a current of tourism phobia (Fig. 13.6a, b). Here, we should stress that three of the neighbourhoods of Ciutat Vella – except for el Raval  – head municipal surveys on the perception of tourism, specifically those residents who wish that there were fewer tourists in their neighbourhood (more than 40% in Barri Gòtic, Barceloneta and Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera, compared to 16% in Barcelona as a whole).

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Fig. 13.5  Evolution in housing rental prices (euros/m2) in the neighbourhoods of Ciutat Vella (first quarter 2014 – second quarter 2019). (Source: Based on data from the Ajuntament de Barcelona: Departament d, 2Estadística)

13.5  Conclusions As a Mediterranean and tourist city, the gentrification processes in Barcelona provide novelties with respect to the most studied cases of Anglo-Saxon cities. From an exhaustive review of the scientific literature, we have identified specific stages of gentrification defined by typologies and territories (neighborhoods). In the course of this chapter, we have reviewed much of the research examining the processes of gentrification in the city of Barcelona. The distinct stages we have identified in this literature reveal a correlation between the dynamics of these trends and significant increases in the number of studies and the diversification in the subjects they address. From the moment these studies first turned their attention to the link between public policies and gentrification, the focus was broadened to consider different modes of gentrification (e.g. commercial, cultural and tourism) and the social dimension of these analyses acquired greater importance (e.g. resistance to change). However, the expansion of this field of research is evident not only in terms of the number of studies published and the themes addressed but also in its geography. Despite the fact that Ciutat Vella, both as a single unit and at its neighbourhood level, has become the chosen ‘urban laboratory’ for the analysis of gentrification in Barcelona, as scholars have published their findings, new areas of interest have emerged, ranging from Poblenou – another exceptional space given the number of innovative public policies implemented there – to neighbourhoods such as Vallcarca,

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Fig. 13.6 (a and b) Reactions to tourism in Barcelona. (Notes: a – Tourism kills neighbourhoods. b – We’ve shut down more than 2000 illegal tourist beds. But there are still many left on the internet. Source: Study authors).

Gràcia and parts of the Eixample such as Sant Antoni. The construction of the discourse on gentrification has become increasingly plural in number, themes, territories and voices, with contributions coming from such disciplines as geography, sociology, anthropology and economics, which collaborate and complement each other in their interpretations of a common problem.

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The case study reported here – in which we have focused our attention on the district in which these socio-urban changes have been most prominent – allows us to corroborate that the neighbourhoods of the historic city centre are subject to major pressures of tourism and gentrification, while they have maintained their notable social diversity, as exemplified by the growing presence of their foreign population, albeit from two quite distinct points of origin. Despite presenting clear indications of gentrification, the neighbourhoods of Ciutat Vella maintain their diversity (or internal segregation), which is critical in defining a dynamic residential property market, although there are evident signs that point to increasing elitization. The public policies implemented by the Barcelona City Hall and the Generalitat served to lay some of the foundations for change, but structural elements already present in this district, including the massive and almost ubiquitous presence  – given the lack of seasonality – of flows of tourists into these neighbourhoods has been crucial in instigating the changes detected in Ciutat Vella. The property revalorization and the upward social mobility of its residents are present in all four neighbourhoods, albeit with varying degrees of intensity. Given its social make-up, the old rundown neighbourhood of el Raval may well be the most vulnerable to rising prices and the displacement of its residents. But it is Barceloneta, with its numerous foreign nationals, led by the Italians and the French, where the increase in house prices presents greatest risks. Any overall view of Ciutat Vella as a single unit fails to hide the internal differences that have come to characterize the district. As Ter-Minassian (2014) pointed out, the diversity of processes and of the paths taken by its four neighbourhoods is one of the most outstanding features of socio-urban change in this area. Moreover, the passage of time and the ravages of the long period of economic crisis that the city has suffered have maintained two distinct spatial patterns: with marginalized sectors, like the southern end of el Raval, standing in stark contrast to the up and coming, gentrified areas of el Born and el Gòtic. All in all, the effects of the economic recovery and the influence of tourism are slowly seeping into the more disadvantaged areas, so that the general advances made by gentrification cannot be ignored. Reactions to the most negative effects of these processes have been concentrated in anti-gentrification policies, led by the left-wing municipal government, and centred above all on the proposals and actions of PEUAT. While it is still early days, initial results give cause for optimism. However, it is hard to escape the feeling that a sectoral policy, a priori, will not be enough on its own to stop successive waves of gentrification. Acknowledgments  This study has been funded by the following research projects: “Tourism and the city: analysis and evaluation of the synergies, conflicts and challenges generated by the growth of tourism in Spanish cities” (PGC2018-097707-B-I00) and “Housing and international mobility in the cities of the Balearic Islands. The emergence of new forms of urban inequality” (RTI2018-093296-B-C22), State Research Agency, Ministry of Science, Research and Universities, and FEDER.

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Chapter 14

Tourism Development and Housing After Iceland’s 2008 Crash Már Wolfgang Mixa and Kristín Loftsdóttir

14.1  Introduction Iceland’s 2008 economic collapse was abrupt and dramatic and included the bankruptcy of three of its largest banks along with considerable related economic disasters. The consequence was a state of shock suffered by the population as a whole, accompanied by hefty personal financial losses and pervasive uncertainty about the small nation’s economic future and solvency (Pfanner, 2008). This chapter focuses on changes in the housing market in Iceland’s post-crash environment and how it intersected with the tourism boom. Our discussion shows that these events led to significant changes in the Icelandic housing market, similar to developments elsewhere globally. Central Reykjavík was transformed from a residential area into a concentrated tourism-focused space, in addition to a dramatic contraction of homeownership. This development led to added demand for real estate, making it harder for people to buy homes. Many of those who lost their homes during the crash could not buy another property due to high prices, thus remaining stuck in the rental market. Following a short theoretical summary, we discuss Iceland’s economic expansion from the mid-1990s until 2008 and its consequences and the aftermath of the crash. We then describe in more detail the housing bubble and its consequent decline. We show how tourism was an economic deliverance from 2010 onwards, both in terms of the local economy and as a way of enhancing the nation’s reputation. Then we will look more closely at the effects of these changes on housing M. W. Mixa (*) School of Business, Reykjavík University, Reykjavík, Iceland e-mail: [email protected] K. Loftsdóttir Department of Anthropology, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_14

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prices in Iceland. That discussion describes rising property costs and the impact on people’s ability to own their own home, which for many meant being in a “rental trap.” It also shows that, ironically, tourism’s positive effects have played a part in blocking people from buying a home, especially those in a precarious financial situation.

14.2  Theoretical Outlook Our analysis is inspired by critical social sciences scholarships, focusing on housing precarity on one hand and tourism mobilities on the other. Recent literature on housing stresses increased housing vulnerability in the Global North, with fast-growing rental and property prices (Anacker, 2019), leading to further precarity of already vulnerable populations, including increased risk of eviction or loss of home (Kennett et al., 2013). Gentrification has been a part of this process, including, for example, state emphasis on diminishing of social housing to make room for new developments (Wilde, 2017, 2020) while promoting the mobility of capital and increased consumption (Lees, 2018, p.4). While the correlation between gentrification and class and racist inequalities has long been demonstrated (Goetz, 2011, p.1583), scholarly work has also turned to tourism-driven gentrification, often by focusing on gentrification in lower-income countries visited by higher-income tourists (Hayes & Zaban, 2020). Tourism-driven gentrification has gained increased salience as tourism has grown in places that were not planned (Cócola-Grant, 2018), as vividly reflected in the “Airbnb-ization” of city centers, often are supported by governmental initiatives (Montezuma & McGarrigle, 2019). Thus, tourism and gentrification become mutually reinforcing concepts, where the term vacation rental can be viewed as the “new gentrification battlefront” (Cócola-Grant, 2016, p.  112; see also Cócola-Grant, 2018). As this scholarship has importantly stressed, the divisions of residents, tourists, and locals can still be blurry and difficult to distinguish (Hayes & Zaban, 2020; O’Reilly, 2017). We are also inspired by studies addressing the 2008 economic crash’s various effects, including producing more precarious housing positions such as in southern Europe (Kennett et  al., 2013). In the context of Iceland, scholarly research has shown the economic crash as being transformative events, creating a rupture between past and future (see Loftsdóttir, 2019). Focus on gentrification and tourism mobilities on housing, as is seen in this chapter, can be seen as constituting an essential contribution to this literature.

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14.3  A Bankrupt Nation The Icelandic economic crash followed a decade of prosperity in the new millennium  – or the “Manic Millennium” (Mixa, 2009)  – which followed a neo-­ liberalization process that started during the 1990’s (Vaiman et al., 2011). Significant institutional changes took place in Iceland, including added integration into the international community by joining the European Economic Area (EEA) in 1994 (Sigurjónsson & Mixa, 2011). Iceland also became part of the Schengen Area in 2001, which effectively ended internal border controls among 26 European states (Icelandic Government, n.d.). A crucial effect of joining the EEA was that in 1995 it forced Iceland to abolish capital controls, which had been in place since 1930, opening the door for international capital flows and subsequently the privatization of Iceland’s largest banks, which began in 1997 and completed in 2003 (ibid). In conjunction with other state expansionary projects, these developments resulted in massive economic growth that continued until the 2008 crash (Halldórsson & Zoega, 2010). From 2000, the growth of the Icelandic economy seemed limitless, with the Icelandic krona (ISK) continuously appreciating (excluding a downturn in 2001–2002), thus making foreign currency “cheap” for Icelanders (Matthíasson, 2008, p. 5). The loan-to-value (LTV) ratio (the amount lent compared to the value of the real estate bought) was raised during the “Manic Millennium” by most financial institutions (Elíasson & Pétursson, 2006, p. 10). With housing prices rising a great deal during the same period, many families took substantial loans with little equity. Individuals increasingly raised their level of personal indebtedness. Household debt rose from 178% of disposable income in 2000 to 221% in 2007 (Halldórsson & Zoega, 2010, p.  8). While the economic growth was driven mainly within the financial sector, which increased 12-fold between 2000 and 2007 (Halldórsson & Zoega, 2010, p. 21), few people realized the inherent risks for the national economy. Those risks became acutely apparent when banks and stock markets crashed during the fall of 2008, and global economies subsequently experienced what became known as the “Great Recession.” The Icelandic economy was particularly hard hit. The three Icelandic banks’ combined credit losses were the second greatest worldwide ever, with only the losses associated with the fall of Lehman Brothers being bigger (Moody’s Investors Service, 2009). Icelandic sovereign bonds, which had received the highest possible rating by Moody’s in March 2007, were rated BBB3 (nearly “junk-bond”) a mere 2 years later by the same institution (Central Bank of Iceland, n.d.). Unemployment, which was practically unknown in Iceland in prior decades, rose from 1.0% in early 2008 to 9.0% 2 years later (Vinnumálastofnun, n.d.). Most shares on the Icelandic stock exchange became worthless in early October 2008, and the Icelandic krona fell from about 90 against the Euro in early 2008 to 190 in November the same year (Wade, 2009).

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14.4  Housing Developments As elsewhere in the global North, housing prices rose swiftly in Iceland during the years leading to the 2008 crash. The housing-index in the capital area rose slightly more than 200% from 1999 until September 2007, the apex of housing prices (Registers Iceland, n.d.-a). Indeed, Iceland’s real estate bubble1 was among the most substantial in history, being ranked among the “big ten” financial “bubbles” in the classic work Manias, Panics, and Crashes (Aliber & Kindleberger, 2015, p. 18). One factor in the dramatic price rise was the type of loans in Iceland. Most of them are linked to the consumer price index (CPI). Such loans bear lower interest rates than nominal loans, which are most common worldwide, but the principal rises in tandem with inflation. During the same period, 1999–2007, the consumer price index (CPI) excluding housing, rose slightly over 50% (Statistics Iceland, n.d.-a). This much lower price rise of consumer goods than real estate prices was mainly due to imports becoming cheaper in tandem with the appreciating ISK. This divergence of price appreciation meant that the real value of homes, i.e., property value compared to the CPI of other goods, rose during this period by around 150%, as is shown in Fig. 14.1.2 This trend encouraged risky property investments. Many took on large loans to finance such purchases with easy access to money. There was a

Fig. 14.1  Housing index and CPI excluding housing in Iceland 1999-September 2007. (Source: Registers Iceland, n.d.-a; Statistics Iceland, n.d.-a)

 Other countries included in that category were the United States, Britain, Spain, and Ireland.  While the value of houses remained stable in the 1994–1999 period, the rise in their value was close to being in tandem with inflation during the same period (Registers Iceland, n.d.-a; Statistics Iceland, n.d.-b). 1 2

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feeling that people had to buy homes before prices rose even higher, which is a typical sign of a bubble. Also, due to the loans being index-linked to the CPI, which was rising much less, the “bet” to buy a property was handsomely rewarded since people saw the value of property rising much faster than the underlying loans used to finance such investments. While few people noticed it at the time, inflation began creeping up a year before the crash, with the increased flow of money in the economy starting to show up in consumer prices. Since the ISK depreciated dramatically during the Crash, with the cost of each US dollar doubling for each ISK compared to the currency exchange at the same time the year before, import prices skyrocketed, causing the CPI to rise a great deal. The housing index change was abrupt during the Crash period and its aftermath. The housing index fell about 15% from its high point during fall 2007 to its low around 3 years later. Figure 14.2 shows a comparison between the CPI developments and the housing index. While the crash was a shock in itself, the ISK’s depreciation immensely affected the CPI index-linked loans. Given that about 40% of the CPI consists of imports, the vast currency swing caused the price of imports to skyrocket and thus inflation to rise to 18% in 2008 (Statistics Iceland, n.d.-a). The principal of most people’s mortgage loans, being linked to the CPI, rose by a similar amount, plus interest, in a matter of months, or around 20%,3 while the market value of houses fell 15%. In other words, if a family owed 10.0 million ISK in a property with a 5% real interest

Fig. 14.2  Housing index and CPI in Iceland October 2000 – year end 2011, rebalanced initially at 100. (Source: Registers Iceland, n.d.-a; Statistics Iceland, n.d.-a)  The interest is also added to the principal, so the addition to the principal can vary a great deal between loans depending on the length to maturity of each loan. 3

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rate, and inflation went up 18% during 1 year, 12 months later, the principal amount had risen to approximately 11.8 million ISK in addition to interest rate costs. For many people, the factors described above were a near-fatal combination, especially for those that had bought houses close to the apex of the real estate bubble, with high LTV ratios, in some cases 90% of the market value.4 Additionally, during the boom years, the banks had encouraged people to take loans tied to foreign currencies, meaning that the principle of such loans doubled in a manner of months after the Crash. Thus, Iceland’s economic landscape was in tatters following the 2008 crash, with many families thrown out of their homes. Rising unemployment, a spike in inflation (raising the principal of mortgage loans), high LTV-ratios, and a falling real estate market meant that many families found themselves unable to pay back the principal or even interest payments. Many families could not sell their homes and move into smaller ones because their loan principal had risen to higher values than their homes’ value. While these loans were later deemed illegal by Iceland’s court system and the government provided some relief, around 9000 individuals were still forced to sell their homes during the subsequent years (Icelandic Parliament, 2017). This figure translates into approximately 3% of Iceland’s population; most were probably forced into the rental market. This was not the tradition in Iceland, which has typically stressed that people own their own property (Ministry of Social Affairs, 2004). This resulted in the percentage of people in rental homes increasing from 17% in 2007 to 27% in 2013, with the largest increase among people aged 25–34, low-­ income and single parents (Ministry of Social Affairs, 2015). While these loans were later deemed illegal by Iceland’s court system and the government provided additional relief, the economic situation forced around 9000 individuals to sell their homes during the subsequent 5 years (Icelandic Parliament, 2017). This figure translates into approximately 3% of Iceland’s population. Many people were forced into the rental market, which is not the tradition in Iceland, where people typically own their property (Ministry of Social Affairs, 2004). The percentage of people in rental homes increased from 17% in 2007 to 27% in 2013, with the largest increase among people aged 25–34, low-income and single parents (Ministry of Social Affairs, 2015).

14.5  Tourism to the Rescue The tourism industry became a central feature of Iceland’s economic recovery following the collapse (Benediktsson et al., 2011). Within a few years, Iceland converted from being a marginal tourism attraction into a near mass-market destination. The number of tourists in the country rose from just above 300,000 in 2000 to 2.3 million in 2018. (Icelandic Tourist Board, n.d.). Tourism has a relatively short

 There were instances where the ratio was 100%, but such cases were very rare.

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history in Iceland; the Icelandic government only started promoting it after 1980, and then only as a supplement to industries perceived as more critical, such as fishing and agriculture (Jóhannesson et al., 2010). Icelanders had made a few attempts to “nation brand” the country (Huijbens, 2011), but this came to a virtual halt with the 2008 crash. In 2010, policymakers and commercial parties joined forces in creating a coherent marketing strategy for Iceland (Loftsdóttir, 2015), with what can be referred to as an “umbrella” brand (Therkelsen & Halkier, 2004). This strategy followed an international trend, where various marketing organizations, often called Destination Marketing Organizations (DMO’s), have for several decades been influential in creating and manipulating perceptions seen as desirable regarding particular destinations (Stepchenkova & Mills, 2010). The umbrella organization was called Promote Iceland, which initiated a massive campaign entitled “Inspired by Iceland,” based on extensive collaboration between various tourist companies, the national government, and the City of Reykjavík (Pálsdóttir & Haraldsson, 2011, p. 4). Part of the reason for initiating the campaign was to revive the economy and increase foreign cash flow. It was also linked to the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption, which significantly disrupted flights to and from Europe for several weeks. There were thus related interlinked concerns regarding the future of Iceland’s economic prosperity and the negative perceived image people saw Iceland having in other countries. The campaign emphasized social media, alongside conventional advertising methods, and sponsoring international events in Iceland (Pálsdóttir & Haraldsson, 2011, p. 4). Much of the campaign emphasized Iceland as someplace different, a place of wild people and nature, closer than people might think and safe to visit (Loftsdóttir, 2019). Within debates on destination branding, there has been a debate regarding if marginal or destinations outside the global North should try to capitalize on exoticism and their presumed otherness or promote more realistic images (Stepchenkova & Mills, 2010). In Iceland’s case, the emphasis on different (even challenging) conditions and nature became essential in promoting the country as a tourist destination (Loftsdóttir, 2019). Part of the reason for Iceland’s popularity as a tourism destination seems to be the country’s branding as an Arctic destination, which has emphasized purity, virtue, and adventure (Bailes et al., 2014). A majority of tourists that visit Iceland do so because they see the country as a pristine wilderness; surveys have shown that 91% of tourists in 2018 responded that Iceland’s nature was one of the key reasons for their visit, and 71% saw it also as linked to their interest in the Arctic (Óladóttir, 2019). While some contend that the “Inspired by Iceland” campaign was a success, it also benefited greatly by increased media discussion of Iceland in general in the aftermath of the economic crash. Concerns with austerity and unequal wealth distribution characterized discussions in the global North; Iceland often depicted in that context positively, especially relating to democracy and women’s rights (Loftsdóttir, 2019). Following increased marketing and the subsequent popularity of Iceland as a tourism destination, new low-budget airlines added Iceland to their destinations list, offering low cost and frequent flights. One such airline, Iceland’s own Wow Air,

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transported (for a few months) more passengers than Icelandair, a far more established airline (Stefánsson, 2019, p.  195–196).5 Additionally, Icelandair offered a “stopover” promotional package, where travellers booking transatlantic flights could opt for an extended layover of up to seven nights without paying extra airfare. The travel industry heavily promoted this package during Iceland’s tourism boom (Lund et al., 2017).

14.5.1  Economic Consequences of Tourism This tourist boom’s consequences have been enormous, creating a business model where continuous growth became the norm. Tourism and industries related to it have become visible in every sector of the Icelandic society, both in terms of the multiplication of hotels and rental facilities, added employees, and increased English use. This economic transformation has, in turn, sparked intensive discussions on what these changes mean for Icelandic society (Skaptadóttir & Loftsdóttir, 2016). The number of tourists coming to Iceland hovered around half a million during the 2007–2011 period (Icelandic Tourist Board, n.d.). As Fig. 14.3 shows, the number of tourists coming to Iceland exploded in the subsequent years. A significant increase in the number of tourists occurred in 2011 and 2012. In 2013, it was 20%. From 2014–2018, the annual growth was well over 20%, result-

Fig. 14.3  Number of tourists in Iceland. (Source: Icelandic Tourist Board, n.d.)

ing in the number of tourists visiting Iceland more than doubling from 2013 to 2016.

 Wow became bankrupt in March 2019.

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The total in 2018 was almost five-fold compared to 2010. The share of tourism as a part of Iceland’s GDP in 2009–20176 went from 3.5% up to 8.6% (Statistics Iceland, n.d.-c). The average in ESB countries is 3.9% (ibid.), meaning that tourism in Iceland affects its GDP more than twice the ESB average. One can attribute this increase in tourism as a key factor in reviving the Icelandic economy (Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism, 2018, p.  1). The inflow of foreign currency related to tourism has, for example, been instrumental in allowing the Central Bank of Iceland to build up a sizable amount of foreign currency reserves. However, since the 2008 crisis, the ISK has appreciated against most other currencies, making imports for Icelanders again cheaper when measured in ISK.7 Despite foreign investors picking up a great deal of costs incurred by the Icelandic state associated with the crash, tourism was still a critical factor in preventing the country from suffering from a more profound and prolonged economic crisis; it even created significant economic growth.

14.6  Housing & the Economy The positive effects of the economic revival markedly affected property prices. Just as the financial crisis was in a sense a twin crisis, meaning that it involved both banking and currency, the opposite could be said about the recovery in 2011 and onwards when annual economic growth was considerable, and the currency consequently appreciated. The increase in tourism has had an essential effect on property prices due to the rise in demand. Once tourism became a significant and permanent feature of the Icelandic economy, property prices in Iceland have (since 2015) risen the most in OECD countries (OECD database, n.d.-a). Figure 14.4 shows the (soaring) nominal price index of various housing forms in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, 2011–2019. By basing initial prices at 100, one can see that Reykjavik’s housing index doubled in just 9 years. The most significant rise in prices in the first years during the period shown in Fig. 14.5 is, not surprisingly, associated with the rental index, initially compiled in 2011. The index shows that rental prices rose slightly more than housing prices during the first few years following the 2008 crash. Given the situation in 2009 and 2010, one could infer the same process also happening during those years. People lost their homes and were forced into the rental market, thus increasing that demand. Using the same data but concentrating on the period after the number of tourists begins growing in earnest in 2014 shows a slightly different development, as is seen in Fig. 14.5.

 The latest figures available at the time of writing were from 2017.  Interest rates in Iceland have been consistently higher than the rates in other countries. According to elementary cross-currency theories, the Icelandic currency should have been depreciating during the post-crash period, but the booming economy has caused it to appreciate. 6 7

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Fig. 14.4  Housing costs development in Reykjavik 2011–2019, 100 is the base in 2011. (Source: Registers Iceland, n.d.-a)

Fig. 14.5  Housing costs development in Reykjavik 2011–2014, 100 is the base in 2014. (Source: Registers Iceland, n.d.-a)

The rental index rose the least from 2014 until 2019, compared to the three other measures of housing indices. One can assume that some people could again enter the housing market due to better economic conditions. As with the 2011–2019 period, the price increase of single homes is lower, reflecting that the demand for smaller units was increasing faster. One explanation is that Icelanders were less inclined to carry debt, a typical historical pattern

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following a financial crisis. Also, concerning the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, financial institutions were more careful in lending, for example lowering the LTV ratios, forcing people to seek smaller homes, or, in some cases, not being able to save enough money for the down-payment. Another explanation is the effect of increased tourism, which we discuss further later in this chapter. After the 2008 crash, the Icelandic population fell in 2009 and 2010, with many citizens going to Norway or elsewhere in search of jobs and “a new life” and some migrants moving back to their origin country, more than offsetting the natural growth rate (Garðarsdóttir & Bjarnason, 2010). During the next few years, the Icelandic population did not appreciably change, contributing to lower demand for houses. When the tourist boom began, population growth returned, with many Icelanders returning and migration increasing significantly. From the beginning of 2012 to 2018, Iceland’s population increased by about 29,000. The increase of migrants – often by lower-income countries – during the same period was 20,000, or just over 2/3 of the population increase. The percentage of migrants increased from 9% to 14% (Statistics Iceland, n.d.-d). The increase among citizens was not much lower, as shown in Fig. 14.6 below, with Iceland’s population increasing 9.4% in 2011–2018, compared to a 4.2% increase in OECD countries during the same period (OECD database, n.d.-b). This population increase meant a considerable demand for housing. In early 2012, just over two thousand migrants worked in the tourist industry; that number had reached over nine thousand by mid-2019, indicating a net increase of seven thousand migrants working in the tourist industry during the 2012–2019 period (Statistics Iceland, n.d.-d). Around 35% of the increase of migrants during

Fig. 14.6  Population of Iceland and percentage of citizens and migrants. (Source: Statistics Iceland, n.d.-d, n.d.-e)

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this period can thus be attributed to the net increase of people working in tourism, with migrants constituting around 30% of the tourism workforce in mid-2019 (ibid.). New job opportunities largely due to increased tourism, was the main reason for migrants moving to Iceland. With tourism booming and other favorable economic conditions emerging, wages rose significantly, both in nominal terms and, more importantly, in real terms. This trend is vivid in Fig. 14.8 below, showing the wage-index in Iceland compared to the CPI and the CPI excluding housing costs. While wages rose a bit more than the two CPI indices in 2011–2013, the gap began to increase considerably in 2014 and continued to do so until 2018. The CPI index excluding housing costs barely moved from 2013 until the end of the period and decreased during the 2016–2018 period. Hence, the increase in CPI was mostly due to housing costs increasing, with the CPI index (including housing costs) rising 50% more than the index excluding housing costs. Figure  14.7 shows that the wage increases were around 80% in 2011–2019, while the cost of living rose only approximately 30% (Statistics Iceland, n.d.-a, n.d.-f). In other words, the general population’s economic welfare increased tremendously during the 2011–2019 period. This generally improved economic situation had, on average, still not boosted the chances of many to buy their own home. While the wage index has risen 7% annually during the 2011–2019 period (only first 6 months in 2019) in nominal terms and 5% in real terms, it has still lagged behind the rise of multiple house prices, which increased on an annual basis by about 9% nominally. The price increase was almost the same for both indices from the beginning of 2011 until 2014. After that,

Fig. 14.7  Wages and consumer price index in Iceland 2011–2019. (Source: Statistics Iceland, n.d.-a, n.d.-f)

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Fig. 14.8  Wages and consumer price index in Iceland 2014–2019. (Source: Statistics Iceland, n.d.-a, n.d.-f)

however, those measurements’ divergence began to emerge, as Fig.  14.8 shows, gaining major strength in 2016, when the increase in tourism became a reality. In other words, despite improved economic conditions and higher wages, it became more difficult for people in Iceland to buy new homes since property costs rose even more than the wage increases. Increased tourism caused improved economic conditions, but also added migrant workers to the population, creating growing demand for smaller homes in multiple units. An additional factor that began around 2013 but gained considerable steam in 2015 and 2016 is home rentals, mainly in relation to the web-oriented company Airbnb.

14.6.1  Airbnb and Downtown Reykjavík Reykjavík does not have a long history as a city. Only 6300 people lived there in 1901, and there were 126,000 in 2018. Increased tourism has transformed the city’s central area with visibly more street and pedestrian traffic, an explosion in specialty stores that target tourists, and international brand stores. The term “puffanization” (Icelandic: Lundavæðing) refers negatively to the increased number of stores that specialize in souvenirs aimed at tourists  – often produced in China (The name comes from a chain store that has a puffin as its logo) (see Loftdóttir, 2019). Tourists could already in 2015 expect when walking just over a kilometer in downtown Reykjavík to encounter 30 stores selling products directly aimed at tourists (Guðmundsson, 2015).

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As we noted earlier, the surge of tourists following the 2008 crash was initially not visible. However, some people did spot a trend in which demand for downtown Reykjavík apartments increased. The investment company GAMMA began buying properties for rental in downtown Reykjavík and other areas in the capital area as early as 2012 (Stundin, 2018). While this strategy proved successful, cries of protests forced its partner company to withdraw price hikes on rental rates in early 2019 (Viðskiptablaðið, 2019). Another recent critical transformation in Reykjavík is the number of hotels and other tourist accommodations. Airbnb has been one of the most influential and controversial of these, connects people renting their houses, or parts of them, to tourists on a short-term basis. It began operations in 2008, and listings started in Iceland in 2009. Although the number of listings during the first 2 years were few, they began increasing considerably in 2011 (Mermet, 2019a, p.  21) when the tourist boom began. The number of listings continued to grow even more in 2015 and 2016, in tandem with the increase of tourists coming to Iceland (ibid.). The research department of Landsbanki (Hagfræðideild Landsbankans, 2019) estimates that Airbnb did not play a significant role in tourist accommodation until 2015, with the number of listed occupied nights by tourists rising significantly in 2015 and 2016 and then reaching a plateau in 2018. Despite a rapid increase in the number of hotels in the capital area, Airbnb’s estimated market share was 38% of tourist occupancy in the Reykjavik area in 2018 (ibid.). The Icelandic Housing Fund (2019a) estimates that the percentage of long-time rental apartments in Iceland has decreased from 10.6% in 2015 to 7.5% in 2019 (p. 7), the most significant decrease having been in Reykjavik and Hafnarfjörður (p.8). Research elsewhere has shown that holiday rentals in urban areas affect the quality of life for those who seek to remain in areas with high tourist density (Cócola-Gant, 2016). A study conducted by Anne-Cécile Mermet is the most comprehensive research on Airbnb’s effect on the capital area. In this study, Mermet (2019b, p. 19) estimates the number of Airbnb listings in the Reykjavik capital area, which rose from 600 units in 2013 to slightly more than 4000 in 2018, with 60% of such occupancies concentrated in the city center. As the housing stock in 2018 is close to 88,000 in the area (Registers Iceland, n.d.-b), approximately 4.5% of all housing in the capital area was at least some part of the year occupied by Airbnb tourists. Some 20% of housing in Reykjavik’s city center were Airbnb listings, with more than 50% in some central districts (Mermet, 2019b, p. 76). It is challenging to determine with precision the percentage of people using Airbnb or similar housing in Reykjavík for various purposes since many are illegally listed. Mermet estimates that 58% of such listings were Airbnb occupancies (2019b, p. 35). About one-third of apartments in Marmet’s random sample had previously been long-term rentals, with another third of flats previously owned. This estimation suggests that nearly two-thirds of the listings have been removed from the housing stock (2019b, p. 59), further indicating that short-term rentals to tourists affect housing for the local population. Mermet (2019a) shows that many people have opted to rent to tourists instead of local people because owners earn much more by renting via Airbnb (ibid., p. 81–85). Indeed, the gap between renting to

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locals versus tourists was enormous: in 2016, the gap was around threefold the amount for studio and two-bedroom apartments, fourfold for three-bedroom apartments, and more than sixfold for four-bedroom apartments (ibid., p. 81). Mermet’s (2019b, p. 84) conclusion is that: …a significant part of the listings advertised in the platform used to be rented on the long-­ term rental market before the boom of tourism and the arrival of peer-to-peer platforms such as Airbnb. A significant proportion of landlords indeed turned their property into a tourism accommodation, due to the significant rent gap between these two markets, which has led to various forms of direct and indirect displacements.

The effects of this trend are more vividly shown in Fig. 14.9, which shows the relative price rise of multiple homes in 2011–2017,8 including the difference in prices in different neighbourhoods in Reykjavik, in the areas surrounding Reykjavik and in a suburban neighbourhood in Akureyri, Iceland’s second largest city.9 The initial swiftest price increase was initially in downtown Reykjavik, reflecting the sense among some investors that the tourist boom was coming. Prices rose there more than in other areas in the capital. However, a ripple effect began soon taking place in different neighborhoods, with one of the suburban districts in

Fig. 14.9  Price index of various locations in Iceland 2011–2017. (Source: Registers Iceland, n.d.-c)

 Newer data is not available at the time of writing.  The neighborhoods surveyed are (a) Innan Hringbrautar og Snorrabrautar, Reykjavík, (b) Melar og Hagar, Reykjavík, (c) Sel, Reykjavík, (d) Kórar, Hvörf, Þing, Kópavogur, (e) Álfaskeið, Hafnarfjörður, (f) Oddeyri, Akureyri. 8 9

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Reykjavik “catching up” with the price increase in downtown Reykjavik in 2017 and other areas in the vicinity seeing increased real estate prices increases in 2015–2017. However, a suburb in Akureyri (located in Iceland’s Northern part) we also studied lags price increase-wise, but prices there nevertheless swiftly rose in 2015–2017, as tourism gained steam throughout Iceland. This trend fits well with the assumption, which can be inferred with the use of various data and media accounts, that the tourist boom has had a major impact on real estate values. Prices rose initially most in the main tourist areas, e.g., downtown Reykjavik, and while the prices in the overall capital area were rising during the same period, they initially rose much less. As the ripple effect began, with most people no longer be able to afford to buy homes in the downtown area, demand increased in nearby neighbourhoods. This happened in tandem with minimal construction of new houses taking place, with Iceland still being in a state of shock following the 2008 crash. The supply could not handle the increased demand of people that under normal circumstances would have moved to the downtown area but with the swift price increases there opting to move to suburban areas. Additionally, while Hafnarfjörður is further away from Reykjavik than Kópavogur, the price increase has been similar to the price increase in the area close to downtown Reykjavik, especially in 2014–2017. The difference is that the suburban areas of Reykjavík and Kópavogur witnessed real estate price increases sooner. Still, once the ripple effects of the tourist boom began taking hold in the downtown area of Hafnarfjörður, property prices there began to rise, with very many Airbnb locations beginning within the area in 2014 and onwards.10 Hence, while the ripple effect trend in Hafnarfjörður did not follow the same trajectory as in Reykjavik, added tourism undoubtedly affected property prices in that town.11

14.6.2  The Rental Market The combination of many families forced into the rental market following the 2008 crash and the tourist boom’s effects on real estate prices has had dire consequences for many families, with many ending up being “trapped” in the rental market. Despite the general prosperity in Iceland, low unemployment, and strong economic growth in the last decade, the percentage of families renting instead of owning their homes – 27% in 2013 – remained the same in 2016, with 44% of that category in the

 The authors of this chapter live in downtown Hafnarfjörður and know first-hand that there are at least five Airbnb accommodations within a 50-meter radius of their house, most of which are not officially listed. 11  There are many variables in Hafnarfjörður that may explain the different trajectory. Many apartment buildings that were built just before the 2008 crash stood empty for a few years, probably causing a downward pressure on prices. Once those apartments had been filled, with little additional space available to build further apartments, the demand-supply relationship caused prices to rise. 10

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20% lowest income group and 26% in the second-lowest one, with half of the single parent population renting their homes (Statistics Iceland, 2018). A study conducted by The Icelandic Housing Fund and Zenter Research (2019b) shows that only 3% of people in the rental market consider themselves likely to buy a property within the next 6 months (p. 6). This percentage is the lowest one since such surveys began in 2017 and is far lower than the rate of people still living with their parents, 13% (p. 7). The difference is also substantial between people living in rural areas versus the capital area, with 66% of people in the capital area residing in their own home compared to 77% outside of the capital area (p. 8). This difference indicates that people in a precarious financial situation are less likely to afford a home in the capital area. This trend cannot be attributed to renters now preferring to rent instead of owning. A survey done by the Icelandic Housing Fund (2015) concluded that 10% of renters preferred not owning their home, a decrease from 19% 10 years before. The same survey concluded that only 26% of respondents thought it was easy to find housing, dropping from 66% in 2003, with 2/3 expecting to be forced to find another location within 3 years. This trend has continued, judging from the results of a more recent survey done by the Icelandic Housing Fund and Zenter (2019c) that concluded that merely 51% of people in the rental market consider themselves safe with their housing, compared to 91% living in their property. Most of those surveyed thought their rental cost was too high (p. 8). Most people in the rental market do not prefer being in that precarious situation; 92% of those considered it not economical to rent, compared to 62% with the same view towards owning a house. Only 40% of renters said they could save money (p. 9).

14.7  Discussion and Conclusion Scholars have stressed displacement in terms of the economic crash of 2008. Displacement has also been emphasized in terms of recent scholarship of tourism-­ driven gentrification (Wachsmuth & Weisler, 2018). This chapter has shown both these factors working together toward increased vulnerability of renters in Iceland. The crash of 2008 resulted in various long-lasting changes, affecting social relations on multiple levels in Icelandic society. A significant number of people lost their homes and were thus forced into the rental market, which translates into considerable economic precarity. In the aftermath of the crisis, Iceland was strongly promoted as a trendy destination. That also affected housing prices. A significantly increased number of previously long-term rentals were being transferred into Airbnbs, giving higher returns to owners and investment companies buying apartments to rent them at high rates. Research elsewhere has shown that the “sharing economy” often becomes a part of capital accumulation by more affluent actors (Cócola-Gant, 2016). Reykjavík significantly transformed in the aftermath of the economic crash, which rhymes with Cócola-Gant’s (2018) view of tourism as a “gentrification battlefront” that can be

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seen as applying to these transformations. Most recently, the oldest part of the downtown area was, for example, vastly transformed to make space for generic brand names (such as a store carrying Hugo Boss merchandise and an H&M store). Our discussion has also shown that increased demand for property was enhanced by the increased number of migrants to the country, drawn by higher wages and job opportunities. These migrants are often in vulnerable positions and become renters alongside the other part of the precarious population in Iceland, reflecting the fluid boundaries between different categories of people (i.e., residents, tourists, migrants) that scholars have elsewhere (Montezuma & McGarrigle, 2019). There are strong indications of the economic precarity many migrants in Iceland face (see, for example, Loftsdóttir & Skaptadóttir, 2019) relating to the housing and tourism-driven gentrification, which need to be analyzed further. Another important avenue for continued research on renting in Iceland and tourism is to look more closely at higher income lifestyles migrants in Iceland, in line with research that has been conducted in Southern Europe (see Introduction to this book). Current developments in the same spot as the generic brand names – again in the city’s historical heart– aim at luxury apartments at prices never seen before in Iceland (Pálsson, 2020). This new housing development becomes particularly interesting when linked to a campaign in 2020, in the context of Covid-19, by the Icelandic government, which aims to appeal to more affluent Europeans (i.e., non-­ EEA nationals) to work remotely while living in Iceland, via facilitation of long-­ term visas (Government of Iceland, 2020). Over the past two decades, tourism has generated significantly more revenue nationally, gaining increased salience in Iceland’s GDP.  However, with property prices rising above wages, many of those forced into the rental market still have little chance to buy their own home. This situation does not only apply to downtown Reykjavik since there were also “ripple” effects in other municipalities, where prices also rose, albeit more gradually. As several scholars have stressed, it is necessary to focus on how the combination of recent tourism gentrification and short-time rentals create and reproduce inequalities and precarious populations (Hayes & Zaban, 2020; Waschsmuth & Weisler, 2018).

References Aliber, R. Z., & Kindleberger, C. P. (2015). Manias, panics, and crashes: A history of financial crises (7th ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. Anacker, K. B. (2019). Introduction: Housing affordability and affordable housing. International Journal of Housing Policy, 19(1), 1–16. Bailes, A., Cela, M., Kjartansdóttir, K., & Schram, K. (2014). Iceland: Small but central. In A. Sprúds & T. Rostoks (Eds.), Perceptions and strategies of Arcticness in Sub-Arctic Europe (pp. 75–99). Latvian Institute of International Affairs. Benediktsson, K., Lund, K. A., & Huijbens, E. (2011). Inspired by eruptions? Eyjafjallajökull and Icelandic tourism. Mobilities, 6(1), 77–84.

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Central Bank of Iceland. (n.d.). The Republic of Iceland’s sovereign credit rating. Retrieved from https://www.cb.is/about-­the-­bank/government-­debt-­management/ the-­republic-­of-­icelands-­sovereign-­credit-­rating/ Cócola-Gant, A. (2016). Holiday rentals: The new gentrification battlefront. Sociological Research Online, 21(3), 10. https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.4071 Cócola-Gant, A. (2018). Tourism gentrification. In L.  Lees & M.  Phillips (Eds.), Handbook of gentrification studies (pp. 281–293). Edward Elgar Publishing. Elíasson, L., & Pétursson, Þ. G. (2006). The Residential Housing Market in Iceland: Analysing the effects of the recent mortgage market restructuring (Central Bank of Iceland working papers no. 29). Retrieved from http://www.sedlabanki.is/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=3630 Garðarsdóttir, Ó., & Bjarnason, Þ. (2010). Áhrif efnahagsþrenginga á fólksflutninga til og frá landinu. In G. Þ. Jóhannesson & H. Björnsdóttir (Eds.), Þjóðarspegillinn. Félagsvísindastofnun Háskóla Íslands. https://skemman.is/bitstream/1946/6774/3/205-­215__löfGar_arsdóttir__oroddurBjarna_FELMAN.pdf Government of Iceland. (2020). Icelandic measures for remote workers put in place. October 27, 2020, Ministry of Industries and Innovation, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs. https://www.government.is/news/ article/2020/10/27/-­Foreign-­experts-­can-­work-­remotely-­in-­Iceland/ Guðmundsson, B. Þ. (2015). Ferðamannabúð á 43 metra fresti. ruv.is. Retrieved from www.ruv.is/ frett/ferdamannabud-­a-­43-­metra-­fresti. Hagfræðideild Landsbankans. (2019). Samdráttur hjá Airbnb á höfuðborgarsvæðinu en enn sókn á landsbyggðinni. Ferðaþjónusturáðstefna Landsbankans, 2019. https:// umraedan.landsbankinn.is/umraedan/samfelagid/ferdathjonusta-­2 019/greiningar/ samdrattur-­hja-­airbnb-­a-­hofudborgarsvaedinu-­en-­enn-­sokn-­a-­landsbyggdinni/ Halldórsson, Ó. G., & Zoega, G. (2010). Iceland’s financial crisis in an international perspective. Institute of Economic Studies, W10(02), 1–51. http://hhi.hi.is/sites/hhi.hi.is/files/W-­series/2010/WP1002.pdf Hayes, M., & Zaban, H. (2020). Transnational gentrification: The crossroads of transnational mobility and urban research. Urban Studies, 57(15), 3009–3024. Huijbens, E. H. (2011). Nation branding: A critical evaluation. Assessing the image of buildings of Iceland. In S. R. Ísleifsson with the collaboration of Daniel Chartier (Ed.), Iceland and images of the North (Droit au Pôle). Presses de l’Université du Québec/Reykjavíkur Akademían. Icelandic Housing Fund. (2015). Staða á leigumarkaði. Retrieved from https://www.ils.is/library/ Frettir/Una_kynning_stofnframl%C3%B6g.pdf Icelandic Housing Fund. (2019a). Mánaðarskýrsla. Retrieved from https://www.ils.is/library/4-­ Hagdeild-­skrar/Manadarskyrsla_%C3%A1g%C3%BAst_2019.pdf Icelandic Housing Fund. (2019b). Mánaðarskýrsla. Retrieved from https://www.ils.is/library/4-­ Hagdeild-­skrar/Manadarskyrsla_sept_19_med_leidrettri_mynd_bls7.pdf. Icelandic Housing Fund. (2019c). Mánaðarskýrsla. Retrieved from https://www.ils.is/library/4-­ Hagdeild-­skrar/Manadarskyrsla_j%C3%BAl%C3%AD_19.pdf Icelandic Parliament. (2017). 148. löggjafarþing 2017–2018. Þingskjal 1370—233. mál. Svar dómsmálaráðherra við fyrirspurn frá Ólafi Ísleifssyni um nauðungarsölur og gjaldþrotaskipti. Retrieved from https://www.althingi.is/altext/148/s/1370.html Icelandic Tourist Board (Ferðamálastofa). (n.d.). Heildarfjöldi erlendra ferðamanna. See Excel Sheet by the link Heildarfjöldi erlendra ferðamanna með skipum og flugvélum 1949–2018. Retrieved from https://www.ferdamalastofa.is/is/tolur-­og-­utgafur/fjoldi-­ferdamanna/ heildarfjoldi-­erlendra-­ferdamanna Jóhannesson, G. Þ., Huijbens, E. H., & Sharpley, R. (2010). Tourism in times of crisis: Exploring the discourse of tourism development in Iceland. Current Issues in Tourism, 13(5), 419–434. Kennett, P., Forrest, P., & Marsh, A. (2013). The global economic crisis and the reshaping of housing opportunities, housing. Theory and Society, 30(1), 10–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/1403609 6.2012.683292

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Lees, L. (2018). Introduction: Towards a C21st global gentrification studies. In L.  Lees & M. Phillips (Eds.), Handbook of gentrification studies (pp. 1–10). Edward Elgar Publishing. Loftsdóttir, K. (2015). The exotic north: gender, nation branding and post-colonialism in Iceland. NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 23(4), 246–260. Loftsdóttir, K. (2019). Crisis and coloniality at Europe’s margins: Creating exotic Iceland. Routledge. Loftsdóttir, K., & Skaptadóttir, U.  D. (2019). Konur af erlendum uppruna: Hvar kreppir að? Háskóli Íslands, Félagsmálaráðuneytið. Lund, K. A., Loftsdóttir, K., & Leonard, M. (2017). More than a stopover: Analysing the postcolonial image of Iceland as a gateway destination. Tourist Studies, 17(2), 144–163. Matthiasson, T. (2008). Spinning out of control, Iceland in crisis. Nordic Journal of Political Economy, 34(3), 1–19. Mermet, A. C. (2019a). Airbnb and the Housing Market in Reykjavík [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from https://reykjavik.is/sites/default/files/ymis_skjol/skjol_frettir/airbnb_in_reykjavik3.pdf Mermet, A. C. (2019b). The ‘Airbnbfication’ of the Icelandic capital. Towards an assessment of the socio-spatial impacts of Airbnb in the Reykjavik capital area. Retrieved from https://www. ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/kannanir/skyrslur/airbnb-­heild2.pdf Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism. (2018). Skýrsla ferðamála-, iðnaðar-, og nýsköpunarráðherra um þolmörk ferðamennsku. Retrieved from https://www.ferdamalastofa. is/is/tolur-­o g-­u tgafur/utgefid-­e fni/umfang-­o g-­a hrif/skyrsla-­f erdamala-­i dnadar-­o g-­ nyskopunarradherra-­um-­tholmork-­ferdamennsku and https://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/ research/files/skyrsla-­radgerra-­um-­tolmork-­2018pdf Ministry of Social Affairs (Félagsmálaráðuneytið). (2004). Íslenskur húsaleigumarkaður – staða og horfur  – skýrsla um leigumarkað. Retrieved from https://www.stjornarradid.is/media/ velferdarraduneyti-­media/media/leigumarkadur/islenskur-­leigumarkadur.pdf Ministry of Social Affairs (Félagsmálaráðuneytið). (2015). Upplýsingar um stöðuna á húsnæðismarkaði. Retrieved from https://www.stjornarradid.is/efst-­a-­baugi/frettir/stok-­frett/2015/09/23/ Upplysingar-­um-­stoduna-­a-­husnaedismarkadi Mixa, M. W. (2009). Once in khaki suits: Socioeconomical features of the Icelandic collapse. In I. Hannibalsson (Ed.), Rannsóknir í Félagsvísindum X (pp. 435–447). Háskólaútgáfan. Montezuma, J., & McGarrigle, J. (2019). What motivates international homebuyers? Investor to lifestyle ‘migrants’ in a tourist city. Tourism Geographies, 21(2), 214–234. Moody’s Investors Service. (2009). Corporate default and recovery rates, 1920–2008. In Moody’s global credit policy. Moody’s Investors Services. https://www.moodys.com/sites/products/ DefaultResearch/2007400000578875.pdf OECD database. (n.d.-a). Housing prices. Retrieved from https://data.oecd.org/price/housing-­ prices.htm OECD database. (n.d.-b). Population data. Retrieved from https://stats.oecd.org/Index. aspx?DataSetCode=EDU_DEM Óladóttir, O. Þ. (2019). Erlendir ferðamenn á Íslandi 2018: Lýðfræði, ferðahegðun og viðhorf. Ferðamálastofa/Icelandic Tourist Board. Retrieved from https://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/ files/konnun2018/konnun-­18-­2.pdf O’Reilly, K. (2017). The British on the Costa del Sol Twenty Years On: A story of liquids and sediments. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 7(3), 139–147. Pálsdóttir, I. H., & Haraldsson, E. K. (2011). Come and be inspired by Iceland: Skýrsla samstarfsaðila. Íslandsstofa. Pálsson, S. Á. (2020). Lúxusíbúðir við Austurhöfn kosta sumar nokkur hundruð milljónir og svona líta þær út, September, 10 2020. Retrieved from https://www.visir.is/g/20202010630d Pfanner, E. (2008). Meltdown of Iceland’s financial system quickens. The New  York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/business/worldbusiness/09icebank.html Registers Iceland. (n.d.-a). Vísitala íbúða- og leiguverðs á höfuðborgarsvæðinu. Retrieved from https://www.skra.is/thjonusta/gogn/talnaefni/visitolur-­kaups-­og-­leiguverds/

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Chapter 15

Gentrification, Social Activism and Contestations in Cape Town (South Africa) Sibonakaliso S. Nhlabathi and Brij Maharaj

15.1  Introduction The dramatic rise in transnational capital mobility during the last quarter of the twentieth century and which still makes major advances into other non-market parts of the world, during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, is well documented. Thus, in the face of the ever increasingly mobile capital, nation states, have been forced to adopt policies that are acquiescent with demands of the market. This has meant that national governments progressively entered into complex state-economy relations in which state institutions are actively mobilised to promote market based regulatory arrangements (Brenner & Theodore, 2005). These arrangements have often brought the state and the civil society into conflict sometimes over varied and competing notions of the use, meaning, and nature of public space (Magana, 2016; Swank, 2001). Internationally, civic mobilisation against market induced use of space in cities or gentrification which is the subject of this chapter, has been very exuberant if not raucous at times. Opposition to gentrification has usually coalesced around the perceived alienation of the market, where, for example, in urban settings, rising property prices displaced low-income people and small businesses from prime locations of cities. This has heightened socio-economic divide. Other varied factors that have galvanised the civic movements against gentrification include the yearning for simplicity in an apparently complex globalised world; progressive values of freedom, equality, and community; the perceived displacement of the usual order; and S. S. Nhlabathi University of KwaZulu-Natal, Department of Geography, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] B. Maharaj (*) University of KwaZulu-Natal, Department of Geography, Durban, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_15

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sometimes, simply values of anarchism (Lock, 2018; Voogt, 2016; Woolsey, 2019). However, opposition to gentrification is at times more complex than it appears. Ironically, sometimes at the forefront of the anti-gentrification protests are gentrifying classes themselves. For instance, some people move into a neighbourhood because they are attracted to certain qualities of a place. Upon moving in, they recognise that they are part of transforming the things that they value about the place. Also, often young professionals in their twenties and and thirties in some developed economies, those not part of the housing market yet, become anti-gentrifiers because they feel that as new arrivals to the housing market, gentrification would price them out (Horn, 2015). Thus, against this backdrop this chapter interrogates the processes of gentrification and social activism and contestations in Cape Town. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section conceptualises gentrification in relation to neoliberalism. Then the discussion proceeds to explore gentrification studies internationally and in South Africa. This is followed by an analysis of gentrification and social activism in Cape Town. The final part of the chapter integrates the whole discussion on gentrification in Cape Town.

15.2  Literature Review 15.2.1  Theorising Gentrification and Social Activism In Geography, the concept of gentrification is associated with Neil Smith’s seminal work, the ‘rent gap theory’ (Eckerd et al., 2019). The ‘rent gap theory’ describes the gap between the actual capitalised land value (ground rent) of a plot of land given its present use and the potential ground rent that might accrue under ‘higher’ and ‘better’ use. Hence, being cognisant of this difference, investors and capital renovate a particular neighbourhood, causing the rent and the value of the property to increase (Smith, 1979, 1982, 1987a, b). This process, displaces the inner-city residents who are usually the poor working class in favour of the middle and upper-­ middle-­classes (Smith, 1987b; Wu et al., 2017). Marxists observe that, gentrification processes advance the neo-liberal agenda of accumulation by dispossession. Accumulation by dispossession derives from the theory of primitive accumulation, which posits that capitalism emerged through the accumulation of surpluses, acquired through predatory practices at the expense of local groups (Dunn, 2007; Harvey, 2009; Harvey & Nak-chung, 2017; Hedin et  al., 2012; Narsiah, 2013; Roccu, 2013; Webber, 2008). Through accumulation by dispossession, capital surreptitiously or sometimes forcefully dispossesses and separates local groups from their means of production (Harvey & Nak-chung, 2017; Webber, 2008). The gentrification process would, therefore, be one of the repertories by which global capital advances accumulation by dispossession. Global markets force local areas to be competitive and offer incentives in order to attract highly mobile capital

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investments. More specifically, urban real-estate markets serve as important vehicles of capital acumulation (Harvey & Primrose, 2012; Hedin et al., 2012). Related to the capital accumulation concept is the concept of transnational gentrification and its associated processes of global urban colonisation which entails new transnational upper-middle classes entering urban landscapes as home buyers (Sequera & Nofte, 2018). Just as in processes of accumulation by dispossession, transnational capital tends to attack those who have the least secure tenure, the weakest political voice, and those with least equity (Freeman & Cheyne, 2008). This explains the effect of gentrification, which frequently displaces the poor residents from previously declining central or inner city areas, and thus, condemning them to socio-spatial marginality. Often there are struggles and contestations as the poor resist displacement (Mendes, 2013). Thus, gentrification is associated with contestations over the occupation and use of space. Further, adding more light to the processes that mould space in the capitalist system, is the spatial dialectic concept. The spatial dialectic concept explains that social phenomena are inscribed on space and as a mutual determination spatial phenomena in turn determine social phenomena (Hankins et  al., 2012; Schatzki, 1991; Soja, 1980). Social phenomena have their basis on an existing ideology, hence space as a reflection of social phenomena also serves as an instrument to further a particular order (Archer, 2005; Unwin, 2000). Space has the capacity to deploy power, and just as space is a dispenser of power, it is also a potential site of resistance (Archer, 2005). And conflict and competition are inherent to spatiality (Collins-Kreiner, 2008). Spatial transgression is related to the spatial dialectic concept and refers to being in a place where one does not belong (Davis, 2010). Dominant groups tend to construct the meaning of places in order to justify and sustain their ideology and in the process solidify power and maintain their control over others (Olsen & Gualle, 2004). As a consequence, they create spaces of prohibition (Davies, 2010). However, spatial trangression denotes going beyond the limit and crossing boundaries, and in the process challenging dominant groups and ideologies (Collins-Kreiner, 2008; Jenks, 2013). The transgressive acts force dominant groups to defend their own order against the deviation of those who have transgressed, the unseen boundary (Collins-Kreiner, 2008). In this way the transgressive act, ironically, while it simultaneously destabilizes the established order, it also serves the establish order (Jenks, 2013). Transgressing boundaries draws attention to social activism and contestations as excluded groups attempt to resist displacement from prohibitive spaces. The last quarter of the twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of social activism which differed in form and in character from that of the preceding era. In the twentieth century, the working classes’ concerns with material, social and cultural advancements initially catalyzed their activism. But this activism has undergoen change in the course of time. The first quarter of the twenty first century has seen activism diversifying into a range of new social movements which mobilised around ideas, beliefs and values such as human rights, economic justice, and environmental concerns, which have been viewed as outcomes of globalisation processes (Davies

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et al., 2016; Peterson et al., 2015; Tapia & Hammond, 2013; Wieviorka, 2005). Of note, are the the post-2011 global protests. These have been modelled as symptomic of the widespread dissatisfaction of citizens across the world with the diverse asymmetries pervading contemporary societies. The much publisised new social mobilizations such as the Occupy Movements have sought to critique the systematic failures of neo-liberal capitalism (Halvorsen, 2017). Similarly, Gurrieri et al. (2018) note the new social movements as having an anti-global capitalism focus. There have been various explanations for the rise of these social movements. These include, the global economic crises and its attendant inequality under conditions of austerity (Alonso, 2009; Davies et al., 2016; Feixa et al., 2009; Gurrieri et  al., 2018). Klein (2000) and Mosbacher and Anderson (2002) have noted that these movements have also been referred to as anarchists, Marxist, right-wing nationalists, or anti-corporate. They have also been labeled as social media-enabled movements (Leong et al., 2019) or new social movements (Hollenbeck & Zinkhan, 2010; Wieviorka, 2005). Other varied conceptualisations of the social movements include Wieviorka (2005) who describes these new social movements as the here and now movements who do not subscribe to models that are marked by deferred gratification. In addition to the new social movement concept, is the resource mobilisation lense, which explains how these new social movements access resources to achieve their goals (Gurrieri et al., 2018). The organisation and structure of the new social movements also receives scholarship from Hollenbeck and Zinkhan (2010) who note their loose structure of membership organisation, which allows them to rapidly adapt to changing environments. Thus, in advancing this conceptualisation, Beckett et al. (2017) draws from Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. This concept describes the act of placing or arranging things that are different from one another such that it is difficult to find a common residence for them (Knight, 2017). Heterotopias juxtapose entities that are incompatible or foreign to one another within a particular locale or space (Goode, 2008). This would explain social activist as constituted by variety of groups with divergent concerns.

15.2.2  E  mpirical Literature Review: Gentrification Studies Internationally and in South Africa Internationally, scholarship uses varied concepts to describe gentrification. The most common being advancement of transnational capital accumulation and its associated displacement of the vulnerable. Related to these processes is the super-­ gentrification process which refers to further upscaling of already gentrified neighbourhoods. The in-migration of upper-income residents displaces middle class residents, many of those who were initial gentrifiers (Halasz, 2018). Similarly, homeowning residents are compelled to sell their homes when their value becomes

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quite high relative to their wealth, under these circumstances, homeowners find it diffucult to afford property taxes (Eckerd et al., 2019). The spectre of neoliberal gentrification shows itself in marginalisation, displacement and outright exclusion of the urban poor from inner city areas in Suva, Fiji (Mausio, 2020). Crosby (2020) coins the concept of ‘demoviction’ and redevelopment to describe tactics that financialised entities employ in order to demobilise tenant organisations, the victims of gentrification. Financialised entities, that is, investment firms, private equity funds, and asset management companies, in real estate, evict and demolish rental housing of working-class communities, this act renders it difficult for tenants to mobilise. Payne and Greiner (2019) characterise gentrification as occuring in waves. The latest wave is the third-wave also called the post-2008-recession, where municipalities have been compelled to regulate zoning. Transnational gentrification also has extensive coverage in literature. Some of the concepts that describe this phenomenon are touristification, studentification and holiday rentals (Carvalho et al., 2019). Di Campli (2019) notes the Othering effect of residential tourism and rural gentrification processes. This type of tourism has introduced a general fragmentation of rural properties and a decline in activities related to agriculture in some parts of the Global South. For example in Equador, the arrival of residential tourists has led to closure of factories linked to agricultural production as land is used for construction. Construction has come with precarious jobs. Lisbon, Portugal has seen revitalisation of the inner city to attract visitors this has a long-term effect of displacing local residents as home prices and rents escalate (Lestegás, 2019). Rainer (2019) uses the concept of speculative urbanisation and neighbourhood renewal projects which cities of the Global South, Latin America, undertake in order to attract lifestyle migrants from the Global North. This phenomenon deepens historically inherited global and local inequalities and exclusion. While, Hayes and Zaban (2020) identifies the concept of planetarisation to describe the production and urban revitalisation in order to capture higher exchange values from space. Fu (2020) writes on transnationalisation and internationalisation of the aesthetics of Mediterranean-style architecture of gated communities in cities of the Global South. In an increasingly competitive world cities seek world class status by developing amenities for transnational elites. Coming nearer to home, unlike in the developed cities of the western world where gentrification processes and social activism were observed since the 1960s, but, in South African cities some form of gentrification emerged in the late 1980s. This explains why scholarship on gentrification in South Africa only dates back to early 1990s (Visser, 2002). In step with the processes of democratic change that South Africa was going through in the 1990s, Garside (1993) analysed the change in the multi-racial complexion of Woodstock, Cape Town, as a result of the processes of gentrification. But, as scholarship on gentrification evolved, there was uncertainty whether all redevelopment projects could be conceptualised as gentrification. For example, Kotze and van der Merve (Kotze & van der Merwe, 2000) examined if urban renewal in residential areas (De Waterkant, Bo-Kaap, Lower Gardens, Woodstock, Salt River and Walmer Estate) Cape Town could be classified as gentrification.

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After the year 2000 gentrification scholarship in South Africa entered what could be characterised as a period of take-off. However, there was still some uncertainty about gentrification processes. For example, Visser (2003) argues that on the basis of international experiences, the post-apartheid South African city presented opportunities for gentrification processes to emerge as part of urban renewal. According to Visser (2003) subsequent research needed to critically explore the gentrification processes. As if taking a cue from Visser (2003), Donaldson et al. (2013) present future possible scenarios for the Bo-Kaap suburb, Cape Town (which has been extensively researched) in view of advancing neoliberalism. Bo-Kaap could be preserved as a cultural heritage site or alternatively gentrification and urban regeneration of the place be allowed to advance. Kotze (2013) highlighted the housing challenges resulting from gentrification, and their impact on the fabric of the population in Bo-Kaap, especially in terms of displacement. Monare et al. (2014) describe gentrification in Parkhurst (Johannesburg) in terms of generations or waves. The first generation or wave occurred during the years 1970s and 1980s when Parkhurst lost its original residents. Returning soldiers (soldiers who had served in the WW II) located in this area, also this place was popular with the working class residents, as houses were cheap. But, the 1970s and the 1980s saw the middle class displacing these original residents. During the turn of the twenty first century, Parkhurst entered, what Monare et al. (2014) label as the super-gentrification cycle where the wealthy and suburban businesses, in turn displaced the middle class residents. However, on gentrification in South Africa and in some developing countries, Lemanski (2014) suggests that this process is characterised by some nuances which render the interpretation of this phenomenon in terms of the Anglo-American theories or Global North perspectives in appropriate. Instead, Lemanski (2014) suggests the concept of hybrid gentrification as a further extension to the theory of gentrification. Hybrid gentrification explains a process where emerging black middle-groups (in South Africa), unable to afford increasing land prices in well located areas of the city, purchase or ‘raid’ land in low income areas. In this way the poor get displaced. This processes is also characterised as downward ‘raiding’. Teppo and Millstein (2015) also equated gentrification processes with hostilities of the market, working in cahoots with the government against the vulnerable poor. The impact of gentrification on local social systems has received coverage. Steyn and Spencer (2016) studied the nature and extent of gentrification in Bo-Kaap vis-­ à-­vis the perceived threats to the traditional culture in which this area is steeped. Similarly, Mosselson (2017) interrogates the threat which gentrification presents to low income in inner city Johannesburg, as the city has to find a balance between the policy imperative to provide social housing through state intervention while simultaneously promoting commercial and market practices in inner-city. Goo (2017) traced the history of gentrification of the Maboneng Precinct (Johannesburg), and the controversy and contested space of gentrification at this place. Bond and Browder (2019) have intepreted gentrification in terms of what they call market recolonization of the inner city. The focus is on the impact gentrification has on the

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intensificafion of class-race segregation of those who are displaced because they lack the buying power required to participate in the new urban lifestyle. Gregory and Rogerson (2019) re-introduce the concept of studentification (which Smith, 2002, orginally used) which explains the influx of students to privately rented accommodation in neighbourhoods close to higher education institutions in the central part of cities. This concept has extended the theorisation of gentrification and other processes of urban change in South Africa. Thus, the foregoing discussion has shown that there are varied conceptualisations of gentrification. This is an indication that gentrification is in a process of continuous evolution. The next section presents the context of the study.

15.3  Context of the Study This paper reports on gentrification processes in Cape Town, South Africa, with the areas of interest being Bo-Kaap, Woodstock and Sea Point (Fig. 15.1). Despite policies to reverse inequality in South Africa, in general, since 1994, progress has been limited. Similarly, being a microcosms of the country, South African cities are among the most inequitable in the world (Bisseker, 2019; Statistics South Africa, 2019). Though, Cape Town municipality is classified as the least inequitable of all South Africa’s cities and but wears the title of a municipality with households with the highest level of public utilities, but there are contradictions. Cape Town is known for having the highest murder rate in South Africa (City of Cape Town, 2016). The continued escalating rate of crime in Cape Town is the main factor that drives the popularity of the secure gated residential developments (Property24, 2018a). It is also in Cape Town that the physical legacy of apartheid town planning is still glaring. Travellers arriving at the airport fly over thousands of tin homes with only rudimentary sanitation or electric power (Burke, 2018; Matthew, 2017). Harrisberg (2019), notes the poverty which is juxtaposed with wealth. A quarter of a century after apartheid ended, the poorest people, mostly black people, are scattered through more than 200 informal settlemensts located far out of town. Thus, the Cape Town municipality, at 17.6% has one of the highest percentages of households residing in informal settlements in South Africa (Statistics South Africa, 2016, 2019). Cape Town has acted as a magnet for a large number of migrants, mostly economic migrants, from both within South Africa and from across the whole African continent, and from Asia, that is, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan (IOM, 2013; Tawodzera et al., 2015). This would explain the large number of informal settlements and the competition for limited resources in the city. According to Reinders (2020) since the landing of the coronavirus in South Africa, there has, also, been staggering rise in ‘land invations’ in Cape Town. Many of the city’s economically vulnerable township citizens lost their jobs and income when the country went into lockdown. Those already living in shacks, often in the backyards of other homes,

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Fig. 15.1  Map of Cape Town. (Source: Own elaboration)

could no longer afford their rent. So they looked for land where they could erect new shacks and live rent-free. Within the context of the afore-discussed socio-economic context, the next section unpacks the methods that scholarship has used gentrification research. With the exception of Monare et al. (2014) who used a mixed method in their research and Mosselson (2017) who adopted a qualitative research approach which involved interviews with property developers, housing providers, government officials, and tenants living in the area, most of the research in South Africa has either been based on desktop data or on literature data. Garside (1993), Lemanski (2014), Steyn and Spencer (2016) and Goo (2017) have used literature as primary source of data for their studies. Kotze (2013) used municipal records to get information about the number and size property transactions. That study also used interviews with members of the communities.

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Thus, this present study uses the desktop data and literature to understand gentrification processes and the consequent civic action in Cape Town. Desktop research is useful where it is difficult to gather primary and secondary data (Adetayo & Oluwakemi, 2018). In order to satisfy the desktop data protocol, this study used a range of available literature data sources (Helms et al., 2018).

15.4  G  entrification, Processes, Dynamics and Issues in Cape Town This section analyses gentrification processes and dynamics in Cape Town with a particular focus on gentrification processes in Bo-Kaap, Woodstock and Sea Point (Fig. 15.1). However, a broader picture shows that, across South Africa, inner cities of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, are experiencing, depending on one’s perspective, a rebirth or displacement, which scholarship refers to as gentrification. Gentrified places in Johannesburg, include, the Maboneng Precinct – a commercial and residential district, Braamfontein and some parts of Hillbrow. However, the liquidation and auctioning of the Maboneng Precinct which was owned by private capital, which at one point had a property portfolio worth over a one billion rand ($70.8 million) serves as as reminder of the sensitivity of gentrified areas to private market shocks (Chutel, 2019). In Durban the recently launched beach front promenade which is part of the Point Waterfront Development serves as more of urban renewal than gentrification. This beachfront development, which is proclaimed to be the longest prominade in Africa, is meant to catapult Durban into a leading tourism driven consumer city. The recently (year 2020) launched Umhlanga Arch, a multibillion-rand upmarket residential and business hub in Umhlanga, Durban, aims to cement the place of Durban as a prime consumer city in the mould of Johannesburg and Cape Town. This section focuses on Bo-Kaap and thereafter Woodstock areas which are undergoing contested gentrification in Cape Town (Fig. 15.1). Bo-Kaap is regarded as the traditional home of the so-called Coloured (mixed race people) who account for 11% of South Africa’s population. But, Bo-Kaap population has always been mixed. This area contains the largest concentration of pre-1850 Dutch architecture in Cape Town and is the oldest surviving residential neighbourhood (Parker, 2019; Tichmann, 2013). Davids (1980) presents a picture full of metaphors, that Bo-Kaap is a small pocket and is teeming with life and vitality, yet it is caught between the encroaching city centre and an uninhabitable mountain. It is a small contested area not even a kilometre and a half in extent. Like Bo-Kaap, Woodstock is also one of the inne-city fringes or ‘twilight zone’ areas which is situated in highly contested spaces (Wenz, 2012). While Woodstock is primarily a working class suburb, extremes of wealth exist and the community is diverse in respect to culture, race and and religion (Von Schirnding et al., 1991; Western, 2002).

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Gentrification in these areas has been occuring as part of the drive to attract tourists and to continue with the agenda to present Cape Town as a global city. Processes that have fuelled redevelopment and gentrification in Cape Town are the two interlinked processes, namely, international tourism which is motivated by climate and weather; and the real estate investments from both local and international speculators or investors (Markets & Investment, 2019). Climate and weather are amongst the key motivators often cited for travel and tourism, which either, depending on the season, reduce or increase demand for destination (Bae & Nam, 2019; Becken & Wilson, 2013; Hewer et al., 2014). For example, summer is the major determinant of tourism in the southern countries of Europe, with places like Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta experiencing higher tourism visitors in summer (Koutroulis et  al., 2018). In Cape Town too, climate, weather and lifestyle attracts wealthy foreigners, the so-called swallows who chase summer. The foreigners buy property in well located parts of the city including the CBD. Their demand for property has resulted in property increasing by 30% in the CBD compared to the suburbs (Property24, 2019a). This escalation in property prices has contributed to property inflation where local residents are being squeezed out by foreigners prepared to pay higher prices against the weaker South Africa currency (Parker, 2019). Besides investments in residential property, wealthy foreigners, notably from the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, France, and Italy, and the Gulf States, also commit heavy capital investments in Cape Town, this occurs as part of the global cities framework (Makoni, 2017; McCool, 2017; Property24, 2017). These trends illustrate the influence of transnationalism on gentrification in Cape Town. Real estate is increasingly internationalised, as more property actors penetrate markets beyond their area of origin (Büdenbender & Golubchikov, 2017; Poon, 2017). The main reason for this phenomenon is that global real estate investors are seeking to diversify their investment portfolios and the perception of better returns in cities of other parts of the world serve as pull factors (Rogers & Koh, 2017). The intensified globalisation and increased transnational mobility of people, capital, and information provides a fertile ground for the processes of gentrification to play out (Wong, 2017). Thus, the Cape Town CBD and the Atlantic Seaboard get caught in this global investment frenzy. The Cape Town CBD offers higher investement yields for global investors. And, on the whole, sitting at R8805 rates per month, the Western Cape has the highest average rent of any province. This is well above the national average of R7359. Capital appreciation of rental properties is healthy at an average of 10% per annum which is way above that of other provinces including Gauteng which sits at 3% on average per annum (Propert24, 2018b). In the Cape Town CBD international financiers prefer to invest in mixed developments which are understood to stay ‘alive’ 24 h compared to office blocks which are only active 10 h. The Zero-2-One Tower serves this purpose for international investors. This R1.3 billion project in the Cape Town CBD, which first made headlines in 2016, has recently secured foreign investment which makes it possible for this project to commence. Once completed, the Zero-2-One Tower would be the tallest

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building in Cape Town (BusinessTech 2019). Investors are chasing yields and growth as these are still attractive in South Africa. Cape Town still offers excellent value in comparison to other international cities, such as New York or Singapore. The city continues to trend in the top 20 global cities for capital value growth (measured during the 5–10 year’s growth period to 2017/8) and offers a superb lifestyle and value proposition as good as anything that one will find in Southern Europe (Meintjies, 2019). The Atlantic Seaboard, which includes Seapoint, in the Western Cape, has also always been popular and continues to attract both foreign and upcountry (Gauteng province, South Africa) investors (Markets & Investment, 2017). Foreign investors are dominated by ‘swallows’ who visit Cape Town once or twice a year, while buyers from upcountry, are split between semigrants and buyers who are looking to acquire second homes (Property24, 2019b; Visser, 2004). Though, the argument on the upside of the foreign real estate investments is that they lead to a substantial capital formation and growth, on the downside they generate deep seated cultural and political sensitivities. Moreover, these processes of foreign real estate investments affect local real estate market in number of ways which include affordability concerns (Liu & Gurran, 2017; Rogers & Koh, 2017). Hence the next section explores social activism.

15.5  Social Activism in Cape Town Over the recent years, Bo-Kaap, in particular, has witnessed extensive gentrification development, which has aroused the wrath of the community. Residents of Bo-Kaap have not necessarily viewed gentrification as as the rejuvination, revitalisation or renewal of deteriorated urban neighbourshoods. But they have viewed it as leading to the loss of generational heritage, community-family ties, and as spatial violence (Petersen, 2018). Some have described gentrification of the place as the modern Group Areas Act. The area is being stripped of its original social fabric and the emotions are that the acts were heart-wrenching (Ngalo, 2018). People in Bo-Kaap feel that gentrification leads to alienation as historical neighbourhoods are lost. Residents understand that investments at Bo-Kaap is pursued by Europeans (Parker, 2019). The new inhabitants of the gentrified Bo-Kaap tend to bring their own culture which may be perceived to be at loggerheads with the established cultural heritage (Steyn & Spender, 2016). For example, the Bo-Kaap Muslim community was served with a complaint against the Adham (Muslim call to prayer) which has been rendered since the year 1919. According to the complainant, the Adham constituted a public nuisance (Charles, 2019). Residents of Bo-Kaap also experience what they call invasion of privacy, commodification of their culture and heritage and objectification. This happens as tourists flock to the area. The act of tourists of simply stepping into resident’s porch and take a picture without permission is understood to be an act of arrogance and is unethical. The residents of the place and protesters who call for the

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preservation of the place in its traditional character, see the struggle in Bo-Kaap as part of a wider struggle to undo the legacy of spatial planning (Gerber, 2018). Residents hope the place to be declared a heritage protected area (Pather, 2018). Similarly, residents of Woodstock a working class area located close to the CBD are flabbergasted as they feel they are losing their familiar neighbourhood to high-­ end property developers and businesses as gentrification continues as the expense of the poor. Rising property prices and rents have forced many residents to leave. As recently as 2016, people have had to be forcibly relocated from areas that they had been living in since the 1970s to the townships some of which are located 30 km from Cape Town (Joseph, 2014). Woodstock has since turned into a tourist hotspot, which has attracted a new class of people, both permanent and temporary, which is gradually replacing its existing community through the forces of the free market (Gamieldien, 2017). Hence, the sharp rise in property prices in the city of Cape Town means that the legacy of apartheid spatial planning is alive and well (Dougan, 2018). The recent sale by the city of Cape Town of well-located land (Tafelberg, Sea Point) which, according to social activists, would have served for low income housing, to the Phyllis Jovell Jewish School for R135-million has aroused anger of the housing activists (VOCFM, 2018; Payne, 2019). Official word from the Western Cape provincial government was that the decision to sell the Tafelberg, Sea Point property to a school instead of developing social housing was that the province needed to generate money for a city whose population is growing faster than the provincial revenue (Pather & Whittles, 2017). The property transactions and gentrification processes discussed above have provoked the ire of the community who have galvanised into social activism. Apart from opposition to gentrification, social activism in Cape Town is also mainly motivated by low income housing challenges. Over and above this, the city of Cape Town has also been recording frequent protests and marches related to land and sanitation services. Service delivery challenges are a feature of Cape Town. As of the year 2018, the Cape Town was metro was sitting at a 345,000 housing backlog. There were 191,590 households in approximately 400 informal settlement pockets (VOCFM 2018). Noting the dire needs for housing and other services, grassroots organisations and housing activists such as the Social Justice Coalition, Reclaim the City, the District Six Working Committee (a ‘Coloured’ suburb), and Ndifuna Ukwazi, a not-­ for-­profit Trust based in Cape Town, have been organizing marches and protests against the city of Cape Town (VOCFM, 2018). On Human Rights Day, 19 March, 2019 (South Africa) Ndifuna Ukwazi and Reclaim the City civic activists took over the prime Rondebosch Golf Course to protest what they called was the failure of the City of Cape Town to redistricbute public land for low income housing (IOL, 2019; Washinyira, 2020). In September 2019, Ndifuna Ukwazi, launched litigation in the Cape Town High Court to compel the city of Cape Town to develop a housing policy that would require new developments to include affordable housing. The assertion was that only 10% of Capetonians could afford to live in the inner city (Shoba, 2019).

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Sometimes, civic activities in Cape Town become rallying mobilisations against the perceived general racism. In 2019 protestors slaughtered a sheep on Clifton beach (a prime international tourist destination) in contravension of the Cape Town by-laws. Protestors described this deed as an act to cleanse the beach of racism (Makinana, 2019).

15.6  Conclusion The concepts of accumulation by dispossession, transnational gentrification, and the spatial transgression concepts have enabled the understanding of the processes of gentrification and the consequent social activism as these play out in Cape Town. But, the processes of gentrification as described in this chapter are not unique to Cape Town. Cities and governments in the Global South, in particular, have been complicit in these processes of transnational gentrification. They have progressively entered into complex state-economy relations in which state institutions are actively mobilised to promote market based regulatory arrangements. This creates the fertile ground for capital to continuously spreads its tentacles throughout the globe. Though, local and sometimes internaltional activists have mobilised against these processes but they have not recorded any meaningful victories. The same applies to social activism in Cape Town. Divergent interests amongst the different groups or perhaps racial groups limit the success of social activism in this city.

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Chapter 16

Local Economies and Socio-spatial Segregations in the Aegean Islands: Touristic Development Versus Refugee Arrivals and Ghettoization? The Case of Lesvos Island Christy (Chryssanthi) Petropoulou

16.1  Introduction: Theoretical and Methodological Issues This study is inspired by critical geography theories based on studies on: the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1968); the production of urban space (Lefebvre, 1991); glocality (Massey, 2005); accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2012); gentrification (Smith, 1996); biopolitics and Bare life (Agamben, 1998); social construction of the judgement (Bourdieu, 1979); discrimination and ghettoization (Wacquant, 2009, 2016); but also from post-colonial (Fanon, 1963); as well as Mediterranean studies on uneven urban development and the question of socio-spatial segregation in Mediterranean cities (Leontidou, 1990; Maloutas, 2012; Petropoulou, 2013). We live in an established political situation of exception that produces new processes of socio-spatial segregation caused by glocal policies: (a) Building an emergency situation by means of accumulation by dispossession; (b) Continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices that Marx defines as “primitive” or “original” during the beginning of capitalism; (c) Mercantilization and privatization of land and forced expulsion of native populations; (d) Conversion of the various property rights (common, collective, state and others) into exclusive private properties; (e) Deletion of common rights; and (f) Mercantilization of the workforce and suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption (Harvey, 2012). From a decolonial point of view, the discourse on the neoliberal politics has its roots in the far past of colonialism. For Frantz Fanon, violence is related to forms of oppression and production of subordinated subjectivities. For him, the colonial process is completely violent, because, to build a world divided between C. (C.) Petropoulou (*) Department of Geography, University of the Aegean, Aegean, Greece e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_16

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colonizers and colonized naturalizes and legitimates different forms of oppression. This discussion goes from the exception (out of constitution) - to the regularization of the situation of exception (Agamben, 1998; Bauman, 2000) - and to the war of capital (with the capitalist hydra) against all, as the Zapatistas say (EZLN, 2016). As Beth Baker states: “The placement of segments, one after the other, crystallizes some of the problems with the names we use for people who move across national borders —“refugee,” “immigrant,” “migrant,” “tourist,” “expat,” “business traveller”—. These terms are applied inconsistently and according to political exigency, and they reflect and reinforce other social hierarchies like “race,” nation, gender, and ethnicity” (Baker, 2017: 1). In this context, Lesvos as a Greek island of the Aegean Sea is a locality where different scales and geometries of powers and politics act. For Doreen Massey (2005), the space is the terrain of politics, because it is relational, in permanent construction and multiplicity. Similarly, Anzaldúa (1987) “understands borderlands as a space of enunciations, possibilities and multiple identities” (Marques & Petropoulou, 2021). By focusing on the island of Lesvos, this paper tries to understand the transformations in the economy of the island and their relations with socio-spatial segregation. Mytilene presents to a large extent the typical characteristics of a medium-sized European  - Mediterranean cities. These cities, despite having a history of socio-­ spatial differences directly related to migration flows over the centuries, do not have the experience of established ghettoized areas, such as US cities and some European cities. Informal urban expansion, mixed land use, slow industrialisation and non-­ existent “ford production” of a big size industries, limited urban planning, the development of the informal economy, the close coexistence of different land uses, were some of the reasons for this diversification, which favored greater socio-spatial mix in relation to the cities of Western Europe and much more of the United States (Leontidou, 1990; Maloutas, 2012; Petropoulou, 2013). This research shows that the city of Mytilene lives in a situation of change from a city of thresholds (Stavrides, 2010) to a city of pockets. This seems to be reinforced by refugee ghettoization processes through the location and management of refugee-immigrant reception centers and by processes of “touristification” of the center and Airbnb temporary accommodation. These refugee ghetto policies went to extremes during the pandemic period through forced confinement in unlivable spaces, thus confirming Loïc Wacquant’s approaches to “the fatal triangle of urban precariousness”. Loïc Wacquant (2009) in his book “Punishing the Poor”, based to: the thesis of “disciplinary society” (Foucault, 1975), the thesis of the emergence of the “culture of control” (Garland, 2001) and the critical approach to neoliberal policy (Harvey, 2005), demonstrates that the process of penalization is a political technique for managing urban marginality. He demonstrates that the neo-liberal state reinforces and re-deploys its police, judicial and prison system to curb disorders caused by the spread of social insecurity. The neoliberal state reaffirms, by “the spectacle of security pornography”, the authority of a government in bad legitimacy following the

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abandonment of its missions of economic and social protection. In another work (Wacquant, 2014) “Marginality, ethnicity and penality in the neo-liberal city” he mobilizes concepts of “social space, bureaucratic field, symbolic power” (Bourdieu, 1993) and proposes the theory of “the fatal triangle of urban precariousness” for the understanding of territorial stigmatization before the construction of territorial criminalization. By marrying Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power (1990) and Goffman's (1964) analysis of “contaminated identities”, he forged the concept of “territorial stigmatization” to reveal how, by cognitive mechanisms, the spatial denigration of the relegate neighborhoods affects the subjectivity and social links of their inhabitants as well as the state policies that model them. He “disentangles the triangular nexus of class fragmentation, ethnic division and state-crafting in the polarizing city at century’s turn to explain the political production, socio-spatial distribution and punitive management of marginality through the wedding of disciplinary social policy and neutralizing criminal justice” (Wacquant, 2014:1687). In such a context, the question of the relationship between the transformations in the “tourist economy” of the island of Lesbos and the new glocal socio-spatial segregation arises. The current chapter of this book offers a critical approach to this process. The current chapter of this book provides a critical approach to this process. Combining qualitative and quantitative research methods, the aim is to analyse if and how the local economy of Lesvos was affected by the 2015 refugee crisis and its impact in socio-spatial segregation. The methodology combines quantitative and qualitative research: • Bibliographic research, • Collect and statistical process of data of official organisms related to Travel, Accommodation and Catering activities, • 20 semi-structured interviews with employers and employees in Accommodation and catering activities, • Participatory observation conducted between 2015–2020 and • 80 short semi-structured interviews during March of 2018 in the market of the street of Ermou, Kavetsou, Ladadika, and around the port of Mytilene (in the context of the Urban Analysis Laboratory of the Department of Geography). The questions of these interviews were about the type of enterprise, the type of products and their provenance, the labour relations, the type of clientele, the impact of the economic crisis and the impact of the so called “refugee crisis”.

16.2  A  Little of History: Mytilene, a Traditional Passage of Migrations with Impacts in Socio-spatial Configuration Lesvos constitutes a traditional passage of migrants moving from Asia to Europe (Fig. 16.1). After the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), a large number of refugees passed from the island. The majority of them moved to other parts of Greece and

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Fig. 16.1  Image of Mytilene in the Application Candidate City: Mytilene Capital of Culture 2021 Source: Lesvos, 2015

some of them settled in the peri-urban areas of the city. The delimitation of peri-­ urban spaces for newcomers –refugees– and the following discrimination of these populations has a long history in Mytilene, which left its traces on the urban landscape. During the period that this discrimination was under construction, the centre of this city was becoming an important quarter of a medium-sized city with new public and private buildings and with some villas (epavlis) in the southern part (Anagnostou, 2011, Anagnostou, 2013). In 1997, the Master Plan directed and proposed by Prof. Spilanis, recognized the situation of uneven regional development and focused on the qualitative development of tourism. Later, it will become clear that this discussion only concerned a part of the population of Lesvos. The centre of the city changed because of the presence of the University of the Aegean after the 1990s and at the same time, the periphery was marginalized because of the construction of a centre for refugees in Pagani (2000–2001) and of the persecution and discrimination against local Roma populations who moved to the periphery of the city. This new segregation as a result of the establishment of a closed refugee camp like that in Pagani had a deep influence in the social construction of the local people’s opinion. The distribution of racist information against refugees by mass media and the creation of politics of discrimination –stigmatization– criminalization with the parallel abandonment of social politics became a critical factor of legalizing an anti-migrant perception and opinion of some locals. In this process, the “fatal triangle of urban precariousness” (class fragmentation, ethnic division, and state-crafting) is quite obvious. However, at this period the anti-­ fascist movement is important with an influence in anti-racist comportment. “The condition of racism is changeable. Thus, a scientific and theoretical argument

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justifies the movement’s action” (Pistikos, 2012: 8), and the habitus is changeable (Petropoulou, 2018; Petropoulou, 2019; Wacquant, 2016). The social construction of opinion is a very important process (Bourdieu, 1979). The No Border festival in Lesvos in 2009 changed the discourse with another based on solidarity. After a few months, the Pagani camp closed and the deportation of refugees stopped (Troubeta, 2015; Petropoulou et  al., 2016). Between 2010 and 2015, flows from Lesvos to Athens remained open and the opinion of locals became friendly, with some exceptions related with the economic exploitation of refugees. At the same time, the socio-spatial configuration of the city played an important role in the social construction of the judgment about refugees (Papachristou et al., 2019). Between April 2015 and March 2016, more than one million people arrived in Greece (550,000 passed through Lesvos) from several countries as refugees (UNHCR, 2019). The entry into the country coincided with the government of a SYRIZA-ANEL coalition. During such a big displacement of migrants, the inhabitants of the border islands at the beginning, and later on other solidarity volunteers and NGOs workers, who arrived quickly in Lesvos, formed a large solidarity movement. The same wave of solidarity was also spread to Athens, Salonica, Idomeni and then to many other cities in Europe (Tsavdaroglou et al., 2019). Autonomous structures related to the first reception and assistance of the newcomers in the northern part of the island (Platanos in Skala Sykamias, etc), and open structures near the city of Mytilene (Fig. 16.2), such as Lesvos Solidarity-PIKPA, “Better Days for Moria”, “No Border Kitchen of Lesvos”, created a no-formal network of solidarity (Alexiou et al., 2016). Since 2015, the Municipality of Lesvos proposed the City of Mytilene for European Capital of Culture 2021, with the slogan Mytilene Capital of Solidarity (Lesvos, 2020). After the EU-Turkey Common Statement of March 20, 2016, migration policy differentiated refugees from migrants in a completely ethnic way. Spontaneous solidarity and self-management were criminalized (Petropoulou, 2017). Many NGOs abandoned the city of Mytilene. At the same time, a large part of the new refugees/ migrants were limited in the Aegean Islands with a ban on moving to large cities. In addition, 60,000 refugees in Greece (5000–6000  in Lesvos) were transferred to camps in very poor conditions and outside the cities, mostly near army camps and abandoned industries and some of them in prisons within Hot Spot fields (Tsavdaroglou. et al. 2018, 2019). In 2014 the number of arrivals in Greece by sea was estimated at 41.000 persons, in 2015 the number climbed to more than 856,000 (UNHCR, 2015). In Fig. 16.2, we can see the evolution of the arrivals of refugees with a decrease in numbers over the following 3 years, and the increase during the second half of 2019. From 1 January to 15 October 2019, some 48,507 refugees and migrants have arrived in Greece by land and sea (European Commission, 2019). Between 2017 and 2019, many NGOs came back to the island. In parallel, new friendly spaces for refugees opened, like “Mosaik” in the centre of Mytilene and “One happy family” near the camp of Moria and Karatepe and other self-organized autonomous places of refugees in the interior or near the camp of Moria (autonomous schools created from refugees of Afghanistan – Syria – Congo and others, like Wave of Hope. In the time of the end of this research (March 2020), the situation is

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Fig. 16.2  Arrivals of refugees and migrants to Europe in 2019 Source: EU portal of information. https://reliefweb.int/map/world/arrivals-­refugees-­and-­migrants-­ europe-­2019-­dg-­echo-­daily-­map-­18102019 Informing humanitarians worldwide 24/7 – a service provided by OCHA

extremely difficult because of the abandonment of a population of 17,000 refugees in precarious conditions outside the Hot Spot of Moria, among olive groves.

16.3  T  he Mediatization of the Negative Impacts of the So-Called Migration Crisis to the Island of Lesvos Mytilene (with a population of 37,500 in 2011), capital of Lesvos island (± 100,000 population), located in the north east Aegean Sea is the first scale - station of this long trip on the entry to Europe. In Fig. 16.3, we can see some of the important locations of entries and concentration of refugees in the island. As of 2016, every summer, the issue of immigration disappears from local newspapers, in the name of tourism. On the contrary, newspapers present several articles on the negative impact of the so-called migration crisis on tourism (Eleftheros Tipos, 2016). Examples such as the decision of large tourism companies and their tour operators to leave the island as well as the abandonment of this destination by cruise ships have caused a panic directed by some ultra-nationalists towards the

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Fig. 16.3  Locations of entries and concentration of refugees in Lesvos Island (2015–2016) Source: Designed by Elena Artemi

victimization of refugees. In addition, these circumstances have had relation with the decrease in gross domestic product per inhabitant in all the North Aegean Islands (from 15,500 in 2014 and 15,700 in 2015 to 14,900 in 2016 and 14,500 in 2017). While the island of Lesvos has been proposed for the Nobel Prize for solidarity shown by its inhabitants to the refugees, and the refugees were at the centre of international interest, some of the merchants in the island were interested in their economic exploitation. During this period more than half a million passed through Lesvos without any case of robbery, about 400,000 travellers to Piraeus by f/b in 2015 (Figs. 16.4 and 16.5). After the EE-Turkey Common Statement of March 20, 2016 –which caught thousands of refugees on the island waiting in inhuman conditions to obtain asylum– the situation has changed, because the new politics towards refugees is related to discrimination and criminalization. The privatization of the airport by Fraport, linked to IMF (International Monetary Fund) directives because of the economic crisis (Petropoulou, 2015), is an example of a mediatization of politics. In June 2016 the famous photo of Lefteris Partsalis at Skala of Sykamia with his three grandmothers (who are lovingly hugging and feeding a baby of refugees) had been posted in a giant poster size at the Mytilene airport and outside the arrivals hall. In May 2017, Fraport escorted this poster (Pagoudis, 2017). Actually, in the renovated privatized airport (2020), the unique publicity is the local alcohol Ouzo

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Fig. 16.4  Air arrivals in Lesvos Source: YPA – Edited by INSETE Intelligence, Processing O. Lafazani and C. Petropoulou

Fig. 16.5  Travellers with F/B – Lesvos port Source: ELSTAT – Edited by INSETE Intelligence, Processing O. Lafazani and C. Petropoulou

Plomari  – Isidoros Arvanitis (3E-Coca Cola Hellenic official distributor). The change of images in the airport reveals the discourse referring to symbolisms and the new glocal situation of Lesvos-island. In the same direction is the new regional plan for the island that proposes the promotion of growth in elderly tourism and

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cruises (ΠΧΠ  – Regional Plan 2019) forgetting the possibility of a youth-based urban development. In 2019, the official publications of the Periphery of North Aegean, based on classic indicators of tourism, announce a new growth of tourism (INSETE, 2019). For example, accommodation and catering activities in the North Aegean Region for the period 2013–2018 increased by +49% (from 6000 in 2013 to 8000 in 2018). Specifically, those employed in the catering sector increased by +59% (from 4000 in 2013 to 6000 in 2018) while those employed in the accommodation increased by +30% (from 2000 in 2013 to 3000 in 2018) (INSETE, 2019: 39). The North Aegean Region in the period 2014–2018 recorded an increase in arrivals of short stay accommodation by +83% or + 66,000 (from 80,000 in 2014 to 146,000 in 2018). Individually, foreigners increased by +29% (from 74,000 in 2014 to 96,000 in 2018) and foreigners increased by +815% (from 5000 in 2014 to 50,000 in 2018). The bigger part of this increase was related to the island of Lesvos according to the same official publication. From January 2015 to December 2018, the European Commission financial support to Greece –with two main Funds providing resources for refugees, the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) and the Internal Security Fund (ISF)– have provided € 816.4 million in aid to refugees (European Commission, 2018). Giorgos Aggelopoulos (2019) comments that big part of this budget goes to the construction and reconstruction of buildings of the Hot Spot and camps, and another part goes to employment. Finally, the refugee crisis benefits economically a part of the private sector in Greece and Europe. However, at the same time, some local newspapers argue that the island is confronted with an economic disaster because of the refugee presence (i-efimerida – Pipinis, 2020; Lesvos news, 2020) or recuperation of this disaster (Ant1news, 2018). Others speak about a xenophobic view (Prin – Manavis 2018). What happens? The situation in the island is very complex. In 2016, most NGOs withdrew from the island causing an economic recession to the city of Mytilene. As of 2017, a lot of international, national police and military forces and FRONTEX arrived on the island and returned some big NGOs. During 2017–2019, UN, EU and SYRIZA-­ ANEL government policies directed the most vulnerable part of refugees to managed houses of selected NGOs. This is how the city of Mytilene began to have a medium-permanent and young population (without family on the island) that together with the students of the University of Aegean may have an important contribution to the growth of indicators called “tourism” as “Accommodation and catering activities”. The restructuring of the type of commercial activity is also very important. Many companies transformed their traditional type of activity (example: traditional café) into another more adapted to the diversified youth of the island (example: café bar). Personal interviews with 20 merchants and employers and employees in accommodation and catering activities, and participatory observation, conducted between 2015 and 2020, as well as 80 short-interviews during March of 2018 in the street of Ermou, Kavetsou, Ladadika and around the port (in the context of urban analysis laboratory courses), confirm this observation.

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The attitude of Hoteliers vis-à-vis new agencies, like NGOs, FRONTEX, police, varied. (R14–2018) “We prefer NGOs and professors in our hotel but we also accept some migrants”. (R15–2018) “We have a very good relationship with police and we always have a room for you, this place is very secure”. (R16–2018) “The hotel is widely open for Greeks, Europeans and Frontex staff, we don’t accept migrants, it’s very calm”. (R16–2018) “We don’t distinguish migrants from tourists, they are all welcome”. (R18–2018) “We prefer locals and Europeans but we accept Turkish and sometimes migrants”. (R19–2018) (R20–2018) “We accept everyone in this hotel, animals as well”. Furthermore, new stores, café, bars and restaurants make their appearance in a continually widening concentration in the historic centre (Ladadika). But, the attitude towards refugees is quite different between those entrepreneurs who practice “face-control” for permission to enter into the coffee-bar and those who are supportive to refugees, yet the majority seems neutral on this issue or rather prefers not to openly declare its disposition. For example, the attitude in small enterprises of catering activities and proprietaries of quotidian commerce vis-à-vis the refugees is variable. (R10–2018) “Initially –during 2015– many migrants were coming in the café, but later on –during 2016– local clients stopped coming. So, we decided not to accept migrants and NGOs in this place. We practice face control, but this is just an informal practice”. (R11–2018) “This place (bistro) is open to all cultures. We like all the people and we don’t distinguish clients. We accept people of every age and nationality”. (R12–2018) “We have clients of all the types”. The research of diploma dissertations realized in this period (Procova, cited by Petrakou et  al., 2015) and the sociological research about the opinion of natives (Rontos et al., 2019), reveal the social construction of the opinions (Champagne, 1990) and the big influence of mass media information in this construction. In two other researches (2015–2016), referring to the opinion of 180 locals (Katseniou, 2016; Papachristou et al., 2019) and the opinion of 50 refugees (Petropoulou et al., 2016) related to different eco-landscapes of the city, Ermou Street (commercial centre in the historical city) is apparently a safe place for refugees and open to all the cultures, but for local people it is just a traditional commercial place crowded by people from all over the world. The opinion of the locals depends of the relations with refugees and the location of their houses – works. The predominant attitude vis-à-vis refugees is complex but is not racist. Since 2016, other studies confirm the same attitude vis-à-vis NGO’s members. The research of Tsartas et al. (2019: 1) in Chios and Lesvos (Greece) conducted between October 2016 and March 2017: “showed a negative attitude of the local stakeholders as to the effects of the refugees’ inflows on the economic and social life of both islands and, therefore, on tourism, but recorded a positive attitude towards the islands and their local societies on behalf of the volunteers and NGO members, as well as their intention to revisit the islands in the future as tourists”. In a study of Papataxiarchis (2016), the new situation of renovation of the historical centre reflects a new ambiance related to new arrivals (migrants, NGOs, other agencies related to “refugee crisis”). The creation of new cultural and solidarity initiatives, news bars, café-bars oriented to young people changed the cultural situation

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in the city of Mytilene and its regional position from a small and peripheral city to an inter-cultural city. Since July 2019, the increase of trapped refugees in the Moria Hot Spot, some thefts by either locals or foreigners, police practice of identity card checking and refugees’ persecution in the centre of the city and the mediatization of the crisis influenced the attitude of locals in a negative way. The local slogan “these are not the same people of the past” is very common. As all research, on the effects of criminalization and stigmatization of social groups located in segregated spaces, demonstrated in different contexts (Agier, 2012; Petropoulou, 2018; Wacquant, 2016), increased fear of the other can upsurge racist incidents and provoke the entry into a vicious circle of crime after a somatization of discrimination and criminalization.

16.4  T  he Increase of Tourism Indicators Without Growth of Tourism, but with the Increase of New Passenger Inhabitants Linked to the So-Called Migration Crisis Between 2003 and 2009, “the number of foreign tourists staying overnight in Lesvos hotels has dropped from about 502,000 to 379,000” (Terkenli, 2015). From 308,921 in 2010 they increased to 434,860 (in 2014) and 467,484 in 2015, years of large numbers of new arrivals from Turkey, including many refugees who spent a few days on the island before leaving for Athens (500,000 in 2015). The presence of many tourists from Turkey before the refugee crisis and during the economic crisis in Greece created cracks in the habitus of the distinction of the other (on a theoretical level, see the influences of orientalism). Expressions such as: (R1): “We coexist like friends with Turkish because we have many common foods and music” or (R2): “We don’t like Turkish politics but not the tourists, Turkish people are very friendly”, are very common. We also find expressions like: (R3): “Turkish tourists spend money for food and fiestas. This is very helpful for the local economy in this difficult period”. This optimistic attitude continued during 2015, the first year of “refuge crisis”. After the EU-Turkey Statement 3/2016, these tourist indicators went down, but that happened only for a few months. According to our interviews with employees of 12 hotels in the city of Mytilene, in 2014 and 2015 during the non-tourist months, a large part of these foreigners were refugees and after 2017 a large number of foreigners came to work on jobs related to the so-called “refugee crisis”. The comparison between the two graphics (Figs. 16.6 and 16.7) shows that after 2017 those who came to the hotels stayed more days than before. However, 2016 is the year with a big decline of tourist arrivals, refugees and NGOs workers and solidarity people. According to data associated to employment in tourism-related activities (Accommodation and catering activities), the number of employees in this sector increased from 5800 to 8300, from 2015 to 2018 (Table 16.1). Part of this increase

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Fig. 16.6  Arrivals of foreigners and nationals in Lesvos Source: ELSTAT – Edited by INSETE Intelligence, Processing O. Lafazani and C. Petropoulou

Fig. 16.7  Overnight stay of foreigners and nationals in Lesvos Source: ELSTAT – Edited by INSETE Intelligence, According to the answers about the total beds available, Processing O. Lafazani and C. Petropoulou

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Table 16.1  Employees in Lesvos Employees in thousands Tourism Other branches Total employees

2010 7,1 64,5 71,6

2011 7,2 59,8 67,0

2012 5,5 60,7 66,2

2013 5,5 60,1 65,6

2014 6,1 56,2 62,3

2015 5,8 59,2 65,0

2016 7,8 59,6 67,4

2017 8,2 61,2 69,4

2018 8,3 62,7 70,9

Source: ELSTAT Labor Force Survey – Edited by INSETE Intelligence, Processing C. Petropoulou Table 16.2  Hotel potential in Lesvos Hotel potential Unities Rooms Beds

2010 147 4502 8850

2011 114 3603 6884

2012 114 3611 6904

2013 111 3536 6757

2014 109 3470 6624

2015 110 3511 6692

2016 108 3476 6637

2017 112 3598 6854

2018 112 3615 6896

Source: Hotel Chamber of Greece – Edited by INSETE Intelligence, Processing C. Petropoulou

has been absorbed by the city of Mytilene where many new bars and restaurants opened during these years. The number of both hotels and available beds, that experienced a major crisis between 2010 and 2014, also begun to increase since 2017 (Table 16.2).

16.5  T  he Economical Restructuration and Territorial Transformation of the New Enterprises Between 2015 and 2019, the island of Lesvos is in a situation that combines the impacts of the economic crisis –international geopolitics and the so-called “migration crisis”. The impacts of this situation produce phenomena that appear to transform the landscape of the island. The majority of new registered companies (218 in 2015, 121 in 2016, 159 in 2017, 86 in 2018 and 81 in 2019) never started working and they cancelled their registration (companies without activity records). The combination of high insurance costs and tax burden are additional causes that have led to this phenomenon. An unknown number of those, that initially expressed their intent to start a new job, migrated to other cities (Australia, EU). During 2015, in the middle of economic crisis in Greece, the number of new business registrations in Lesvos (after subtracting those that never started working) is larger than the number of business deletions. After the Common Statement of EU and Turkey (3/2016), this trend decreased increasing again after 2018 (Fig. 16.8). This process is much diversified at a structural and spatial level. The unification of 13 municipalities in 1 municipality including the whole of the island with “Kalikratis Law” (Law 3852/2010), under the direction of the EU territorial policy and Greek government decisions, has produced an important structural and spatial change, with negative impacts on the Gross value, and in several sectors between 2010 and 2012 (Korres et al., 2015). Between 2010 and 2014 the GDP per capita declined from 15,882 €/hab. to 12,883 €/hab. (INSETE, 2019: 34) and go to 12,700

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Fig. 16.8  Registration and deletion of enterprisers in Lesvos Source: Registration and Deletion of active enterprises at the Chamber of Commerce in Lesvos island, 2020. Data collecting of Ilias Pisticos. Processing C. Petropoulou

€/hab. (2015) and 12,266 €/hab. (2016) with the same tendency of decline as the rest of Greece, because of the economic crisis. Many cities, capitals of old municipalities located farther from the city of Mytilene, were heavily affected in a negative way by these political decisions of “Kalicratis law” like the city port of Plomari. In addition, the deindustrialization of the city of Plomari had already caused a displacement of the population and significant emigrations during 1980–2000. The city of Kaloni, an agro-industrial centre of the island was also deeply touched by this regional change, but kept its agro-­ industrial functions. The city of Molyvos appears to have the greatest impact of this change, but also of the so-called migration crisis because it cultivated a “mono-­ culture” tourism dependent on multinational tourism companies of “tourist packages” that after 2015 decided to leave the island with a very serious impact on direct flights with charters arriving from European countries (Fig. 16.4). The desertification of Lesvos West is an old phenomenon (Iosifides & Politidis, 2005). The bankruptcy of Thomas Cook on September 2019 affected a lot of travel agencies and 16 big hotels in Western Lesvos and especially in Molyvos, Petra, Kaloni, Anaxos (Christodoulou, 2019). The city of Mytilene, in particular its centre, does not appear to be very touched by this crisis, nor by the cancellation of all cruise trips (from 53 in 2015 to 1 in 2018 according to data from the Union of Ports of Greece). On the contrary, it appears to have benefited. However, the beneficiaries are located in the gentrified centre of the city. The presence of a large number of NGOs employees, FRONTEX, police, army personnel and others, as well as of students of the University of the Aegean changed the city centre by way of transformation from a peripheral centre of the country (oriented to agriculture) to a centre with central city functions focused on tertiary and quaternary sector services.

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Based on data from the records of the companies in the Lesvos Chamber of Commerce, we observe an economic restructuring that appears to favour consumer companies located in the city of Mytilene (such as: cafes, bars, daily consumption companies), and companies related to the income of rooms and the repair of old houses (with expensive rents), as well as the daily and specialized services (beauty etc.). At the same time a devaluation of traditional companies that cannot adapt to the new situation occurs, many of them located more to the periphery of the island and the periphery of the city (cafes and traditional fast-food companies, traditional clothing and beauty companies). Labour Market Precariousness based in young non-numerated work and flexible work is synonymous with this process of gentrification (Gourzis et  al., 2019). In Mytilene’s gentrified centre, this is obvious, but requires systematic research. (Wx-2018): “We work 4 hours, but we have a contract for 2 hours”. (Wj-2018): “Majority of personnel is with flexible relations of work. Status is depended from the relations with the boss of the café”. (Wk-2018): “We have a good contract; we receive all the legal pay, but this is a result of a collective claim”. (Wl-2018): “We work 8 hours but we have a contract for 4 hours”. In addition, a new tendency appeared since 2018 that corporate companies prevail, but individual companies continue to have an important role. Yet, these data need a more profound analysis because they contain both large companies (multinational chains), small cooperative companies and family enterprises (Fig. 16.9). For example, in 2018, half of the 84 new registrations of corporate companies were catering and bars.

Fig. 16.9  Registrations and deletion of individual and corporate enterprises Source: Registration and deletion of active enterprises at the Chamber of Commerce in Lesvos island, 2020. Data collecting Ilias Pisticos. Processing C. Petropoulou

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This tendency continues in 2019 but also a significant investment in the rehabilitation of rooms and of short-time rentable apartments starts. This last observation may be related to the growth of Airbnb platforms.

16.6  T  he “Gentrification” of “Ladadika” and the Role of Airbnb Gentrification is an urban process “related to emerging investment opportunities”, change of land use, the elite’s appropriation of urban space, socio-spatial exclusion and spatial displacement and dispossession of the vulnerable  – poor populations (Lees, 2012; Slater, 2006; Smith, 1996; Smith, 2002; Tonkiss, 2013). According to Alexandri: “In times of crisis, when state dismantling is accompanied by increased intervention in spatial restructuring and public order, gentrification may be especially favoured. Indeed, systemic crises only serve to create grounds for yet more gentrification, acting as a constitutive element of contemporary capitalism, its commodity-­based housing systems and neighbourhoods” (Alexandri, 2018: 36–37). In Mediterranean cities the process of gentrification is an important phenomenon (Alexandri, 2018; Maloutas, 2012), because the oldest elites and middle classes did not abandon the centre of the city (Leontidou, 1990; Maloutas, 2012) but colonized the poor  – traditionally popular part of the city (Petropoulou, 2011). Georgia Alexandri argues: “a planning tradition of clientelism and spontaneity has been key to the emergence of gentrification” in Greek cities and particular in Athens. In addition, “political networking, policy transfer practices and gentrifiers’ topological imagination complete the jigsaw of inner-city socio-spatial restructuring” (Alexandri, 2018: 38). The old, but abandoned, area of Ladadika (the central part of the city dedicated to the trade of olive oil products), was transformed into a recreation space full of bars, modern cafes and restaurants. The installation of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in renovated historic buildings and the accommodation of the armed forces in buildings previously intended for family use, also affects the prices of apartments dedicated to family use. (R3–2018) “On the present time we have many people of NGOs and army forces and so we have not many departments on a low or medium price!” says a real estate broker. Thus, the house owners living in the city centre re-evaluate their apartments’ value and the old renters (with low rents) become obliged to move outside the historic centre of the city or to peri-urban communities and villages. (R4–2018) “We can’t find an apartment in the historical centre of the city and we are obliged to move to other neighbourhoods like Chrysomalousa” say a couple of students. Another factor of displacement of the renters is the persistence of the Church to not decrease the rents of its old traditional small buildings even at the peak of the financial crisis, in the old area of the Ermou shopping street. (R5–2017): “I can’t stay in this place (clothes shop) because I can’t pay such a rent in the middle of this

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crisis”. (R9–2017): “I stay in this place 30 years but now, I work all day and I can’t pay my electricity bill” says an owner of an old traditional café. All this process is clearly a kind of a Mediterranean style gentrification, where the role of urban planning is less present at the change of the historical centre, and the role of private initiatives will be very important in the coming years. Therefore, the impacts of the so-called refugees-crisis appear positive at the economic level but benefit a minority of the island dedicated to construction and commerce in the historic centre of the city. (R6–2016): “We had two small grocery stores. Because of the economic crisis, we closed the one (in Kavetsou Street) and we reinforced the other in the centre of Ermou Street, hoping to keep our clientele from the University. But unfortunately, students don’t buy any more; to the contrary, we have a lot of clients among Turkish tourists and actually people from NGOs and Syrians”. This process is also dependent on the type of business. (R7–2019): “We have changed the type of enterprise. Local souvenirs (made in China…) are not important for these people but tents and travel bags are very important”, (R8–2019) “We decided to open this grocery with oriental foods and similar products because such a store didn’t exist previously”, (R13–2019): “In 2016 I had faltered. So, I wanted to sell out a nice old 3-floor historic house at a very low price of 50,000 euros but no one wanted it. I decided to renovate it and now I have rented it to an NGO for 1600 euros per month”. In Lesvos, the Airbnb platform plays an important role in this process of gentrification, especially in the process of excluding low-income tenants from the city centre. This phenomenon creates serious problems for many permanent residents of the city as they are finally excluded from the real estate market. A quarter of the rentable accommodations are in the city of Mytilene (Fig. 16.10). As of 2017, a structuring change within the touristic product is established through the Airbnb platform that in March 2020 (date of the research) offers 630 accommodations in Lesvos. The majority of these accommodations are of two rooms rentable for the price of: 1600–2000 euros per month in the city centre and near the university. The rent is 1000–1600 euros outside the city to the north (near the refugee facilities and the old industrialized areas) and, 2000–15,000 euros between the airport and the city of Mytilene and in luxurious buildings within the city and near the beaches. The impact of Airbnb and the new prices of renovated rooms for the city of Mytilene became very important. Students, small families and temporary workers living in the city centre are the first financial victims as they can no longer find a house at a fair price based on their salaries, as before 2017. For example, a tworoom apartment costs 400 euros per month, which means 150 euros more than the previous period.

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Fig. 16.10  Location of Airbnb in Lesvos Island (March 2020) Source: Registration of Airbnb in Lesvos Island, March 2020. Data collecting and processing C. Petropoulou

16.7  S  ocio-spatial Segregation and Ghettoization of Refugees. The Fatal Triangle of Urban Precariousness Mytilene has a past of socio-spatial differentiation, which has been transformed in socio-spatial segregation in the middle of the Asia Minor refugee-crisis, between 1920 and 1930 (Artemi & Petropoulou, 2015). The Northern part of the city, the Synoikismos neighbourhood near the ancient old port (Anagnostopoulou, 2006), was the more industrial and polluted part of the city (electricity centre and other industries, near the sea). It is there where refugees from Asia Minor concentrated in the years 1920–1950. The Southern part of the city (Akleidiou, Sourada) was a middle  - upper class quarter, built of luxury homes near by clean and beautiful beaches. The installation of the Airport and the University in this South area changed the land use and the social profile (big traditional luxury houses divided in rooms for students) without completely changing its landscape image. In the second half of twentieth century, the new modern centre-city and many new neighbourhoods (like Chrysomalousa, Kalithea etc.) are developed in an area between the old historical centre and the residential luxury south of the city (Fig. 16.11). On the other hand, in Lesvos, immigrants’ detention centres have been in use since 2001. In 2003, the detention centre of Pagani opened. It is a time when official nationalist discourse rendered immigrants and refugees a menace (Petrakou

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Fig. 16.11  Areas of study in different urban eco-landscapes of Mytilene Source: Map (Artemi, 2015)

et al., 2015; Troubeta, 2015). During the same period, the city centre, influenced by the arrival in 1997 of about 3000 students (5200 today) of the University of the Aegean -since 1984 (ΠΔ 83/1984)- seems to acquire the first youth shops (PC shops, bookstores, cafes, bars, etc.). In the beginning of the crisis of 2010–2011, the relocation of most university departments outside the city centre did not change this activity, as no new commercial shops were developed near the new campus buildings. As of 2015, the installation of refugee camps to the North of the city follows the previous pattern of socio-spatial segregation. The closest to the city, that of Kara Tepes (built by the Municipality, as an exemplary refugee reception camp), is

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erected in an area destined for the recycling of waste. The banner “recycling space” still exists, as an allegory to the human theories (Bauman, 2000; Bauman and Donskis cited by Urteaga, 2015). In 2016, Kara Tepes becomes a controlled but open centre under the supervision of UNHCR and the Municipality, and offers a supportable condition of living. Further, three kilometres from the city, the Hot Spot of Moria, a reception  detention camp, was built near Moria community, in an old army camp for 2200 people. Currently, inside and around this camp of Moria, more than 20,000 people live, trapped by the EU-Turkey Statement 3/2016 that orders the State of Greece to register and handle the asylum applications by the Migration offices in this place and either accept the application or proceed to immediate deportation of the refugees back to Turkey. The Moria camp brings together refugees from several countries like Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Congo, Eritrea and other countries of Africa and Middle East. Seventeen thousand refugees are installed in the exterior of the main camp under tents in a territory of olive groves five times bigger than the official Hot Spot area, in inhuman conditions (without water, electricity, drainage, waste system and without any planning for infrastructure works, medical centres, schools and other public services). This situation has caused many social, environmental and public health problems not only for the refugees, but also for the inhabitants of the community of Moria (Fig. 16.12). The limited space, poor housing conditions, scarce food and the discrimination policies relative to ethnicity cause great conflicts between different ethnicities. Because of despair, alcoholism and drug addiction are increasing. Within the camp,

Fig. 16.12  Moria Hot Spot in fire, 26 Abril 2016 Photo source: C. Petropoulou

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there are jail buildings for new refugees and those who will be deported, and buildings for minors. The tents are organized per ethnic group. In the exterior of the Hot Spot, an informal city has organized itself as an emergency (groceries for cigarettes, phone cards and water, complementary meals, barber and hairdressers’ shops etc.) As has been the case with earlier mass movements of refugees in Greece (1922–1930) or other countries, as NGO Antigoni had foreseen on the basis of its international experience, “the lack of host infrastructure can cause discontent to the inhabitants of the areas where immigrants and refugees arrive, especially in cases of mass arrivals. Discontent can become racist and instead of being pressured into the policies pursued by the authorities, it may turn against the migrants, blaming the victims themselves of these policies” (Antigone 2012). This policy of current abandonment and ghettoization of the peri-urban Northeast part of the city of Mytilene, in contradiction to the development policy of new luxury homes south of the city and to the gentrification process of the city centre, causes social and very conflicting policies. After 2016, the new arriving refugees (if not deported) had to wait up to 2 years on the Island to be allowed to continue their journey to Athens, if not to Northern Europe, with the latter destination becoming an unrealized dream. Because of this situation, many refugee revolts happened, hunger strikes began (that had few positive results and only for just the strikers), fires, suicide attempts and several deaths. General insecurity exists all over Camp Moria: lack of hygiene, sexual abuse, drug trafficking, etc. (Fig. 16.13). At the same time, the Karatepes camp and the Moria Hot Spot opened many job opportunities in NGOs.

Fig. 16.13  Moria Hot Spot in January 2020 Source:https://ffm-­online.org/refugee-­incarceration-­on-­kos-­island/

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Between 2016 and 2020 there had been many refugee manifestations demanding free movement to Athens and other European countries, and the need for measures in the Moria Hot Spot that would improve living conditions and a faster asylum decision process. Since July 2019, with the government of the right party New Democracy, the State of Greece is currently operating in a permanent “state of emergency” and a situation of regularization of the management of “outcasts of society” (Agamben, 2005; Sparke, 2006; Tsianos & Kuster, 2016) who live in a situation of extreme poverty and neglect. Refugees can no longer share the public spaces of the city with the inhabitants because they are persecuted by the repetitive controls of the police (which force them to return to the Hot Spot camp). As the police multiply in the city, the city simultaneously loses its functions of care and solidarity. Within this situation the opinion of the inhabitants (that are also deeply affected by the international and national socio-economic and political crisis) changes. The fear and easy blame against the victims of the wars coming to Lesvos is a daily story. The news follows a policy of “silence” and “selective information” coming from above, that offers support for the planned construction of a new detention and concentration closed camp. New refugees cannot apply for asylum and are transported to exile sites in northern Greece (March 2020). During 25–27th of February 2020, the inhabitants of the island, independently of their political, ethnic, or religious preferences, fought against the installation of a second detention camp. They faced the police forces coming from Athens to Karava-­ Kavakli near Madamado (a small town with a long history of anti-fascist struggles) and Diavolorema, in the middle of the Mytilini-Kaloni road, where populations from other parts of the island gathered. After this battle, several groups of paramilitaries – fascists began beating people related to the solidarity of the refugees. At the same time, other solidarity manifestations in favour of the refugees started taking place. At the moment of finishing this text and in the time of COVID-19 “corona-­ virus”, the security policies are related to just the local people, and the Moria Hot Spot population in reality is abandoned and restricted in this terrible place. By such a policy of ghettoization, the urban socio-spatial segregation has become extreme. During the process of publication of this text, the Moria Hot Spot was destroyed by a great fire (the causes remain conflicting and are attributed to refugee groups, other political interests, or a combination of the above). The fire started after an attempt to build a wall that would isolate the entire camp from the surrounding areas and mainly from access to the city and the sea. Currently, pressure from the Greek government has resumed to locate a big, closed camp (of at least 5000+ hab.) away from residential areas, right next to the central Sanitary Waste Landfill (ΧΥΤΑ). The justification for this location comes as the culmination of a series of discrimination and communication practices (fake news) against the refugees, thus confirming the proposes of Wacquant’s theory of “fatal triangle of urban precariousness” (State with workfare and prison fare). At the same time, the only place of reception and solidarity for refugees that existed in the PIKPA – Lesvos Solidarity area (on the other side of the city – mainly

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middle class) was stigmatized as an illegal occupation (despite its concession by the Municipality the 2012) and then forcibly evicted by police forces. Thus, the socio-­ spatial divisions were further established.

16.8  Reflections By focusing on the island of Lesvos, in this chapter we tried to understand the transformations in the economy of the island and the socio-spatial differentiations or segregations. Following the EU- Turkey Common Statement of March 2016 and through the site selection of refugee camps in the degraded peripheries of the cities, such politics of exclusion have become even more concrete. At the same time, the city centres experience a perpetual change due to the “touristic development”, combined and interacted with the “politico-economic, social and refugee crisis”. This research shows that the city of Mytilene lives in a situation of change from a city of thresholds (Stavrides, 2010) to a city of pockets. This process has been intensified by the creation of the Moria Hot-Spot and the Karatepe camp and by the creation of luxury houses in the other part of the city. A newer process of gentrification in the historic centre also strengthens this segregation process and the large difference between the city centre (benefiting from the so-called refugee crisis) and the Northeast periphery (degraded and abandoned by public policies). The economic crisis at the national level, since 2010 (Petropoulou, 2015) combined with all the previous processes caused a touristic decline in the periphery of Lesvos island, with an accentuation of social and territorial inequalities. Eventually, the conquered socio-spatial mix is disrupted by European state policies of confining newly arrived refugees to reception centres located far from the city centre, combined with gentrification policies that seem to be reinforced by alleged “tourism” processes and temporary residence Airbnb. These refugee ghetto policies went to extremes during the pandemic period through forced confinement into incompatible spaces, thus reaffirming Loïc Wacquant’s approaches to the fatal triangle of urban precarity that links: class fragmentation, ethnic division and government practices - state-crafting (state with workfare and prisonfare). Lesvos, as a peripheral island frequently abandoned by public policies, lives at the same time the impacts of an uneven development policy within the country and Europe. In comparison with other Greek islands, it does not have a great tradition of tourism development on the contrary, has an important agricultural production. During 2019–2020, the decisions at the European and national level of lowering the prices of milk and olive oil production together with the impacts of the concentration of public institutions in the city of Mytilene (since 2010), have emphasized the already existing territorial inequality in the interior of the island. Since 2015, the so called “refugee crisis” aggravated the socio-spatial segregation. In this context, Mytilene, capital city of Lesvos, transformed in a glocal centre

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of international, national and local conflicts related to the refugee crisis. At the same time, the geometry of power of these conflicts superpose on the structural socio-­ spatial changes of the city. As Nikos Xipolitas (2019) showed in his book, the situation of abandoned refugees in reception centres is not a lack of public policies, but an entry deterrence policy. From this policy, not only refugees, but also residents of nearby communities were affected (Antiracist Observatory of University of the Aegean, 2020). Mitchell and Sparke (2018: 1) say: “Hotspots have made migrants unsafe, even as they have been simultaneously justified in humanitarian terms as making both Europe and refugees safer”. In so doing, it is shown that in the management of the migratory body, bio and geopolitical governance technologies inescapably overlap. “The migratory body is used as a technology of governance in a broader EU biogeopolitical game” (Mitchell & Kallio, 2017: 4). The migrant is not, however, merely a passive object of governance processes, but also an active subject (Alexiou et  al., 2016; Mitchell & Sparke 2018; Tsavdaroglou et al., 2018, 2019). Based on Massey (2005) and Anzaldúa (1987) and understanding borderlands as a space of enunciations, possibilities and multiple identities, we can say that Lesvos is a borderland space that lives under glocal embodied geopolitics. One of the effects of these policies is the rapid “gentrification of Mytilene historical city”, the “exclusion-ghettoization of newcomer-refugees” and finally “socio-spatial segregation”. In a period of crisis, the old socio-spatial segregations, gentrification, exclusion and discrimination are very important processes in the creation of a new urban configuration and structural re-organization of space. These processes may increase tourism indicators virtually but may also increase inequality indicators, something that has not yet been analysed. The current chapter provides a critical approach to this process. Our assumption is that voices that see the economy being destroyed by the refugee arrivals are highly ideological deriving from anti-refugee and xenophobic views. However, this process is complex and needs a profound exploration that would be proposed for another research.

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Chapter 17

Tourism and Lifestyle-Led Mobilities Dieter K. Müller

17.1  Introduction Although mobility has long been a topic of academic research within the social sciences, the interest in it has certainly reached a new peak in the last decade (e. g. Adey, 2017; Cresswell, 2006; Hall, 2005: Hannam et al., 2006; Williams & Hall, 2002; Wright & Ellis, 2016). However, this growing interest has entailed a greater variety of scientific approaches and terminology, recognizing the great diversity within mobilities in terms of motivation, patterns, and impacts. As Hall (2005) notes, mobility occurs over various scales and along a spatial and a temporal continuum stretching respectively from the local to the global and from trips of short to long duration. Bell and Ward (2000), offering a framework for systemizing mobilities in space and time, have shown this as well. The renewed interest in the social sciences has been interpreted as a response to sedentary traditions within the social sciences, increasingly outdated at the turn of the century, that failed to recognize the impacts of globalization and the related growing mobility of people, information, and commodities (see even Hannam et al., 2006; Sheller & Urry, 2004, 2006). In this context, Urry (2000) even claimed that mobility is so prominent in people’s lives that it in itself has become an anchor of identity in the twenty-first century, rather than places indicating spatial fixity. Whether or not this is applicable remains a topic for academic discourse (McIntyre et al., 2006). However, the new mobility paradigm promoted by Sheller and Urry (2006) forms a backdrop even for the lifestyle-­related mobilities addressed here. In this chapter, two overarching approaches to understanding current mobilities are brought together. On the one hand, research on lifestyle migration has developed out of population geography and migration research as a response to the insight that D. K. Müller (*) Department of Geography, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Dominguez-Mujica et al. (eds.), International Residential Mobilities, Geographies of Tourism and Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77466-0_17

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migration is increasingly to be explained by migrants’ consumption orientation (Benson, 2016; Benson & O’Reilly, 2009; Benson & Osbaldiston, 2014; Janoschka & Haas, 2013; Torkington, 2012). This has put places offering desirable amenities – often related to climate, culture, and the physical environment allowing for pursuing certain lifestyles – at the center of interest. On the other hand, tourism geographies have been interested in temporary mobilities for a rather long time (Page & Hall, 2014; Hall, 2005; Hall & Williams, 2002), and not least in relation to second homes, questions at the nexus of tourism and migration have been addressed (Hall & Müller, 2004, 2018). In this context, even tourism has been understood as a consumption-­ led phenomenon, although interrelationships with other forms of mobility have been acknowledged as well (Williams & Hall, 2000, 2002). Certainly, there have been contributions from other research fields, for example aging research (King et al., 2000; Gustafson, 2001; Oliver, 2012) and housing research (Paris, 2010) that have also addressed international lifestyle-related mobilities, but they are not explicitly addressed here. Against this background, the purpose of this chapter is to review and contextualize the chapters of this volume, International Residential Mobilities: From Lifestyle Migrations to Tourism Gentrification and propose future directions for research on this topic at the intersection of tourism and migration.

17.2  Migration, Tourism, and Mobilities The obvious connection between tourism and migration was noted early, and not least the work edited by Hall and Williams (2002) and Bell and Ward (2000) aimed to clarify relationships between the two concepts. The latter offered a comparison of key concepts and dimensions of permanent migration and temporary mobility, noting that the circulative movement of tourists contrasts with ideas of single transitions from one place to another as present in definitions of migration. However, they claimed that population movements increasingly corresponded to the key dimensions of tourism, i.e. varying length of stay in different places, repetitiveness in circulation, an ambition to return, and relatively clear seasonal patterns of movement. Cohen and colleagues (2015) have offered a further development of this argument in relation to lifestyle mobilities. In accordance, multiple moorings with limited belonging to particular locations are characteristic of lifestyle mobilities, as are flexible patterns of physical mobilities in time and space, or an “ongoing fluid process” (Cohen et al., 2015:158). Therefore, Bell and Ward (2000) and Hall (2005) ordered forms of mobilities along spatial and temporal axes, creating a mobility continuum. Obviously, lifestyle migration can be seen along such a continuum. It can be characterized as international or at least interregional regarding its geography, and visits to another property are long-term, stretching over several months before a return to another home (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009). However, in many cases lifestyle migrants will not permanently relocate to the location of a new home, but rather continue circulating

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between homes, which also entails alternative terminologies such as seasonal migration, snowbirds’ migration, or residential tourism (McHugh, 1990; Smith & House, 2006; McWatters, 2008; Janoschka & Haas, 2013). However, it is also obvious that the concept of lifestyle migration stretches beyond the limits of tourism when referring to households that relocate their center of living for an unlimited time. Furthermore, even the idea of lifestyle mobilities differs from lifestyle migration in that the latter refers to a “one-off lifestyle-led transition”, although increased back-­ and-­forth mobility between the old and the new home may in fact be a consequence (Cohen et al., 2015:160).

17.2.1  Causal Relationships Tourism and lifestyle migration need not be seen only as overlapping concepts. As Williams and Hall (2002) demonstrated, there are multiple ways in which tourism and migration are interlinked with and dependent on each other. Tourism partly triggers migration, and migration partly triggers tourism. The authors also identify the following specific forms of interrelationships: tourism and labor migration; tourism and return migration; tourism and entrepreneurial migration; tourism and retirement migration; and second homes (Williams & Hall, 2000). It can be assumed that lifestyle motives can be involved when individuals or households engage in one of these sometimes-interrelated forms of mobility. Moving, particularly abroad, is a major decision for many households, and thus it is seldom done spontaneously, although exceptions are documented (Müller, 1999). In many cases, however, frequent tourist visits facilitate a decision to migrate to the tourist destination. In this context, real-estate agents play an important role in conveying property purchases and providing various service to newcomers (Hoggart & Buller, 1994; Åkerlund, 2012; David et al., 2015). Many migrants in this category are retired and hence not constrained by work duties, or work in professions that allow for independent and online work solutions that make connections to certain physical places less relevant (McHugh et  al., 1995; King et  al., 2000; Smith & House, 2006; Eimermann et al., 2012). This situation is also captured in the alternative terminology “residential tourism”, indicating the touristic and consumption-led motivation on the one hand and the duration of visits on the other (McWatters, 2008; Janoschka & Haas, 2013). Pickering et  al. (2018) summarize the motivations of these migrants, highlighting four dimensions: (1) climatic and environmental properties of the destinations; (2) populations at the destinations, promising both the company of fellow countrymen as well as new cultures and contacts; (3) costs of living and affordability of the destination; and (4) ease of movement in relation to available transport links and visa requirements. However, in a study of Dutch lifestyle-­led migrants to Sweden, Eimermann (2015) showed that returning to the country of origin was a frequently considered option, blurring the distinction between tourism and migration.

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As Williams and Hall (2002) pointed out, tourism development entails labor migration in order to cater to sometimes only seasonal labor needs within the tourism industry. As tourism often takes place in amenity-rich areas, these destinations are attractive not only to tourists but also to people who desire a certain place-based lifestyle but need to engage in gainful work to facilitate this. Good examples of this are mountain or beach resorts attracting not least a younger workforce, although there are complex and multiple motivations found among this group (Uriely, 2001; Möller et  al., 2014). Hence, while certain parts of this group are engaging in a mobile lifestyle as seasonal workforce (Boon, 2006; Lundmark, 2006), others choose to register at the destination (Müller, 2006; Möller et al., 2014). It has also been shown that lifestyle migration facilitated by self-employment, or entrepreneurial migration as Williams and Hall (2000) call it, within the tourism industry is a frequent phenomenon utilizing the seemingly low entrance barriers to the industry and individual market intelligence regarding demand markets imported into the destination (Shaw & Williams, 2004; Carson et al., 2018). However, these companies and their owners, sometimes labeled lifestyle entrepreneurs, do not always prioritize business over their own leisure (Ateljevic & Doorne, 2000; Goulding et  al., 2005). Hence, strategies of growth-oriented destinations seldom align with such approaches to tourism business.

17.2.2  Participation in Mobility Practices The lifestyle migration literature has typically assumed that members of the relatively better-off segments of society pursue lifestyle mobility, preferably internationally. For example, Benson and O’Reilly (2009:609) note that “…lifestyle migrants are relatively affluent individuals of all ages, moving either part-time or full-time to places that, for various reasons, signify, for the migrant, a better quality of life.”

For various reasons, however, this notion seems pale. In relation to second homes, for example, Hoogendoorn (2011) recognizes that poor households have second homes and lifestyles as well, entailing flows between different places offering various kinds of amenities and opportunities. Even a motive among retirement migrants, i.e. benefitting from lower costs of living at the destination area (CasadoDiaz et al., 2004; Howard, 2008; Pickering et al., 2018; Sunil et al., 2007), confirms that not all international retirement migrants are economically independent. Rather, they seem interested in optimizing their consumption in relation to a fixed available income (Bender et al., 2018). Ormand and Toyota (2016:136) even go as far to refer to some of these migrants looking for cheap care as “economic refugees”. However, frozen pensions and other economic challenges related to fluctuations in costs of living and currency values imply that lifestyle migrants may in fact end up in precarity (Botterill, 2017). Hence, the notion of relative affluence becomes complicated, not least as it is highly contingent on place and time. Cohen et al. (2015) comment

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that the notion of a “better life” connects to a tradition of romanticism in migration, neglecting less positive dimensions of the migratory experience. In contrast, a majority of tourism approaches on the topic depart rather from the notion, for example, of second-home tourism as a “hidden giant” of tourism (Frost, 2004). Hence, an interest in detecting and mapping various forms of mobilities involving even caravans and other mobile homes has been at the forefront of the research agenda within the field (Table 17.1) (Hoogendoorn & Visser, 2004; Hall & Müller, 2018a). Furthermore, understanding second-home tourism has been seen as necessary for understanding an overall tourism development, not least at resorts where second-home owners are among the main customers facilitating the provision of infrastructure and services (Strapp, 1988). However, depending on the geographical location, second-home tourism can also be related to affluence (Paris, 2010). This applies particularly to the UK and other countries where land ownership is in the hands of only a few. Still, in many countries, among them the Nordic states, many Mediterranean countries, Eastern Europe, North America, and Oceania, second homes are part of folkloristic traditions, and participation in second-home tourism is far from being exclusive to the upper classes (Müller, 2007; Vagner et al., 2011; Müller & Hall, 2018). However, as for other property markets, supply, demand, and reputation imply that certain localities attract affluent clientele (Müller, 2002a, b, c, 2005; Norris & Winston, 2010; Norris et  al., 2010; Paris 2010; de Verteuil, this volume, Chap. 2). This has been a focus not least in housing studies. Even rural studies have been concerned with issues related to second homes and temporary mobilities. Buller and Hoggart (1994) recognized the temporary mobility of British citizens into rural France as international counterurbanization. This is also the point of departure for Halfacree (2012), who, however, is more concerned with the heterolocal identities of the second homes’ owners.

Table 17.1  Approaches to mobility, tourism, and second homes Discipline Tourism, economic geography Sociology, social geography Housing studies Population studies, rural studies

Term Second homes

Mobile All owners and families Lifestyle mobility Affluent

Second homes, Affluent multiple dwelling Heterolocal identities, counter-­ urbanization

Space Domestic, international

Time Seasonal, temporary

International

Seasonal, permanent

Domestic

Seasonal

All owners Domestic, international

Seasonal

Focus Spatial patterns, impacts, mobility Motives, narratives Housing provision, planning, justice Identity, mobility, population distribution

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17.3  International Dimensions of Lifestyle Mobility As has been noted earlier, the globalization and deregulation of international markets is an important explanation for the renewed interest in second homes and residential tourism (Müller, 2002a; Müller & Hall, 2018). In a European context, the political and economic integration opened new avenues for international secondhome ownership and mobility, not least for households from Central and Northern Europe benefitting from superior economic development in their home regions and looking for affordable property in the Mediterranean area (King et  al., 2000; Casado-Diaz et al., 2004). Gustafson (2001, 2008) characterizes the resulting lifestyles as transnational, acknowledging cross-border characteristics of mobility patterns and moorings in different countries on the one hand and a decreasing importance of borders and nation states on the other. In such a context, mobility becomes mundane. However, as Gustafson (2008) notes, transnationalism is applied selectively. In relation to belonging and identity, social networks, and cultural practices, the retirement migrants in his study become transnational, while in terms of political and economic activities no major transnationalism develops. Still, this does not mean that people involved in temporary mobility do not engage in political activities in destination communities (Janoschka, 2011). In this context, the distinction between tourists and migrants is not easy, even in relation to the mobile population’s own identities (O’Reilly, 2003; Janoschka & Haas, 2013). But, as Gustafson’s (2008) notion regarding transnational lifestyles reveals, the distinction is far from simply an academic challenge. Instead, remaining regulations concerning civic rights and social benefit systems in the sending as well as the receiving country still constrain how mobility is performed. For example, being away from the country of origin for too long – in the Nordic case 6 months – disqualifies migrants from social benefit systems and hence forces them to tailor complex solutions enabling them to optimize their benefits (Åkerlund, 2017). Another example is offered by Huete and Mantecón (2012), who note that people’s legal status in Spain is important for how they relate to destination and community. In accordance, registration and property ownership imply a greater commitment towards the destination, while a lack of these characteristics often means that links and property ownership back in the home country are maintained. Interestingly, in their Spanish case study, the authors note clear variations in relation to nationality. While UK citizens are found among the first group of permanent residents, Germans dominate the group of temporary residents relying on rental apartments or homes. Unregistered property owners are found mainly among other nationalities (Huete & Mantecón, 2012). This example also underlines Hall’s (2015) call for more studies acknowledging the role of governance in relation to second-home tourism. Particularly the international properties of consumption-led mobilities have entailed concern for their impact on destination communities as well. This depends not least on asymmetrical access to economic resources between newcomers and locals in destination communities. Hence, Benson (2013) argues that current flows

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of North Americans to Latin America have to be seen in the context of postcolonial relations, and Korpela (2010) argues that Western exotic notions of authenticity in India are a major motivation for lifestyle mobility to that destination. However, it should be noted that similar motives have been detected within a European context as well. Thus, the search for a lost domestic countryside abroad has been identified by Buller and Hoggart (1994) for British second-home owners in France, and by Müller (2002b) for German second-home owners in Sweden. Similarly, in this volume, residential tourists’ idealized imagination of rural Mexico is analyzed (Bringas-Rábago et al., this volume, Chap. 6). Nonetheless, economic differences are still a major motivation for moving abroad (Pickering et al., 2018). In this context, the focus has been not least on the impact of temporary mobility on property markets. In the Mediterranean region, residential tourism has certainly contributed to large-scale property development and tourism-driven urbanization (Soto & Clavé, 2018; Huete Nieves & Mantecón, this volume, Chap. 4). Although charter tourism is the major driver of such development, it is obvious that residential tourism not only benefits from cheap transport connections from northern demand markets but also contributes to further tourism by offering an accommodation alternative to large-scale hotel complexes. However, second-home tourism can also induce the gentrification of historical neighborhoods (Sánchez-Aguilera & González-Pérez, this volume, Chap. 13), not necessarily causing displacement but generating business, employment, and urban renewal (Visser, 2004; see also Nhlabathi & Shadrack, this volume, Chap. 15). In this volume, Sassone and González demonstrate a similar development in Patagonia. In rural areas, indeed, international demand has often contributed to properties not being completely abandoned (Buller & Hoggart, 1994; Müller, 2002b). However, issues of gentrification of neighborhoods and displacement of local people are complex, since it remains unclear to what extent second-home ownership is driver for or consequence of rural and urban change, respectively (Marjavaara, 2007; Hoogendoorn & Marjavaara, 2018). In many cases, complaints refer to spatial exclusion rather than displacement. This implies that locals are not be able to purchase property because of high property prices, which is a common situation in market economies. Still, even when displacement is taking place, property transactions involve both buyers and sellers. Hence, not buyers alone can be hold responsible for causing displacement. A further remark on the international dimension of temporary mobility relates to the notion of diaspora: second homes can also serve as a link for expatriate communities to their home countries. For example, Duval (2004) documents the mobility of Canadians of Caribbean origin to homes in the Caribbean, and in this volume the case of the Cape Verde Islands is discussed (Parreño-Castellano et al., this volume, Chap. 11). This diaspora second-home mobility can be displaced as well, as in the case of Swedish Iranians who for political reasons cannot enter Iran. Instead, locations in Turkey offer alternative meeting places to gather geographically scattered families (Abbasian & Müller, 2019).

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17.4  Looking Forward As noted in this chapter and in several other contributions to this volume, the relationship between tourism and migration is multifaceted and complex (Hall & Williams, 2002). This applies not only to the lived experiences and practices of mobile populations, but also to the academic study of the related phenomena. Although tourism and migration are obviously interrelated, problems remain; not least as the two concepts are governed by distinct geographical subdisciplines with separate traditions, terminologies, and practices. Furthermore, the field of mobility, lifestyle migration, and tourism is multidisciplinary as well, drawing interest from geography, sociology, anthropology, tourism studies, housing studies and so on, often bringing along distinct research agendas and research foci. The work of Huete and Mantecón (2012) presented earlier provides an additional explanation for different terminologies. They point out that the studied populations in fact differ far more radically than is often anticipated. Hence, Benson and O’Reilly’s (2009) focus on lifestyle migration makes sense considering that the UK population they study obviously engages in migration rather than other forms of mobility. In contrast, other nationalities, for various reasons, choose other forms of residency or are constrained by welfare systems in their countries of origin, and thus engage in more temporary forms of mobility. Therefore, it can be argued that care is required when theorizing from the UK case for other populations and of course for other mobility systems, a notion also supported by another comparative research (Norris et al., 2010; Paris, 2010). This naturally applies vice versa as well. Instead, one can argue that different mobility systems and lifestyle industries produce different outcomes. Thus, a more nuanced debate acknowledging variation seems to be needed rather than a search for global generalization, which is in line with recent thinking in second-home research as well (Müller & Hall, 2018). Against this background and in analogy to tourism systems, the following mobility system model can be proposed, linking places of lifestyle-related mobility with each other (Fig. 17.1). In this system, socioeconomic conditions, regulations, and

Fig. 17.1  A lifestyle mobility system model

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legislation in the countries of origin and destination –exemplified in this volume in the case of Portugal (McGarrigle & Montezuma, this volume, Chap. 7) – but also the availability and costs of transportation, influence mobility flows not least in relation to length and frequency of visits. Furthermore, geopolitical settings and economic conditions such as currency potentials contribute to the selection of certain destinations at certain points in time. In contrast to the tourism system, here the terminology of home and away, or origin and destination, is avoided in order to mark the dynamic features of such a system blurring distinctive categories over time. Hence, what has been the place of origin can turn into the destination and vice versa. The volume also reveals that the notion of mobility has recently offered a fresh perspective with the potential to create bridges between the different scientific perspectives (Hall, 2005; Cresswell, 2006; Sheller & Urry, 2006). The case studies in this volume indicate that common ground can be found, and that there is need for further investigation into the topic. However, it is also clear that the most radical interpretations of the mobility turn, seeing mobility as a mundane norm rather than a seasonal exception, are difficult to embrace in practice. Politics, administrative definitions and practices, statistical data, and a long intellectual tradition of favoring spatial fixity over mobility are seemingly powerful constraints (Müller & Hall, 2003), and thus, the notion of homes “as nodes in networks of scapes and flows” (Williams et al., 2004) seems far away when considering practical challenges related to living abroad. Still, this should not hinder the scientific community from moving forward and developing a research agenda for rethinking lifestyle-led mobility and its relation to tourism. In this context, big data allows for moving beyond narrative evidence of mobility and opens indeed exciting possibilities for future research (Bauder, 2019).

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