The conflict in the Barceloneta neighborhood could be seen as another example of a resistance to modernization on the part of a society clinging to the past, in the same line as the Luddite protests (the destruction of steam powered mills by manual laborers in the 19th century, such as the Bonaplata) or the opposition today to infrastructures such as Barcelona's fourth beltway or the construction of nuclear waste storage sites. Understandable but selfish attitudes, that should be defeated for the common good to prosper.

The Barceloneta conflict could be seen in this way, but it shouldn't be, for two reasons.
First, because it opposes an urban transformation that is illegitimate. When Mayor Pasqual Maragall designed the transformation of Barcelona, he did it by presenting his vision of a city open to the sea, able to organize an Olympic Games, and ready to recover leadership as a destination for trade fairs and conventions. Not everyone applauded all of its facets. To give two examples: the hotel sector opposed the increase in licenses, and many questioned the development of the expressways planned by Porcioles that the socialists had promised to forget forever. Nevertheless, the electorate supported the realization of that vision.

Now Barcelona is being subjected to a transformation that is more far-reaching because it affects the essence of the city: the composition of its neighborhoods and the use of public spaces. Entire neighborhoods are specializing in a tourist trade that demands a loud and boisterous nightlife that is incompatible with neighbors who have a normal work schedule. This transformation represents a break with the urban traditions of Barcelona, which has always supported the preservation of neighborhoods where people could live, work and shop, avoiding specialized neighborhoods (such as "downtowns").

This second transformation, whether you are in favor or not, is illegitimate because it has never been presented to the electorate; no candidate or mayor has ever presented an electoral program that describes anything like what is taking place. Indeed, even now we don't know how far Barcelona City Hall will take this process, probably because it doesn't know itself.

What's more, the citizens are being forced to make a pointless sacrifice, because, contrary to what some would like us to believe, this type of tourism doesn't create wealth, but instead destroys it.

There can be no doubt that, from an economic point of view, tourism is a blessing, but if poorly managed it can become a disaster. We are constantly bombarded by data on spending by tourists as if this were the measure of its contribution to our material wellbeing. In this field, politicians, so-called specialists, and opinion makers systematically confuse the increases in GDP that each additional tourist undoubtedly adds, with the increase in GDP per capita, which is the measure of wealth creation. As I have pointed out on many occasions, the data indicate that certain kinds of tourism are not contributing to an increase in per capita GDP because they attract more immigrants (denominator) than tourism value added (numerator).

On the other hand, party-oriented, or drunken, tourism is destroying the prestige of Barcelona as a city identified with science, technology and business, an image that has been so difficult to achieve. City Hall claims that the dual images of a Barcelona that can be identified simultaneously with Magaluf and with San Francisco, with sangria and with seriousness, are compatible, but this is simply ridiculous.

A final consideration regarding the article by Professor Jordi Maluquer that was published in these pages on August 26, in which he explicitly labeled my critique of the "tourist phenomenon" as "wrong", "unfounded" and "poorly documented". The only thesis that he presented was that Catalonia's trade balance with the rest of the world has been systematically unbalanced, and that for the past sixty-five years the only thing that has allowed us to buy what we needed has been money brought in by tourism. It's a startling argument. It's as if, in a debate about high-tension power lines someone reminded us that electricity was necessary, or if someone tried to resolve the eternal debate about the expansion of Heathrow Airport by pointing out that without aviation Great Britain would be isolated. What needs to be debated by Catalan society is not "tourism, yes" or "tourism, no", but rather what type of tourism, and what we have a right to see is something that no government or academic has ever provided: an analysis of the costs and benefits of each segment of the tourist trade.