Airbnb Cities

Cities are complex, living systems. Trends are waves of change, and fashions are tsunamis of impacts.

Trends are the signals that something is not quite right and that it must change, and when those signals turn into realities it means that the risks were not seen, and the consequences were not estimated.

There are also changes. The landscape changes; when you walk through Madrid, in Lavapies, you see entire streets filled with tourists walking with their carry-ons, but you don't see shops, you don't see bakeries, schools, or pharmacies, and if you do see them, they are closed. The provision of public services changes; it is no longer calculated by demographics or population. Tourists walk from public space to public space to meet someone, the streets are darker, there are no children, no cats, no elders on thresholds or bookshops. Settlement turns into movement, and the accumulated social and cultural legacy is lost.

If landlords prefer to rent out their properties on a short-term basis, rental prices, and housing in the area increase. The arrival of tourists changes the composition of the community and alters the social and cultural dynamics of a neighborhood.

This is reflected in theory. Gunderson et al. propose the concept of panarchy, which is a conceptual framework that explains the dual and seemingly contradictory characteristics of all complex systems: stability and change. It is an integrative framework that brings together ecological, economic, and social models of change and stability to account for the complex interactions between these two different domains and different levels of scale.

Changes are neither continuously gradual nor constantly chaotic. They are regulated by interactions between fast and slow variables. Different scales concentrate resources and potential differently, and non-linear processes reorganize resources between levels. Ecosystems do not have a single equilibrium; rather ,multiple equilibria are common.

There are times and cycles; panarchy identifies four basic stages of ecosystems: exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization. The exploitation stage is a stage of rapid expansion, as is happening with over-tourism and real estate functions.

This stage is followed, partly due to local pressures, by conservation and stability, strong organization, rigidity, and slow change. This is where slow accumulation and storage of energy and material is emphasized, as when a population reaches carrying capacity and stabilizes for a period.

The next conversion is that of instability, collapse, creative destruction, constant change, and low interactivity. Release occurs rapidly, as when a population decreases due to a competitor or changing conditions.

Mobilization, reorganization, regeneration, and redefinition provides flexibility to the system. It can also occur rapidly and is therefore adaptive to cycles; for example, it is the process that explains both stability and change in complex systems.

Fast levels innovate, experiment and test; slower levels stabilize and preserve the accumulated memory of past successful experiments. Sustainability in this framework is the ability to create, test and maintain adaptive capacity. Development becomes the process of creating, testing, and maintaining opportunity.

Uncertainty is an inherent feature of the adaptive cycle and should be a key factor in any ecosystem management activity – both uncertainty and risk increase with scale (for example, global-scale problems pose the greatest risks).

The technology behind all platforms and applications changes many things: ethics, aesthetics, speed, perception, the illusion of being modern. Wouldn't it be better to be in the Renaissance? In the end, the Renaissance was a great system of knowledge and not an exclusionary doctrine. Contextualized technology, not fanatics, not converts. In an increasingly complex world, what will govern it will be paradoxes, simultaneous opposites. The point is to govern the paradox, not to take sides.

It is not that the forces of change matter, the problem is that they are not being addressed in a systemic way. One variable – Airbnb tourism – pushes entire neighborhoods into reorganization, but planning comes late and execution even later. Environments deteriorate, people move out, tourists end up not wanting to be in dark, unserviced, lifeless spaces. Residents, or former residents, wander around their old neighborhoods, talking about their memories. Are these the cities and neighborhoods they want? Neighborhoods with rights for tourists but no responsibilities?

The neighborhoods of successful tourist cities are beginning to be places without memory: what is a neighborhood without anyone telling the story; will there be only plaques that say, Marie Curie or Modigliani lived here, without anyone telling or knowing the story? Settis has said that cities tend to die in three ways: when a ruthless enemy destroys them, like Carthage; when invaders colonize and despoil the gods; and when the residents become strangers to themselves in their neighborhood. The role that city has had and has had in comparison with others, its uniqueness, its diversity, and its culture, is forgotten. 

It is not nostalgia for the present. It is yet another sign that cities are getting further and further away from being intelligent.

Will the snake bite its tail again?