Lisbon isn’t just about its beautiful tiles, food scene, and sunsets. There’s also the intangible things like family networks, old neighbours, cultural routines, saudade, and its hopes.
It becomes a form of exploitation when investors are allowed to bid for a culture nurtured over generations, prune the rough edges, and then sell access for maximum profit…rendering it beautiful, but hollow. Meanwhile, those who created much of its value are left with higher rents, weaker communities, and a growing sense that their own country no longer has room for them.
But at least it enriches a narrow class /s
To be crystal clear, I don’t think tourism itself is the danger. Tourism brings money, jobs, visibility, and cultural exchange. The danger is this modern extractive form of it. And it doesn’t take much imagination to consider the consequences. I’d only need to look at London (where I was born and raised) to notice how wealth preserved the surface while the life beneath it can feel precarious.
I write this seemingly naively, as if private equity and wealthy investors are merely oblivious to the effects of their quarterly goals. Unfortunately, and with great insomnia, I know it’s a business model: privatise the gains and socialise the losses (i.e. the intangible negative externalities). All enabled by regulatory capture, political incentives, and a dash of scorn that community isn’t as profitable as individual isolationism.
I can’t seem to pinpoint moral imagination anymore. It’s quiet. I struggle between accepting accumulation as an inevitable human impulse, and whether surrendering to that conclusion is a kind of defeat itself. Greed often feels more powerful than kindness, because it’s easier: easier to take than to care, easier to extract than to preserve, easier for a few determined people to damage what many gentler people are trying to protect.
I don’t think a country should measure success primarily by how much capital it attracts, or how much property appreciates. Surely a humanistic approach, which, correct me if I’m wrong, relates to what we are, would be: can its young people afford to live near their family? Can an elderly resident remain in the neighbourhood they know? Can workers in the tourism economy build stable lives from the wealth they help generate? Do local people feel included in the future of their own city?