Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Current Issue

Throughout history, the coasts have been an important source of wealth as well as strategic points for defending the territory. From the 1950s onwards, a vast number of buildings began to appear on the Spanish coasts, colonizing the surroundings and turning them into an enormous tourist space. Although a significant proportion of this construction is of appalling architectural quality, forming part of a chaotic urban development process which destroyed natural ecosystems, some alternative models also emerged, seeking a different kind of relationship with the environment. Fernando Higueras, who, together with his friend César Manrique proposed a distinctive approach to the island of Lanzarote, is an outstanding figure in this respect. Blending into and respecting the habitats in which they were planned, his proposals responded to the demands for new tourist accommodations by drawing on the traditions of local vernacular architecture.

The resurgence in 1970s Spanish painting of the Mediterranean aesthetic (at least as a topic of a debate) entailed a utopian vision of the tourist city. The promise of tourism development permeated the realist (or ‘committed’, as it was called at the time) paintings when the artists used the opportunity to trade the sordid imagery of the previous decades for an imaginary evoking pleasure and warmth and suggesting a new urban utopia. This article overviews various versions of this utopia: from the images of the Mediterranean by Guillermo Pérez Villalta and Equipo Crónica to the impacts of art museums on urban development, from Cuenca to Bilbao.

When urban spaces are concerned, Americanization was a cornerstone of the tourist utopia in Spain. In its quest for economic modernization, the development of tourism in the 1960s and 1970s brought about immediate changes in the landscape, which was remodelled to become consumable. Objectivizing both the tourist experience and the consumerism that it induces, postcards offer a meaningful example of this new world in colour. By putting into circulation the developmental ‘ideal’, postcards also highlighted its fragility and foreshadowed its destruction. Utopia or development? Postcards do not lie, or do they?

Ten-Bel was built in the Canary Islands in the 1960s and 1970s. At the time, it was one of the largest holiday resorts in Spain and a pioneering site of touristic development in the south of Tenerife. More than five thousand tourist beds were integrated into a modern architecture with large green areas, where the guests were offered a wide range of leisure activities and international shows. In the 1980s, however, the lack of investment led to a loss of prestige, and it became increasingly difficult for Ten-Bel to compete with the growing number of new offers in the nearby tourist areas. At the beginning of the new millennium, after several unsuccessful attempts to renovate the complex and make it more profitable, the resort was split up and sold off in parts. This confusing division occurred without first finding a solution for the municipal utilities, which were centralized for each tourist complex and did not offer an individual option for the new owners. In addition, there was no agreement on the maintenance of the common areas and parks. These were left in a state of dilapidation. Ten-Bel is an exceptional case, not only because of its outstanding architecture, commercial success or innovative management, but also because it illustrates the problems that arise when a tourist complex is converted to residential use. It is a paradigmatic example to examine the beginnings of touristification in Spain and the contradictions of this new utopia.

Magical South is a major detour around my own island, taking a road between urban enclaves in which the popular dynamics of neighbourhoods rub up against and collide with the ‘tourist bubble’, the prototypal closed space for tourism removed from the local. This theoretical ‘photoshoot’ of sorts endeavours to disclose the unconsciousness in operation when we cross through the tourist city, imbued in a semiotics that recreates a time, repetitions and a chaotic visual mesh. It begins with Walter Benjamin’s appraisal of the mechanism that enables copies to continue facilitating motivation for tourist travel. This returns us to the detour without detracting from the critique of the bunkerization of the city through processes like gentrification, paying attention to how everyday violence also runs through ordinary affects and the mainstream banality created by tourism.