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    "title": "Overrun",
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    "text": "Cover — provided as a courtesy\n\n\n\n\n\nThis volume was not intended as a study of urban decline. It began as an attempt to live, quietly, in a city one had previously managed to love at a manageable distance.\n\nCivic Darwinism could well be a series of essays on the transformation of urban space — its habitability, its civic fabric, and the mechanisms by which it ceases, gradually and without announcement, to function for the people who live in it. The experiences that prompted this volume took place, for the most part, in a medium-sized Andalusian city of considerable architectural distinction — the kind of place that rewards prolonged attention and that has, in recent years, been rewarding a rather different kind of attention altogether. The narrator has lived, at various points, in other cities along the Mediterranean coast, and has found the essential pattern sufficiently consistent to suggest that the argument is not, in the end, parochial. It is, however, personal. The decision to write about urban degradation as a resident rather than as an analyst was taken at the precise moment I realised that what had seemed a local inconvenience was, in fact, a structural condition — and that its costs were being borne, in ways that did not invite easy equanimity, by people considerably less well-placed than I was to absorb them.\nThe five central chapters examine the city through five perspectives: the returning long-term resident, the daily commuter, the citizen without leisure, the flâneur in public space, and the modestly-paid professional who finds himself guiding a young Erasmus student through a rental market he has long since stopped questioning. That last task, I should add, feels less like assistance than like an unwilling audit of his own accommodation. These five are not exhaustive; they cover, between them, the ordinary range of urban experience — memory, mobility, the body, public space, and the condition of being a reliable guide to a place that has stopped being navigable.\nThe argument that follows is informed, in places it will signal rather than advertise, by Lefebvre’s insistence that urban space is a social product and that the right to inhabit it is a political claim rather than a consumer preference (1968). It is informed, in other places, by Cócola-Gant’s documentation of how tourism markets convert housing stock into a different kind of asset, and residents into a different kind of variable (2018). The remaining references — Zukin on the commoditisation of authenticity, Sennett on the erosion of public codes, Augé and Koolhaas on what is left when specificity has been engineered out — surface in the chapters where they become necessary, which is more often than I would have preferred.\nA recent essay has proposed that what residents of transformed cities experience is best understood as a form of urban disaffection — a falling-out-of-love whose structure resembles the end of a personal relationship (Casado, 2026). The metaphor is apt in one respect: the estrangement is real, and the person experiencing it did not choose it. It is misleading in another: the causes are not emotional but institutional, and treating the condition as heartbreak risks exempting the responsible parties from the analysis.\nA note on the narrator, in the third person, because some things are easier to say about oneself when one has briefly agreed to be someone else. He is a moderately qualified professional — qualified enough to know what the qualification cost, and experienced enough to have quietly accepted that the labour market has its own views on what that cost was worth. The postcode he inhabits is not the one he would have chosen; this has become, over time, less a source of grievance than a recurring confirmation of a suspicion he would prefer not to hold. What it has given him, as compensation of a sort, is an unusually attentive relationship with the indicators of urban habitability in the areas he knows well. He notes, with some discomfort, that when he was a student he had access, as a matter of course, to conditions adequate to the demands of a serious discipline: affordable, reasonably quiet, and not subject to the continuous small emergencies that the current housing market reserves for those who arrive in a city without a prior claim on it. He does not regard this as nostalgia. He regards it as a baseline — and its disappearance as a fact requiring explanation rather than acceptance.\nA note on how this volume was composed is set out in the Note on Authorship and Method.\n\nGranada, 2026\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFigure 1\n\n\n\nPlate I. Urban streetscape, city centre, western Europe, present day. A mature resident consumes a ‘Heritage Blend’ hot beverage whilst appraising signage that promises, in aggregate: curated experiences, a concept space, premium co-living, a calm mobility corridor, and the good life. A wheeled suitcase, unattended, occupies the pavement. The proprietor of the nearest establishment has chosen to describe his premises as ‘Local Local’, a formulation whose redundancy may be deliberate. Traffic conditions visible to the right have not been classified. The resident’s expression suggests familiarity. Provenance unknown; the scene has been documented in forty-seven cities without material variation.\n\n\n\n\n\nCasado, Diego. (2026, April 10). El libro que explica cómo superar el desamor por lo urbano: «Hay que cambiar las ciudades para cambiar el mundo». elDiario.es. https://www.eldiario.es/madrid/somos/libro-explica-superar-desamor-urbano-hay-cambiar-ciudades-cambiar-mundo_1_13108130.html\n\n\nCócola-Gant, Agustín. (2018). Tourism gentrification. In Loretta Lees & Martin Phillips (Eds.), Handbook of gentrification studies (pp. 281–293). Edward Elgar.\n\n\nLefebvre, Henri. (1968). Le droit à la ville. Anthropos.",
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    "title": "A City Still Worth Loving",
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    "text": "I should state, for the record, that the Granada I am about to describe was not a paradise. It merely had the distinctive quality of being a city one could afford to live in while learning how to think.\n\nIn the early 1990s Granada was, by any reasonable measure, the principal university city of eastern Andalusia: a provincial capital of some two hundred and fifty thousand residents whose demographic centre of gravity had been quietly colonised by the student body of the Universidad de Granada. The Ministry’s historical series records just over sixty thousand undergraduates enrolled in 1991–1992; the university currently reports in excess of seventy thousand students across all levels. The figures and their implications are examined more fully in Chapter 5; what matters here is not the headline number but the distribution. The university was not a campus at the edge of town; it was dispersed across the city in such a way that a substantial share of the population, on any given weekday, was walking between a lecture theatre and somewhere else. A student, a hospital orderly, a junior lecturer, a retired mason and a shift worker could each find, within a short walk of where they lived or worked, a place that served them on terms they recognised. That infrastructure of affordable sociability was not concentrated in the half-dozen streets that subsequent decades selected for conversion. It was distributed. The difference, it turns out, was everything.\nThe word that gives this chapter its subtitle requires a brief defence, because the alternative terms — collapse, decay, destruction, ruin — are all wrong in a way that matters. Granada in 2026 has not collapsed. Its centre stands, its monuments are maintained to a standard that exceeds what most European cities can presently afford, its hotels are full, and its tourism statistics remain the envy of provincial capitals across the Mediterranean. By any metric the city’s tourist board would think to publish, the city is doing well. By several metrics that no tourist board would publish, it has stopped doing the thing it was, until recently, also doing — which is functioning as a system of shared civic life for the people who live in it.\nA threshold, in the sense this volume will use the term, is the point past which a system continues to operate but no longer operates for the same constituency (see threshold). It is not a moment of breakdown and it is rarely announced. It is, on the contrary, the result of a series of decisions — taken at different times by different agents, mostly in good faith and within the law — whose cumulative effect is to convert a place that worked for its residents into a place that works for someone else. The question this volume puts to Granada is not whether the conversion has begun, which is no longer in dispute, but at what point it became irreversible, and what the lived experience of that point feels like for someone who was paying attention without yet knowing what to call it.\nOne establishment in particular survives in memory with the clarity of things one has not yet learned to describe properly. It was a small bar whose legal capacity, had anyone asked, would have been somewhere in the region of ten persons, including the proprietor, who also did the cooking, the serving, and the greeting of regulars whose names he had known since before they were regulars. On a Friday evening at its busiest it contained, by unhurried count, around thirty. A party who could not plausibly be accommodated within the premises would, on the proprietor’s own initiative, be served through the street window: bottles of beer passed out horizontally, the small plate that came with each drink handed across with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone for whom the arrangement was neither unusual nor, in any meaningful sense, against the rules. The rules, in any case, were understood to be the sort that existed for different premises.\nI am aware that this is already beginning to sound like charm, which is precisely the distortion I want to resist. The bar’s ventilation would now be classed as a public health hazard. The tapas sat on an unrefrigerated counter in a way that anyone paying attention to seafood should have found more alarming than they apparently did. The self-correction is necessary here, because it is exactly where nostalgia does its damage: by converting the absence of a better alternative into a positive quality of the thing remembered.\nThe corrective is empirical. What that bar and those shared flats and those walkable circuits provided was not charm. It was a system of provisioning for a particular kind of inhabitant — the not-yet-productive citizen, the student, the underpaid young professional — on terms that the inhabitant could meet. When a city stops being able to provision that category of person at a price they can pay, what it loses is not atmosphere. It loses the conditions under which a university town is a university town rather than a conference venue with seminars attached. Cócola-Gant’s work on the reconfiguration of central districts under tourist pressure (2018) describes the mechanism precisely; what he does not describe, because it would not be his business to, is how quickly the mechanism can be mistaken for weather.\nI return to Granada now as someone who has learned to describe, in technical language, what he once simply used. This is not an improvement. It is the thing this volume is about.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFigure 2.1\n\n\n\nPlate II. Establishment, unnamed, eastern Andalusia, c. 1990. Legal capacity: ten. Observed capacity on a Friday evening: approximately thirty, plus proprietor, who also served as cook and, when required, as window. Service through the street window was not, at the time, considered remarkable, and was not, at the time, remarked upon. Private collection.\n\n\n\n\n\nCócola-Gant, Agustín. (2018). Tourism gentrification. In Loretta Lees & Martin Phillips (Eds.), Handbook of gentrification studies (pp. 281–293). Edward Elgar.",
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    "text": "It is a peculiarity of the returning long-term resident that he notices, within the first forty-eight hours, precisely the things that the city prefers him not to see. The tourist arrives with a camera; the former resident arrives with a memory, which is considerably more damaging.\n\n\nThe axis of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón and the streets behind the Facultad de Derecho formed one such perimeter. The lower Albaicín and the approaches to Gran Vía formed another. Both were already familiar enough to outsiders to risk being mistaken, in retrospect, for the whole story. They were not.\nAround the three large hospitals — El Clínico, Ruiz de Alda and Traumatología — the Barrio de los Doctores sustained a dense local economy of bars in a register brisker and less ornamented than the centre’s. The clientele was hospital staff, medical students, and the families of patients who had travelled in from villages across the province for an appointment or a longer stay. The contrast between rural arrival and urban transaction produced an atmosphere unlike any other in the city: prices adjusted for people with no margin for surprises, an instinctive courtesy at the bar, and the regular small surprise of recognising someone. A taxi driver who had brought a parcel from a relative. A neighbour from a town two valleys over delivering bread and clean clothes to a nephew enrolled in his first year at the university. These encounters were not picturesque. They were the unremarkable infrastructure by which a provincial capital remained continuous with its hinterland.\nAround the Facultad de Ciencias, the ascending stretches of Camino de Ronda produced another perimeter, less concentrated but more continuous. The cafeterias and small bars there accommodated the rhythm of science undergraduates: earlier mornings, shorter lunches, longer laboratory afternoons. The student flats above and around them sustained a generational density which the local businesses recognised. Students were not a marginal demographic to be tolerated but the principal category of customer, and the prices reflected the calculation.\nThe neighbourhood of El Zaidín, larger and more internally varied than any of the above, sustained at least two distinct registers depending on proximity to the centre and to the main access roads. Around La Hípica, the bars and cafeterias resembled in tone the perimeters closer to the university — slightly cheaper, somewhat less student-saturated, but recognisable. Further south, around Santa Adela, the register changed entirely. The clientele was no longer students but workers in low-qualification trades and the pensioners who lived in the housing blocks then standing. Several of those blocks have since been described as precarious, and a number have been demolished and replaced by structures more than twice as tall, built in the apparent hurry of recent peripheral construction and carrying the anonymous aspect that such hurry tends to leave behind. The football stadium nearby manages the same architectural register: relatively new, cheap, industrially produced. The bars and outdoor terraces between Avenida de Dílar and the stadium served their customers on terms which assumed, correctly, that those customers were not going anywhere else. La Chana, further out and socially distinct from all of the above, sustained a traditional repertoire of neighbourhood bars and outdoor terraces whose clientele was predominantly local and whose prices reflected that fact.\nTwo of these perimeters — the Barrio de los Doctores and the streets around Santa Adela — form, in retrospect, the baseline of what one might cautiously call habitable urban space. They were not the most charming. They were not the most photographed. But they were the places where the use was frequent enough, the prices recognisable enough, and the welcome reliable enough that visiting them produced, almost involuntarily, the impression of belonging. That impression is the thing the volume is principally about, because it is the thing that has been most thoroughly dismantled. The point of this enumeration, then, is not to produce a nostalgic atlas. It is to record that the infrastructure of affordable sociability was distributed across the municipality, not concentrated in the half-dozen streets that subsequent decades have selected for conversion. A student, a hospital orderly, a junior lecturer, a retired mason and a shift worker could each find, within a short walk of where they lived or worked, a place that served them on terms they recognised. The disappearance of some of these perimeters and the transformation of others is not a uniform phenomenon, and the chapters that follow try to keep the differences in view.\nThe evening I am thinking of ended earlier than most. The bar normally closed at around one in the morning; on this occasion it closed shortly before eleven, and it did so by the simple expedient of admitting the window-side party, waiting for the other customers to finish and leave, and then locking up. The decision, as I understood it at the time and have had no reason to revise since, rested on a single empirical observation: the group was drinking beer at a rate which, multiplied by the minimum obligatory plate per round, would exhaust the kitchen’s entire stock of seafood and fish before midnight. Closing early was not a gesture of hospitality. It was an exercise in inventory management, conducted with the precision of someone who had done the arithmetic in his head while uncorking the eighth bottle.\nNot every proprietor in the category merited the same defence. One of the nearest establishments of comparable ambition was a beer house whose tapas consisted of salted nuts and, on generous days, a slice of dry sausage. Another, smaller still and even less ventilated, served almost exclusively a snail broth ladled into short glasses, which the customer was expected to consume as if it were a drink — an arrangement which, on a sufficiently cold evening, had its defenders. The contrast clarifies the point. This proprietor did merit the defence, and the distinction is worth preserving, because it is the distinction on which a significant part of the argument will eventually rest.\nThere was, moreover, the matter of what followed the closing of the door. Once the seafood-bound party had been admitted and the bar locked behind them, the proprietor — who was, as established, also the cook, the waiter and, when required, the window — would set down his apron, pour himself a glass, and join the group as one more drinker, contributing his views on the subjects that mattered with the same unhurried directness he applied to seafood. One such evening was, by the accepted local arithmetic, sufficient to count thereafter as kinship. A certain amount of what I remember as conviviality was, in retrospect, tolerance for conditions that had not yet acquired the dignity of being called substandard. This is the point at which the argument has to become careful, because it is exactly here that nostalgia does its damage: by converting the absence of a better alternative into a positive quality of the thing remembered.\n\nThe decline has since been documented at scale, though not without friction. Between 2010 and 2024 the number of beverage establishments in Spain fell by just over nineteen per cent, from 202,720 to 163,890 (see Table 10.1); the loss was distributed unevenly across the autonomous communities (Table 10.2), and the statistical apparatus through which it can be observed was not designed to see the kind of establishment this volume is chiefly concerned with (see A note on measurement). A partial inventory of the Granada closures that reached the local press between 2017 and 2024 is included in Table 10.3. The loss is neither recent nor local. What is local is what the loss has replaced, and what it has not.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFigure 3.1\n\n\n\nPlate III. Commercial transition, central Granada, present day. Three premises simultaneously available: two proprietors have retired; one has closed permanently, having had the courtesy to say so. The incoming tenants — a global financial institution and a burger franchise that describes itself as the customer’s new favourite before the customer has been consulted — have secured prominent signage above the shuttered ironwork. The Alhambra occupies the background in its customary capacity. A delivery vehicle passes without stopping, which is the appropriate response. Four residents, carrying bags that suggest they have managed to find food somewhere, assess the situation. Their expressions are not recorded.",
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    "text": "The roundabout, in its civic conception, is an instrument for the orderly resolution of competing trajectories. In Granada it has been quietly reclassified as a venue for the assertion of priority by means other than the Highway Code.\n\n\nA reasonable place to begin is with the observation that the journey to work in this city is not, in any meaningful sense, a commute. It is a sequence of negotiations, each of which has a nominal rule and an operative one, and the daily task of the commuter is to learn the difference and to act on the second without admitting, even privately, that he is doing so. The nominal rules are posted on signs, painted on the asphalt and codified in a body of law to which the city pays a form of attention I shall come to in a moment. The operative rules are distributed by example, refreshed every morning, and enforced by the simple expedient of being followed by enough other drivers that any individual deviation feels, at the wheel, like a private form of sabotage.\nI want to be precise about the temptation I am about to resist. The temptation is to attribute what follows to a regional disposition — the famously brusque granadino at the wheel, the raised hand, the unsignalled lane change executed with the particular conviction of a man who is, in his own estimation, already late. There is enough anecdotal material in any twenty-minute crossing of Camino de Ronda to fund such an account indefinitely. The account would, however, be wrong, or at any rate wrong in the way that matters. What I am describing is not a character. It is a learned norm, in Sennett’s sense (2018): a code that the city’s road users absorb by participation, refine by repetition and transmit by example to the next cohort of arrivals, including the ones who arrived recently enough to remember being shocked. The character is downstream of the norm. So am I.\nThe first stretch of any morning tour passes the perimeters of two schools and the access road to a third. Around each of these the operative rule, observable any weekday between half-past seven and a quarter past nine, is that the parental double-park is a courtesy extended by the urban environment to those whose transport of a child overrides any subsequent claim on the same lane. Triple-parking occurs, more rarely, and discloses itself by the third vehicle’s hazard lights, which are understood to convert any infraction into a temporary and therefore forgivable one. The single-lane sections of these streets collapse, with the predictability of a tide, into columns through which cyclists, scooters and other parents in slower vehicles must pick a route whose only available description is between. None of this is policed, in the sense that one could reasonably expect a presence; it is observed, periodically, by a municipal officer whose principal effect on the system is to displace the double-parking by approximately fifteen metres in the direction the officer is not facing.\nRoundabouts, of which the city has many and on which a great deal of its peripheral traffic depends, operate under a parallel norm whose internal logic I have spent some time trying to articulate without rancour. The norm is that priority within the roundabout, which the law assigns to the vehicle already inside, is treated as a default subject to override by several locally significant variables: the colour and trim package of the entering vehicle, the apparent urgency of its driver’s facial expression, and the time of day. The aggravating factor is that the override is not consistent enough to be predictable. One learns to enter slowly, to avoid the inside lane on principle, and to assume that any vehicle visible in a feeder road may, with full sincerity, be planning to assert a priority it does not technically have. The school runs and the morning peak intensify the pattern; the late evening softens it without removing it; and at four in the morning, when the density of vehicles has dropped to the point where the question of priority is essentially hypothetical, one will still occasionally encounter a driver who treats the roundabout as a slalom course on which his being there at all is a sufficient claim to the racing line. I have, in moments of fatigue, found this funny. It is not. It is the second thing I want to correct.\nWhat complicates the geometry of the roundabouts is that several of the busiest are positioned within a few metres of a traffic light, and several of those traffic lights are positioned within a few metres of a bus stop at which passengers continue to board and alight after the light has turned green. The practical effect, repeated dozens of times each morning across the city, is that three lanes feeding into the roundabout attempt to converge into two, the two attempt to converge into one around the stationary bus, and the resulting funnel delivers a small population of frustrated drivers into the roundabout at a rate the roundabout was never designed to absorb. The tram, when it crosses the system at certain junctions, periodically closes a feeder road altogether, and the back-up reaches several blocks. None of these elements is, in itself, an outrage. They are the consequence of decisions taken at different times, by different agencies, mostly within their own narrow remits and largely in good faith, and their combined effect is the kind of friction that no individual agency can be held to account for, because no single agency designed it. This is the texture of what Augé called the non-lieu (1992): not the absence of place, but the substitution of transit through for being in, until the distinction stops being available even to the people who used to live there.\nThe body of law I mentioned earlier deserves a word. In 2014 the Defensor del Pueblo Andaluz (the Andalusian Ombudsman, a regional office with powers of investigation and public censure but without binding executive authority), having compared sanction volumes across Andalusian capitals, opened a formal enquiry into why the city of Granada was issuing roughly 215,000 traffic fines per year, against around 137,000 in Málaga, which is larger and has more vehicles, and around 74,000 in Córdoba, which is comparable in both (Defensor del Pueblo Andaluz, 2014). The institution found no plausible explanation in the relative behaviour of drivers and concluded, with considerable diplomatic care, that the discrepancy required either a revision of mobility policy or a revision of inspection practice — that is, in either reading, that the city was sanctioning more not because its drivers were worse but because its sanctioning apparatus had been calibrated differently. The twelve years since have produced no obvious change in the pattern. It is possible, then, to inhabit a city in which the operative norms of driving are observably worse than the written ones and in which the sanctioning machinery, far from correcting that gap, runs alongside it as a parallel and largely revenue-relevant system. The two coexist. This is not a paradox; it is what happens when enforcement is decoupled from the norms it was supposed to discipline.\n\nThe cost of the gap is not abstract. According to the Comisión Provincial de Tráfico, forty people died in thirty-five fatal collisions on the province’s interurban roads during 2025; this is a reduction of eleven per cent in fatalities relative to 2024, but hospitalised injuries rose by seven per cent over the same period (Redacción ahoraGranada, 2026). Of those forty deaths, seventeen were vulnerable users — motorcyclists, moped riders, cyclists and pedestrians. The provisional figures for the province as a whole, presented at the November commemorative act, are starker: 575 accidents with victims, thirty-four fatalities, seventy-eight seriously injured and eight hundred and nineteen minor injuries (Rodríguez, 2025). Translated into the terms of this chapter, the trend is that fewer commuters are killed and more are broken. The decline of fatalities owes something to vehicle safety, something to enforcement on the high-capacity rings, and very little to any recalibration of the operative norms inside the city itself. The air the survivors breathe, meanwhile, has exceeded the annual NO₂ limit of 40 μg/m³ at the Granada-Norte station for several consecutive years, and the ozone monitor at Armilla recorded forty-two days above the protective threshold in a single summer against a legal maximum of twenty-five (Ecologistas en Acción, 2019). The pollutants and the driving norms have the same source.\n\nI notice, on rereading the previous paragraph, that I have again allowed the data to do the moral work I was trying to keep the prose from doing. The correction is this: the figures do not, by themselves, indict anyone. They establish that the daily commute is, statistically, a low-grade and continuous production of injury, and that this production is distributed unevenly across categories of road user — with the vulnerable ones, as the Comisión put it in language drained of any discernible affect, requiring “preventive measures adjusted to their exposure to risk”. A motorcyclist filtering between double-parked vehicles outside a school is exposed in a sense the Highway Code does not capture. So is the parent who has double-parked, who has done so because the alternative — finding a legal space within walking distance — would cost them fifteen minutes they do not have, in a city whose public transport, on the routes that would replace their journey, saturates to the point of leaving them at the kerb at the very hour they need it most. The norms are not free-standing. They are the rational adaptation of a population to a system whose official version cannot be made to function for them.\nThis is where the chapter has to stop, because the alternative is to slide into a recommendation, and the volume is not in the business of recommendations. What the commuter learns, over the years, is a compound of small skills — anticipation, lane discipline of a peculiar local kind, the ability to read at speed which of two converging vehicles is bluffing — that he would prefer not to have had to acquire and that he cannot unlearn even when he travels to cities where they are not required. He brings them home with him, applies them to his own streets, and confirms, daily, that they continue to work. Their working is the problem.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFigure 4.1\n\n\n\nPlate IV. Urban access junction, Granada periphery, present day, half-past eight in the morning. Two Safe School Route signs are visible; their placement has been noted. Several vehicles have interrupted their forward motion to discharge children directly into the lane; their relationship to the Highway Code has not been established. A cyclist occupies the central ground, technically in possession of the right of way and practically of very little else. The signs remain legible throughout.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAugé, Marc. (1992). Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Seuil.\n\n\nDefensor del Pueblo Andaluz. (2014). Queremos saber porqué las sanciones de tráfico en Granada son muy superiores al resto de provincias con similar parque móvil. Queja de oficio, resumen del resultado. https://www.defensordelpuebloandaluz.es/queremos-saber-porque-las-sanciones-de-trafico-en-granada-son-muy-superior-al-resto-de-provincias\n\n\nEcologistas en Acción. (2019). La pesadilla de la contaminación en Granada. Ecologistas en Acción. https://www.ecologistasenaccion.org/129043/la-pesadilla-de-la-contaminacion-en-granada/\n\n\nRedacción ahoraGranada. (2026). Las víctimas mortales en carretera en Granada descienden un 11% pero aumentan los heridos hospitalizados. ahoraGranada. https://www.ahoragranada.com/noticias/las-victimas-mortales-en-carretera-en-granada-descienden-un-11-pero-aumentan-los-heridos-hospitalizados/\n\n\nRodríguez, Alba. (2025). Las carreteras granadinas registran más de 30 muertos este 2025. Granada Digital. https://www.granadadigital.es/muertos-trafico-granada-2025/\n\n\nSennett, Richard. (2018). Building and dwelling: Ethics for the city. Allen Lane.",
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    "text": "The right to walk through one’s own city without ambient sound levels that would be considered grounds for complaint in an industrial workplace is not, technically, listed among the fundamental rights of European citizenship. This is an oversight that the data are making increasingly difficult to ignore.\n\nThe expression citizen without leisure is not meant ironically, although the irony is available if one wants it. It refers to a precise condition: the inhabitant whose hours outside paid work are spent attempting to perform an unproductive activity — walking, sitting in a park, reading at a window, sleeping, preparing for an examination — in conditions that the city has steadily made unfit for that activity. The condition is not dramatic. It is the slow withdrawal of a particular kind of provisioning that the urban environment is supposed, when it is functioning as a city rather than as a service platform, to deliver as a matter of course.\nOne should begin with what does not surprise the resident any longer, which is the traffic baseline. The depopulation of Granada’s central districts over the last fifteen years — well documented and not disputed even by those whose interests it serves — has had no observable effect on the ambient acoustic conditions of the same districts. Whatever the arithmetic of resident departure has been, the arithmetic of vehicle throughput has more than absorbed it. The principal access roads remain congested at the predictable hours; the roundabouts at the entries to the autovía have, as the previous chapter noted, been quietly reconverted into collectors whose acoustic emission is continuous; and the cobbled streets of the historic perimeter contribute a particular and underappreciated effect, in which a single passing motorcycle produces a sound profile roughly equivalent to that of several vehicles on conventional asphalt. The cobbles are charming. They are also, considered as a surface, an amplifier.\nOnto this baseline the city has, over the same period, encouraged the proliferation of outdoor hospitality terraces with what one can only describe as a notable absence of restraint. Their distribution across the central streets and squares is not, in any obvious sense, the result of planning; it has the character of a network deployed by trial and error to intercept passing pedestrians by something close to physical capture. Once captured, and after the second or third round, the captured contribute their own share to the sound field, and the field rises accordingly. This is not a complaint about the captured. It is an observation about the geometry of the network and about the silence of the regulatory record concerning its acoustic externalities.\nThe parks in which a citizen might attempt to escape the foregoing arrangement are themselves arranged in a way that makes escape conditional. The Parque Federico García Lorca, the largest of the central green spaces, is bounded on its longer side by an autovía of three lanes in each direction, one of which is an uphill on-ramp fed by a roundabout of the kind described in the previous chapter; the driver who emerges from that roundabout, having survived it, accelerates onto the on-ramp with the particular conviction of a man asserting both his relief and his determination to match the speed of the traffic he is joining, and the park receives the result. On the opposite side the same park is hemmed in by the three operative lanes of Calle Arabial, which on certain afternoons present themselves to the pedestrian as four. The noise gradient from these two borders inwards is such that respite is available only within a relatively small interior core, the size of which the regular user learns to estimate without the aid of a meter.\nThe smaller green spaces are organised on a similar logic with the proportions reversed. Those between the Paseo de los Basilios and the Paseo del Salón–Paseo de la Bomba, the dispersed pockets of the Serrallo such as the Parque García Arrabal, and the Parque Tico Medina are too narrow in their busiest stretches for the passage of even a single moped to leave the bench-sitter undisturbed; in the Tico Medina, the additional courtesy of six autovía lanes along the broader side has been incorporated into the design. The Parque Lagos has been provided with one of the busiest roundabouts in the city at one of its corners, and the Parque Carlos Cano labours under an arrangement of similar inspiration. The arithmetic of perimeter to area is not in the citizen’s favour. The parks are real, well-maintained and adequate to look at; what they lack is the buffer that would let them perform the function for which the citizen had hoped to use them.\nI notice that I am beginning to sound aggrieved, which is the wrong register for the argument. The personal annoyance of one resident with a normally functioning auditory system and a flat with reasonable insulation is not an indicator of anything in particular. It is, at best, the prompt that sends one to look for the indicator. The indicator exists.\n\nThe World Health Organization’s Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region (2018) recommend that road-traffic noise exposure remain below 53 dB Lden by day and 45 dB Lnight by night, on the explicit grounds — the document is unusually direct on the point — that exposures above these thresholds are associated with increased risks of cardiovascular disease, sleep disturbance, cognitive impairment in children and the kind of chronic stress responses that are difficult to reverse once established.\nThe WHO thresholds are a floor and not a ceiling, and the subsequent literature has developed them in directions the original document deliberately left open (Jarosińska et al., 2018). Particular attention has been paid to the effect of ambient noise on cognitive performance in school-age children (Gheller et al., 2023), and one might reasonably extend the concern beyond the schoolroom: whatever auditory sensitivity attenuates after the age of twenty, the corresponding need for cognitive calm does not, because the tasks demanded by serious study and by skilled professional work compensate by becoming more exacting rather than less (Razai et al., 2025). At any age, sleep interference produces effects on mood and on reflexes whose consequences are not confined to the bedroom — a fact that may go some way towards explaining what happens, at certain hours, at the roundabouts described in the previous chapter.\nThe European Environment Agency’s most recent aggregate audit estimates that approximately twenty-two million Europeans experience chronic high annoyance from environmental noise and around six and a half million experience chronic sleep disturbance attributable to it (2020). Granada’s strategic noise map, prepared as required under the European Noise Directive (2002), identifies a substantial fraction of the central and ring-road population as exposed to levels above the WHO road-traffic threshold by day, and a smaller but clinically significant fraction as exposed above the night threshold. The translation from those figures to the experience of the resident is not difficult. It is the translation the chapter has been quietly performing throughout.\n\nThe attentive observer will have noticed that the parameters above worsen perceptibly each weekend, in every season, and that they worsen further between March and October when the weather is good enough to make the outdoor rounds attractive. The same observer will have noticed that the shaded zones — the only patches of central Granada where the summer afternoon does not require physical retreat — are also the zones where the lucrative activity of terraces and restaurants concentrates with the greatest density. The unproductive aspirations of the stroller and the productive operations of the hospitality sector compete for the same square metres, and the question of which has the prior claim is settled, in practice, by which is paying the licence fee.\nThe dimension of all this that interests me most, because it is the one in which the cost is least visible and most consequential, is the one borne by students. A non-trivial share of the central housing stock that has not yet been converted to short-term tourist accommodation is rented to undergraduates, and a non-trivial share of those flats sit directly above, beside, or within audible range of the bars and terraces whose busiest hours coincide with the hours that the students depending on those flats need to read, write and sleep. The walls of those flats are the walls Spanish residential construction conventionally provides, which is to say that they support furniture and people but offer almost no resistance to a normal conversation, the operation of an ordinary domestic appliance, or the accumulated noise of a third round on the street below. It will not surprise the reader to learn that the principal demand of the student representative bodies of the Universidad de Granada, repeated across at least five successive cohorts of delegates — which is to say across two decades — has been the provision of adequate study rooms: silent, ventilated, of regulated temperature. The persistence of the demand is the most reliable indicator of the persistence of the conditions that produce it.\nThe temptation here is to translate this into a programme — quiet zones, terrace caps, decibel limits at source, study-room provision as a municipal obligation — and the temptation should be resisted, at least within the covers of this volume, because the moment the argument becomes a list of demands it will be misread as a list of demands and the underlying point will disappear. The underlying point is descriptive: a city that has stopped being able to provide silence to those whose work requires it has stopped being able to perform one of its quieter and more important functions. Sennett’s account of the city as a setting in which strangers sustain coexistence through minimally shared codes (2018) is, among other things, an account of what a city loses when those codes — including the unwritten one about not shouting beneath another person’s window past midnight — cease to be enforced even by mutual recognition.\nThe third correction, and the last, is the one I find hardest to make. It is the suspicion that I am describing a condition that has always been present in Mediterranean cities and that the difference is in my own diminishing tolerance for it rather than in the city. I have tested the suspicion against the only available control, which is the testimony of long-resident neighbours older than I am and with no professional incentive to complain, and the test does not support it. They report, with the consistency of people who have not co-ordinated their stories, that the conditions have changed, that the change is recent, that it has accelerated, and that it is not, in any obvious sense, reversible without an intervention that they have stopped expecting anyone to make. The body, in the end, is the indicator that the policy documents have not yet learned to read.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFigure 5.1\n\n\n\nPlate V. Bar terrace, residential street, Granada, midday. The establishment operates under a canopy in a condition that suggests long acquaintance with the elements. Eight patrons are seated; drinks and food have been served; the social function of the perimeter is, by any measure, being fulfilled. A motorcycle negotiates the cobbles at a volume proportionate to its displacement. To the right, a Granada Brewing Co. delivery vehicle has reversed to the kerb with the precision available to it. On the first floor, a figure wearing headphones leans from the window in a posture that does not indicate leisure. The headphones appear to be doing their best.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEuropean Environment Agency. (2020). Environmental noise in europe — 2020 (EEA Report 22/2019). European Environment Agency. https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/environmental-noise-in-europe\n\n\nEuropean Parliament and Council of the European Union. (2002). Directive 2002/49/EC of 25 june 2002 relating to the assessment and management of environmental noise. Official Journal of the European Communities, L 189/12, 18 July 2002. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32002L0049\n\n\nGheller, Flavia, Spicciarelli, Gaia, Scimemi, P., & Arfé, Barbara. (2023). The effects of noise on children’s cognitive performance: A systematic review. Environment and Behavior, 55(8-10), 698–734. https://doi.org/10.1177/00139165241245823\n\n\nJarosińska, Dorota, Héroux, Marie-Ève, Wilkhu, P., Creswick, J., Wothge, J., & Paunović, E. (2018). Development of the WHO environmental noise guidelines for the european region: An introduction. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(4), 813. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15040813\n\n\nRazai, Mohammad S. et al. (2025). The impact of noise pollution on health. BMJ, 391, e081193. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2024-081193\n\n\nSennett, Richard. (2018). Building and dwelling: Ethics for the city. Allen Lane.\n\n\nWorld Health Organization. (2018). Environmental noise guidelines for the european region. WHO Regional Office for Europe. https://www.who.int/europe/publications/i/item/9789289053563",
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    "text": "The flâneur, in the tradition that produced the figure, was precisely the one whose virtue lay in not needing to be classified. The contemporary historic centre, alas, has acquired a strong administrative preference for being able to tell at a glance who you are and what you intend to spend.\n\nThere is a particular condition of being a resident that the present chapter wants to describe before the description becomes complaint. It is the condition of standing somewhere in the centre of one’s own city, with no purpose other than to be standing there, and discovering that the city has stopped being able to accommodate the gesture. The discovery does not arrive as an obstruction; obstruction would be easier to name. It arrives as a low, sustained pressure to either consume something, queue for something, or move along. The pressure has no single author. It is the cumulative effect of decisions taken in different offices at different times, each within the legitimate scope of its own competence, whose combined consequence is that the only categories of presence the central districts now reliably recognise are visitor with itinerary and resident with errand. The figure who is neither — the slow, anonymous, non-purposive observer who used to constitute, in the literature on cities, the privileged sensorium of urban life — has been quietly removed from the schedule.\nThe Plaza Bib-Rambla is the case to begin with, because it is the plaza the city’s own tourist materials would still choose, and because what has happened to it can be described without exaggeration. The plaza retains its dimensions, its façades, its central fountain and the old confectionery on its eastern side. What were once booksellers’ kiosks are now, in the main, florists’ kiosks, of which one or two remain open on a given morning; the books appear, when they appear at all, on the days the city authorises the temporary stalls of an artisans’ market or the spring book fair, occasions which have the additional feature of compressing the available walking surface to the exasperating minimum that is now its baseline at any moment of festive intensification. What the plaza has shed, over the period this volume covers, is the proportion of its surface available to a person who is not a customer of one of the hospitality establishments that now occupy it. The chairs face, with the businesslike attention of an audience, the diminishing strip of plaza that remains. The visitor who counts the public benches available for sitting, and then counts the waste containers, will discover that the municipal authorities have, by some procedure not made public, arranged for the second category to outnumber the first.\nIf the imprint of a hospitality terrace on the disputed public realm can be described in any sufficiently drastic register, Bib-Rambla and several of the other emblematic plazas have, in recent years, discovered how. They have moved from chairs and parasols, which at least had the courtesy of being movable, to permanent metal frames fitted with lateral panels of plastic or glass, which delimit each terrace as the architecturally reaffirmed extension of an interior establishment whose floor area is, as a rule, a fraction of the surface its terrace now occupies on a twenty-four-hour basis. The disproportion between the interior the licensee actually owns and the exterior he has been authorised to colonise around the clock is the variable that distinguishes the present arrangement from the older one, in which a terrace at least had the decency to be dismantled overnight and to return what it was not using to the public domain. Where, until recently, only the uniformity of furniture suggested the possibility of an industrial strategy quietly coordinating Granada’s terraces, the new generation of fixed metal structures, awnings and glazed side panels has done away with the need for inference: they colonise the already reduced public space on a permanent and non-removable basis, and they do so under municipal cabinets of differing political signatures whose enthusiastic convergence on the same arrangement would be improbable in the absence of an incentive sufficiently powerful to guarantee it. The footprint exists; it is a measurable thing; the municipal ordinance that defines it is on file; the willingness of the same ordinance to license footprints whose sum approaches the surface of the plaza is the matter for which the explanatory framework is missing, although the framework is not, in the end, particularly difficult to imagine.\nThe fountain at the centre, with the small square of garden around it, holds out with the morale of an institution that has accepted the terms of its defeat and is interested mainly in the dignity of the surrender. It is now the only feature of the plaza that has not been quoted as a candidate for commercial use, although it is probably only a question of time before someone calculates the viability of a smoothie operation with a half-circle of low stools around the basin. To this one should add the LED cone which, having appeared with sufficient regularity around the Christmas period, has ceased to require a season: its absence, at this point, would be the novelty. None of the foregoing will surprise the reader who has walked through the surrounding streets on the way to the plaza: the commercial transformation of the central districts under heaviest tourist load already prepares the visitor, without surprises, for what he will find in this plaza and in the others nearby. Without surprises is the operative phrase. The system has reached the stage at which its outputs are predictable in advance from a single street corner, which is itself a kind of finished state.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFigure 6.1\n\n\n\nPlate VI. Small plaza, central Granada, spring, midday. A nineteenth-century stone fountain occupies the geometric centre of the square; it is functioning. On its left, one establishment has deployed approximately thirty aluminium chairs and twelve tables across the cobbled surface; on its right, another has made a comparable contribution. The resulting configuration leaves a curved asphalt strip of some two metres’ width as the pedestrian right of way, which two individuals are presently exercising, in single file, with the lateral clearance available to them. A third figure has elected to consult her telephone while seated on the fountain’s edge, the fountain being, at this hour, the only unoccupied civic fixture in the square. Several young trees have been planted at intervals; they are providing less shade than the synthetic-fibre awnings extending over them, a circumstance that is expected to resolve itself in due course. The cobblestones beneath the tables are in good condition and are not visible.\n\nThe Carrera del Darro and the Paseo de los Tristes, taken together, form one of the most photographed urban sequences in Europe. The reader who has wondered about the title of this volume and has not yet arrived at a satisfactory gloss will derive one without further assistance from any attempt to walk along either of them on a weekday afternoon in April or on a Saturday morning in any month. The eight-metre cross-section is what it is; the guided groups whose itineraries converge on it walk exactly as a guided visitor is supposed to walk; the slow walker who tries to look up while doing so becomes, by simple geometry, an obstacle. The Cuesta de Gomérez adds a slope to the same problem, which sorts the stream of pedestrians by speed and accelerates the conversion of the slow walker into something the rest of the stream has to flow around. The fault, if the word still applies, lies neither with the visitors nor with the streets but with the geometry into which the numbers have been poured without any corresponding adjustment of the carrying capacity it was designed for.\nI notice that I am within a sentence of beginning to enumerate the other corners of the centre that retain something the chapter values, and I should stop. To name them would be to inscribe them, by the same act, on the list of famously atmospheric spots from which they have so far escaped, and the conferring of that adjective is, on the evidence assembled in this volume, the most reliable single predictor of the subsequent loss of whatever the adjective was meant to register. The kinder service the present chapter can perform on behalf of those corners is to leave them unnamed.\nThe Mirador de San Nicolás was, until perhaps fifteen years ago, the place to which a resident would go in late afternoon to sit on the low wall and watch the light move across the Alhambra. It still is, in the sense that the wall and the light are both still there. The conditions under which a resident could perform the act, however, have been displaced; and the displacement, on close inspection, has the structure of a small economy.\nThe local with the rucksack who has been on the mirador since well before the first visitor arrived is, on closer inspection, the proprietor of a small inventory of artisanal objects whose presentation he will arrange on a cloth as soon as the foot traffic justifies it. The musician whose guitar drifts agreeably out of tune over the parapet is finishing the night before, on the working hypothesis that an unexpectedly long evening can be retroactively financed by performing its closing minutes in front of an audience that has just arrived. The visitor patiently waiting for an unobstructed turn at the wall is, in a meaningful proportion of cases, composing the photograph for a content commitment whose sponsorship arrangements have already been negotiated. Even the apparently disinterested companion is often a holder of the second camera. And the staff of the second-rank and third-rank terraces strung along the approaches are waiting, with the patience of people who know the conversion rate, for the return of the visitors who have stood at the parapet rather longer than they had planned and who will require, on the way back down, something to sit on and something to drink. The mirador, in short, has been quietly reorganised so that no human presence on it is structurally outside the local economy of the view; the resident who shows up without a function is no longer absent from a category, he is the category, and the category is the one the apparatus does not know how to bill.\nThe mirador now operates as a queue for a particular kind of photograph; the wall serves as a foreground for that photograph; the late light is itself a scheduling input to the photograph; and a person sitting on the wall without a camera is read by the surrounding apparatus as either an obstruction to the queue or as a candidate for one of the buskers’ opening gambits. The Alhambra, viewed from across the valley, is the same Alhambra it has always been. What has changed is that the act of viewing it from across the valley is no longer a use the place is configured to accommodate. The monument itself, viewed from inside, has been on a timed-entry regime for many years; the regime is operationally necessary and aesthetically defensible, and it is also, in Lefebvre’s sense, the most visible single instance of the conversion of a place from a site of habitation into a product to be consumed in slots (1968).\n\nThe Alhambra and the Generalife together received in the order of 2.7 million visitors in 2024, a figure that has been quietly hovering at or near the upper bound of the monument’s declared carrying capacity for several seasons (Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife, 2025). The municipal ordinance regulating outdoor terraces in the centre permits licensed footprints whose aggregate surface, in the principal central plazas, has been the subject of repeated neighbour-association complaints and at least two appeals to the Defensor del Pueblo Andaluz; the precise figure varies year to year and is not, in any case, the variable that matters most. What matters is the proportion of central public space whose status has shifted from common to licensed, and the degree to which the shift is reversible by ordinary administrative action — which is to say, almost not at all, because each licensed footprint is also a small business, an employment relationship, a tax contribution and a vested expectation. Sharon Zukin’s term for what tends to follow is pacification by cappuccino (2010); the term has the merit of being accurate and the further merit of being slightly funnier than what it describes. The associated environmental burdens are no longer marginal in the literature: a recent BMJ review treats chronic exposure to urban noise above WHO thresholds as a public-health issue with documented cardiovascular and metabolic consequences (Razai et al., 2025), and the cognitive literature has now extended the concern to the children for whom such districts are simply where they live and try to learn (Dohmen et al., 2022).\n\nThe reader will have noticed that I am within a sentence of converting all this into a complaint about tourism, which is the wrong complaint. Tourism is the visible mechanism, not the underlying one. The underlying mechanism is the slow conversion of the central public realm from a space of right — the residents’ right to be in it without justification — into a space of licence, in which presence requires either a ticket, a transaction, or a recognised errand. Tourism happens to be the largest current beneficiary of the conversion. It is not its sole author, and it would not, if it disappeared tomorrow, automatically restore what has been lost.\nThere is, finally, a sensory layer the previous chapter did not name and that this one cannot honourably omit, because it is the layer against which the resident is least able to defend himself. On the worst days — the still ones, the hot ones, the ones during which the ozone in the metropolitan basin reaches the levels that the Granada-Norte and Armilla stations have been recording with documented regularity for several years (Ecologistas en Acción, 2019) — the air over the centre acquires a quality that is not exactly bad and not exactly painful but that the body recognises as something it would prefer not to be inhaling. To this baseline the metropolitan belt occasionally adds a more specific contribution. There is, between the city and Armilla, a manufacturing facility that produces fragrance compounds, and which from time to time releases a load whose distribution depends on the prevailing wind. The result, on the days the wind is wrong, is that several square kilometres of central Granada are placed under an olfactory canopy whose intensity exceeds anything one would normally associate with the substances in question. The detail one is required to register, with the deadpan attention this volume tries to maintain, is that the substance in question is, in its intended commercial use, sold as something a person applies to herself voluntarily, in small quantities, and at considerable expense. The category error is administrative rather than poetic, but the resident bears it.\nThere remains, as a partial consolation the chapter declines to name too loudly, a residual archipelago of central spaces that have so far escaped the conversion. They are the places where the metrics that govern the conversion — visitor counts, photographic opportunities, hospitality footprint per square metre — happen to fall, for the moment, below whatever threshold currently triggers commercial attention. They include certain stretches of the upper Albaicín on weekday mornings, the lower paths along the Genil after the cyclists have passed, the cemeteries (which are everywhere underestimated as places in which to walk slowly), and a small number of plazas whose names the resident familiar with them will recognise without needing them written down. To name them more precisely than this would be to begin the work of naming that the rest of this volume has been documenting. The flâneur in present-day Granada has not been abolished; he has been displaced to the margins of the centre that bears his image, and his survival now depends on the same property the centre has taken to selling — namely, anonymity — being available somewhere it is not yet for sale. The third correction, the one I find that I cannot quite make, is the suspicion that the displacement is not the end of the process this volume has been describing but its penultimate stage, and that what looks from inside like consolation is simply the period during which the surveying has not yet been completed.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFigure 6.2\n\n\n\nPlate VII. Cobbled street, central Granada, mid-morning, present day. The location is a section of one of the most walked sequences in the historic centre, here depicted slightly wider than the surface actually permits, in keeping with the representational conventions of the city’s promotional materials. Two guided groups are visible in the central plane, a third inferable from the red flag at the upper right; their itineraries appear to converge on the same eight-metre cross-section. The guide’s yellow umbrella, held in the raised position, has over the last decade become the single most reliable indicator that a stretch of public space has entered the touristic phase of its life. A Segway and an electric scooter are crossing the cobbles at speeds inconsistent with the surface. A souvenir display occupies a portion of the left-hand pavement that no municipal ordinance is presently withholding from it, and a notice above the doorway behind it invites the passing visitor to Experience Authenticity, a formulation in which the verb has been recruited to compensate for the noun. Two empty bottles and a discarded leaflet have been disposed of by the only method the immediate environment appears to encourage. At the right-hand margin, an elderly couple have pressed themselves against the parapet of the embankment to allow the central body of pedestrians to flow past; their posture suggests long familiarity with the manoeuvre. Their facial expressions are the only ones in the image not directed at a camera, a guide, a screen or a destination, and the apparatus has, in consequence, declined to register them. Outside the frame, immediately behind the illustrator, a taxi driver is waiting for the photographic session to conclude before resuming his ascent towards the Cuesta del Chapiz; his fare has not been recorded.The scene has been documented in approximately every Mediterranean historic centre over the last decade without material variation.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDohmen, Maud, Braat-Eggen, E., Kemperman, A., & Hornikx, M. (2022). The effects of noise on cognitive performance and helplessness in childhood: A review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(1), 288. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20010288\n\n\nEcologistas en Acción. (2019). La pesadilla de la contaminación en Granada. Ecologistas en Acción. https://www.ecologistasenaccion.org/129043/la-pesadilla-de-la-contaminacion-en-granada/\n\n\nLefebvre, Henri. (1968). Le droit à la ville. Anthropos.\n\n\nPatronato de la Alhambra y Generalife. (2025). Memoria anual: Visitantes a la alhambra y generalife, 2024. Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife, Junta de Andalucía. https://www.alhambra-patronato.es/\n\n\nRazai, Mohammad S. et al. (2025). The impact of noise pollution on health. BMJ, 391, e081193. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2024-081193\n\n\nZukin, Sharon. (2010). Naked city: The death and life of authentic urban places. Oxford University Press.",
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    "text": "What follows is, more or less, the report of a person who arrived in this city as a student, did not quite leave, and has been watching the same six or seven streets behave in a particular way through roughly the same set of windows for rather longer than he had planned.\nThe streets in question are the ones the various faculties of the university happen to occupy, and the buildings most directly relevant are the ones in which, until perhaps a decade ago, students were the default and almost only tenants. The inversion has not been dramatic. There has been no single August in which the piso de estudiantes announced its conversion. The change has proceeded by attrition: a contract not renewed, a flat refurbished and reclassified, a notice in a window whose grammar has shifted from se alquila a estudiantes to se alquila por habitaciones, días o semanas, and finally to a small QR code routed through one of the platforms that have come to be the only interface the building has with anyone seeking to enter it. The cumulative effect, on a stretch of street the chapter could name and would prefer not to, is that a building which once accommodated four flats of four students each now accommodates a different number of a different kind of guest, on contracts of a length the city’s existing stock of ordinary leases has no instrument to defend itself against.\nThe mechanism is not local. A recent and unsentimental review of the question, prepared from the side of the residents rather than the side of the platforms, sets out the central finding without ornamentation: in cities whose long-term rental markets are already structurally short of supply, the conversion of housing into short-stay tourist accommodation reduces to a marginal minimum the probability that a resident or worker — and, by extension, a student — will encounter a long-term let at a price related to local incomes (Centeno & López, 2025). The verb that the report uses is reduce, not displace; the difference matters. Displacement implies that someone else has taken the space. Reduction implies that the space has been removed from the category in which the student was looking, and re-entered the market under a heading the student does not have the budget to read.\nThe experience of the student arriving in September I cannot describe without slipping, here and there, into a register the rest of the volume has been trying to avoid; the irony, as elsewhere, will have to live in the precision and not in the indignation. She arrives with a list of viewings printed from a platform whose listings have a half-life measured in hours. Two of the addresses do not exist; a third corresponds to a room she will share with a tenant already installed and unmentioned in the listing; a fourth has been re-let between the morning of the printout and the afternoon of the visit. The fifth viewing actually takes place. The room is approximately the dimensions promised. It is, she is also told, an individual room — with the small clarification, produced in the same tone as the dimensions, that its present occupant happens to be away on account of work for most of the academic year, and that on the occasional weekend on which she does return, one of the two parties presently holding the room can be relied upon to take the living-room sofa for the duration. The visitor is invited to assume that this arrangement is peculiar to this room and that no comparable arrangement obtains in either of the other two rooms in the flat, on the grounds that such a coincidence would be improbable.\nThe deposit requested at the door is not the dimensions promised either, and has a further feature the visitor will not verify until well after she has paid it: in a meaningful proportion of cases, the sum the new arrivals contribute is the sum from which the outgoing tenants will recover the rent of their own last month or two. The two parties are not, properly speaking, in conflict — both would prefer not to be defrauded — but the older tenant, finding himself in a small position of informational advantage over the new one, has elected to imitate the practices of the proprietor rather than to warn against them, and the imitation has the additional convenience of being invisible until the handover is complete. Where an estate agency has been interposed between the parties, the arrangement becomes harder to read rather than easier: a third actor appears whose function is, in principle, to formalise the transaction, and whose contribution in practice is to lend administrative cover to whichever of the foregoing manoeuvres the immediate market conditions reward. Certain features of moral character, it turns out, travel rather easily between actors who had been assumed to occupy different sides of the same door. The agency fee, prohibited by the 2019 reform of the urban tenancies law, returns under the formula gastos de gestión and is presented as non-negotiable. The contract on offer is for nine months, on the working understanding that summer is when the landlord prefers to test the rental against a different category of guest. None of the foregoing is exceptional; all of it is reported, with the regularity of a meteorological observation, by every cohort of arrivals I have spoken to in the last several years.\nI notice that I am within a sentence of beginning to list the landlords, and I should stop. The argument is not that landlords were once virtuous and have lately become predatory. Landlords have always been the variable in the system most attentive to the system’s incentives. What has changed is the system. The structural ratio between rooms available at prices a student grant can absorb and students requiring such rooms has shifted, and the shift has a documented mechanism, and the mechanism is not the moral character of any individual proprietor. To make the chapter about individual proprietors would be to mistake the symptom for the cause and to deliver, in passing, the small consolation that the problem is one of bad apples — a consolation the present volume is not in a position to extend.\nThe forced cohabitation that follows is the part that does not appear in any indicator. Four people who have not chosen one another, and in many cases share neither language nor schedule, occupy seventy square metres because none of them, individually, can support the rent of the small flat each of them would, if asked, have preferred to occupy alone. The arrangement is not without its consolations: people meet in this way, and some of those meetings outlast the lease. The arrangement is also not without its costs, and the costs are distributed in the manner the housing market generally distributes costs, which is to say onto the party with the least capacity to defuse them. The student whose grant arrives in three instalments, and whose family cannot wire the difference, will accept the room with the unventilated interior wall, the radiator that has been disconnected since the previous summer, and the housemate whose hours are exactly opposed to her own. She will accept these things because the alternative is not a better room. The alternative is the village forty minutes down the line, where a room can still be had at a price related to its physical properties, and where she will spend in transport, in meals taken outside a kitchen she does not effectively have access to, and in the cumulative small economies of being far from the place she is supposed to be studying, the difference she has just saved on rent. The arithmetic, considered honestly, does not favour anyone. It redistributes the location of the deduction within the same monthly transfer.\nThe literature on this is not new, and I will glance at it rather than rehearse it. Cócola-Gant has documented, with respect to several southern European cities, the sequential character of tourism-led displacement: residents first, then workers, then students, then the institutional functions for whose sake the city was once thought worth preserving (2018). Zukin’s contribution, which the previous chapter has already drawn on, is the observation that a city becomes illegible to the people who need it as an apparatus of formation at the moment it has reorganised itself around people who need it as a backdrop for consumption (2010). Both authors have had the patience to make the case at length, and both, I notice, have been read more often than they have been acted upon.\nThe second self-correction the chapter requires is to do with the temptation to convert the diagnosis into a recommendation. The temptation is strong because the recommendations are obvious: a regulated cap on short-stay licences in central districts, an honest enforcement of the existing prohibition on agency fees, the construction of student residences at a scale commensurate with the matriculation figures the university itself publishes.1\nThe chapter has, until this point, declined this kind of temptation on a principle worth stating once: the absence of the obvious measures is not a gap in the diagnosis. It is the diagnosis. A city in which the obvious measures have been available for years, and have not been taken, is a city whose decision-making apparatus has settled on a different priority, and the priority has, for the moment, the wind behind it.\nThe chapter will allow itself, in this single section, one departure from the rule, under cover of an analogy the reader is free to refuse if the cover seems insufficient. We do not ask of a competent professional that she be expert in everything; we ask only that she be competent within the epistemic margins her formation has actually equipped her for, and we treat any wider demand as a mistake about what training is. The same charity might reasonably be extended to a residential district. The streets immediately around the faculties of a university are not, by any plausible reading of their morphology, designed to operate simultaneously as tour operator, hotel chain, short-stay platform, residential let and student residence, while still discharging the residential function for which they were laid out; the cumulative request that they perform all of these at once is the request that has produced the conditions this chapter has been describing. To the institutions presently authorised to act on the matter — and which, while presumed competent, have for some time given little conspicuous evidence of being diligent — the chapter is willing to direct, on this single occasion, what would in any other section of the volume be classified as a recommendation. It is that the years a young person sets aside in order to train for a serious profession should not, in addition to everything else they cost, also be the years in which she is required to develop her resistance to small structured frauds and to the unannounced reorganisation of her own domestic arrangements; and that the provision of safe and unfraudulent lodging within reach of the lecture rooms she is matriculated to attend is, on any reasonable reading of the public interest, a function the responsible authorities are expected to guarantee rather than to outsource. The recommendation is so basic that the chapter is mildly embarrassed to have to make it, and would prefer to attribute the embarrassment to the institutions whose inaction has made the making of it necessary.\nThe closing observation is the one I cannot quite soften. The shortage of student housing in Granada is not a problem of the housing market in the narrow sense in which such a problem admits of housing-market solutions. It is the visible edge of a slower process by which the city has stopped reproducing the conditions of its own intellectual life. Universities, in the old understanding, were among the institutions a city built so that its future would arrive on time and would have been prepared for; the arrangement was reciprocal, in that the university supplied the formation and the city supplied the room in which the formation could take place. The reciprocity is being quietly dissolved on one of the two sides, and the side that is dissolving it is not the one with the bookcases. The student who has stayed on, and who has now spent enough years watching the dissolution to know what it is, is in no position to reverse it. He is in a position to record it, and — on the rare occasion when the omission would amount to a kind of cowardice — to make the small recommendation he has just made. These are the lesser of the two functions a serious description of a city is supposed to perform, and the only ones this chapter has been willing to undertake.",
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    "text": "The figures in question are not trivial. The Ministry of Science’s historical series records 58,974 students enrolled at the University of Granada in 1989–1990, rising to 60,533 by 1991–1992 and returning to 56,964 by 1995–1996 — figures which refer to undergraduate enrolment only, under the pre-Bologna degree structure (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (Spain), n.d.a, n.d.b). The university currently reports in excess of 70,000 students across all levels (Universidad de Granada, n.d.). The city’s housing stock has not been recalibrated to accommodate a student population of this magnitude at any point in the intervening three decades; the recalibration that has occurred has moved in the opposite direction.↩︎",
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    "text": "Patterns, in the plural, is the word one reaches for when a single noun would be too precise and the reader would object. The plural protects everyone involved, and the chapter will try to do without it where it can.\n\nThe five chapters that precede this one were written as five perspectives on what appeared, at the outset, to be five separate problems. The returning resident was losing a neighbourhood. The commuter was losing a working relationship with his own streets. The citizen without organised leisure was losing the conditions of ordinary rest. The flâneur was losing the park. The student and her reluctant guide were losing, between them, the city’s willingness to house the people it had agreed to educate. At no point during the drafting of those chapters was the narrator able to sustain, for more than a few paragraphs, the impression that he was describing five problems. The impression kept collapsing into one. The one is what this chapter is for.\nThe process the five perspectives were each describing is not a deterioration of the city in the sense in which a building deteriorates — by accumulating faults that a sufficiently determined maintenance budget could eventually address. It is a reorganisation of what the city is for. The ordinary civic purposes — living, moving, resting, walking, studying — have not been abolished; they have been demoted to the status of residual uses, tolerated where they do not interfere with the extraction of rent, and quietly relocated where they do. The word that has been waiting, unused, through the preceding chapters is the one the volume has been circling from the start, and the chapter will now have to let it appear without further cover: the city has been reconstituted as a platform of value extraction, and the five perspectives were five views of the same reconstitution.\nThe mechanism is not mysterious, and has been described, for rather longer than the present situation has existed, by people whose business is precisely to describe such mechanisms. David Harvey’s observation, in the book from which this chapter borrows its spine, is that urban rent functions as a form of capital accumulation in its own right, and that once a city’s built environment has been recognised as a yielding asset by the sort of capital that was previously placed elsewhere, the uses to which that environment is put will be reorganised in whatever way maximises the yield (Harvey, 2012). Henri Lefebvre’s rather older claim is that the right to inhabit a city is a political claim and not a consumer preference, and that when the claim ceases to be recognised the inhabitants discover, in succession, that they are being treated as an obstacle to a process whose beneficiaries are elsewhere (Lefebvre, 1968). The two observations do not need to be reconciled. They describe, between them, both the movement of capital into the built environment and the corresponding displacement of the civic claim that the previous inhabitants had imagined themselves to hold. No further theoretical scaffolding is required, and the chapter will not supply any.\nThe critical feature of this mechanism — the one that resists satisfying explanation because it refuses to take the shape the explanation wants — is that it does not require anyone to have decided it. There is no meeting at which the conversion of a city into a platform is announced. There is a market in short-stay accommodation, a market in licences, a market in commercial space along the main pedestrian routes, a market in the attention of visitors with a limited number of days to spend, and a set of institutional actors whose function would notionally be to regulate some of these markets and whose practice has been, at best, to lag behind them. The aggregate behaviour of the actors inside these markets is the process. It has the convenience, from the point of view of anyone trying to resist it, of belonging to no one in particular.\nThe convenience, however, is overstated, and the structural innocence of markets is one of the more durable fictions of the present moment. The chapter is not obliged to respect it. There are agents, and they are identifiable. They include the proprietors who converted long lets into short-stay units at the first opportunity the tax code permitted; the intermediary platforms whose interface has taken the place of any prior relation between tenant and landlord; the estate agencies whose fee is now called a management charge because the original name is illegal; the tour operators who discovered that a historic quarter can be consumed at the rate of several cohorts per day; and the municipal actors whose reluctance to act has been sufficiently consistent over sufficiently many council terms to qualify as a position rather than a lapse. Naming them does not require a conspiracy; only arithmetic.\nA further observation is required at this point, and it is the one the chapter has been postponing. In the kind of environment the preceding chapters have described — one in which ordinary transactions are conducted under a steady pressure of small urgencies, advertised on walls and noticeboards, experienced by actors whose margins are narrow enough that the next rent is a real question — the morally uncomfortable roles are exchanged with an ease that would be disturbing if it were not, at this point, ordinary. An outgoing tenant reproduces, without apparent hesitation, the practices of the landlord who was about to defraud him of his own deposit. A small agency lends administrative cover to an arrangement it would, in any calmer market, have declined to be associated with. A long-standing resident accepts a weekly let on his second flat not because he holds a settled view on the conversion of housing stock into tourist accommodation, but because the arithmetic has made the alternative look like a hobby. The precarity is, among other things, a solvent. It dissolves the distinctions the volume was planning to rely on.\nI notice I am being fair to the wrong parties, and I should correct course. The observation that precarity degrades everyone’s conduct is accurate; the observation that the degradation is symmetrically distributed is not, and the chapter will not permit the register of even-handedness to obscure the ordering. The actors who profit most from the precarity are the actors who organised the conditions under which it became profitable: the proprietors with scruples they have elected to do without, the agencies that recognise a vulnerable applicant and adjust their demands upwards accordingly, the intermediaries whose entire business model rests on the inability of newcomers to verify what they are being told. The solvent dissolves distinctions; it does not redistribute responsibility. The small compromises of the people further down the chain are consequences of the architecture, not contributions to it.\nThe chronology is available to anyone willing to look at it. The principal acceleration is post-2014 and has two phases: the consolidation of the short-stay platforms as the dominant interface between visitor and building, and the post-2021 return of international arrivals at volumes the pre-pandemic baseline would have classified as exceptional. The pre-2014 conditions were not a paradise, and the volume has been careful not to pretend otherwise; they were a baseline against which the subsequent decade has moved in a direction that no one with a serious interest in the continuity of civic life would have chosen, had they been asked in advance, and which very few of them were.\nWhat the diagnosis leaves us with is not a list of policy levers, which the volume has promised not to produce, and not a set of actionable recommendations, which it would in any case be the wrong instrument to deliver.\nIt also leaves us, and the chapter will permit itself to say this once and then let the rest of the volume take over, with a modest unsolicited observation about the formation of the young people who will shortly be asked to enter the conditions the preceding chapters have described. The months immediately before university — the months a serious educational system would otherwise devote to Latin verbs, to the structure of a sonata, to the rudiments of a political tradition — might now, on any honest reading of the environment into which the student is about to be delivered, be more profitably spent on a rather different curriculum: the verification of an online rental listing, the detection of a fraudulent deposit, the administrative anatomy of a management fee that is technically illegal, the small courtesies by which a cohabitant can be persuaded not to retaliate when the sofa is required. These skills would, in the short term, improve the probability that the student reaches her second semester with her nervous system intact. Over the longer term, if the present trend continues along its present line, they would equip her for the entirety of her working life in the city she is about to be matriculated in, which is a benefit a careful educator would find difficult to dismiss. The chapter does not propose this as a reform. It proposes it as a description of what a reform would, in the present circumstances, have to concede it was teaching.\nThe city has been reconstituted as a platform of value extraction. The agents are identifiable, the chronology is available to anyone willing to consult it, and the cost is being borne by the people the preceding chapters have named. The description has been the product, offered without the consolation of a resolution that is not available. The remaining discomfort is the coda’s.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFigure 8.1\n\n\n\nPlate X. Estate-agency window, central Granada, evening. The premises trade as Studentalia Granada, a name whose target demographic the signage has not thought it necessary to disguise. Six identical photographs of the same ochre corner building appear in the window, each repackaged under a different commercial heading — Heritage Loft, Premium Co-Living Suite, Student Experience Room, Authentic Old Town Home for the Ideal Investor, Boutique Tourist Apartment, and a second Student Experience Room whose repetition the agency, if asked, might or might not have explained. Two students consult the display; one points, the other is already on her telephone, and neither expression contains anything resembling surprise. To the right of the listings, the same premises offer Western Union remittances, phone booths and an ATM, so the building’s principal trade — estate agent, locutorio, or efficient compression of both — remains, with pleasing ambiguity, part of the exhibit.\n\n\n\n\n\nHarvey, David. (2012). Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution. Verso.\n\n\nLefebvre, Henri. (1968). Le droit à la ville. Anthropos.",
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    "text": "The honest thing to say at the end of a volume like this is that writing it has not helped.\n\nThe five perspectives set out in these chapters converge on a finding that arrived not by choice but by accumulation. The city in question has not collapsed; it has not been bombed, flooded or abandoned; no single catastrophe marks the boundary between what it was and what it is becoming. What has happened is at once less dramatic and less reversible: the conditions under which ordinary residents could inhabit it without constant, low-grade administrative combat have been quietly withdrawn, not by decree but by the accumulated weight of a thousand decisions, each of them rational, none of them designed to be answered for.\nThis volume has not proposed solutions. Not because solutions do not exist — they may — but because the kind of knowledge a resident accumulates by staying in a place and paying systematic attention to its decline is not the kind of knowledge from which policy follows. It is the kind of knowledge from which discomfort follows, and discomfort is what the volume has been trying not to waste. The temptation, at this point, is to convert the discomfort into one of two available currencies: grief for what has been lost, which is sentimentality; or the shrug that concedes the loss was inevitable, which is resignation. Both are available. Both are, in their way, a relief. And both are forms of the same concession — that description, having been completed, can now be set aside.\nSetting it aside, however, is not available to anyone who was paying attention on a Saturday in April, when people walked through thirty-nine cities with keys in their hands and placards whose slogans had the compressed clarity of things that should not need to be said. Your Airbnb was my house. Dwellings should be dwellings. Ministry not of housing — of survival. On lampposts and faculty noticeboards, other notices — smaller, unsigned, more abject — continued to appear: responsible and quiet person seeks home. The author of that sentence had done everything the city asked of her. She had qualified, presented herself, and explained, with the compressed politeness of someone who has learned that the explanation must be brief, that she was not a risk. The sentence stayed on the lamppost. The city did not answer it.\nRecording these things is not the same as opposing them. But there is a prior step to opposition which consists in not looking away, and which requires a tolerance for one’s own uselessness that is surprisingly difficult to maintain. The volume ends here, not because the material is exhausted but because the limit of what description can do without becoming something else — a programme, a plea, a manifesto — has been reached. The city is still there. So is the narrator. Neither of these facts is as reassuring as it sounds.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFigure 9.1\n\n\n\nPlate XI. Public demonstration for the right to housing, Spanish city, two dates recorded. The placards and protest banners are legible. The demands are constitutional. The march continues past the frame.",
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    "text": "10.1 A note on measurement\nThe statistical apparatus for documenting the disappearance of small neighbourhood bars in Spain is considerably coarser than the phenomenon it claims to describe. The Instituto Nacional de Estadística, through its Directorio Central de Empresas (DIRCE), publishes an annual count of establecimientos de bebidas (beverage establishments) under code CNAE 5630, a category which aggregates bars, taverns, beer houses, late bars, discobars and cafés into a single undifferentiated total. DIRCE does not disaggregate by number of employees, by ownership structure, or by functional role within the neighbourhood economy. The one-person bar run by its owner — the category on which most of this volume’s argument rests — is statistically indistinguishable in the published series from a thirty-cover hotel bar, a chain franchise, or a themed outlet operating under a pub licence.\nA second limitation matters for any comparison across time. Between 1990 and 2010 the total number of hospitality establishments in Spain grew substantially, driven by the expansion of coastal tourism infrastructure and by the legal (and sometimes extra-legal) proliferation of establishments in oversaturated tourist areas. This growth partly masks the parallel loss of neighbourhood bars inland and in the residential districts of historic cities, because both movements occur within the same aggregate category. Any reader consulting DIRCE in search of confirmation of the decline described in this volume should be aware that the evidence must be reconstructed from within a dataset that was not designed to see it.\nThe figures that follow are therefore presented as orientative rather than exhaustive. They come from INE/DIRCE where the national and autonomous-community totals are robust, from press reconstructions of the same DIRCE data where those reconstructions add breakdown not otherwise available, and from local press reporting for the Granada-specific inventory, which cannot be reconstructed from any public statistical source at present.",
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    "section": "10.2 National trend: bars in Spain, 2010–2024",
    "text": "10.2 National trend: bars in Spain, 2010–2024\n\n\n\nTable 10.1: Beverage establishments in Spain (CNAE 5630), 2010–2024.\n\n\n\n\n\nYear\nBeverage establishments (CNAE 5630)\nChange vs. 2010\n\n\n\n\n2010\n202,720\n—\n\n\n2019\n181,230\n−10.6%\n\n\n2022\n175,890\n−13.2%\n\n\n2023\n168,065\n−17.1%\n\n\n2024\n163,890\n−19.2%\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSource: INE, Directorio Central de Empresas, 1 January of each reference year. 2010, 2019 and 2023 figures as reported by Newtral (García, 2024) from INE DIRCE series; 2024 figure as reported by Libre Mercado and La Iberia (2025) from the same series. The 2022 figure is interpolated from the intermediate DIRCE release and should be treated as approximate.\nOver the same period, the count of restaurants and food-serving establishments under CNAE 5610 rose from 71,818 to roughly 83,700, an increase of approximately sixteen per cent. The aggregate hospitality category (CNAE 56) therefore fell only by around five to six per cent between 2010 and 2023, concealing the redistribution within it. What the data describes is not a contraction of hospitality but a reconfiguration: the small beverage establishment has been disappearing and the structured, reservation-based restaurant has been taking its place in the aggregate, though not in the same streets and not at the same prices.",
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    "section": "10.3 Regional breakdown: where bars have disappeared fastest",
    "text": "10.3 Regional breakdown: where bars have disappeared fastest\n\n\n\nTable 10.2: Regional loss of beverage establishments, 2010–2023, by autonomous community.\n\n\n\n\n\nAutonomous community\nBars lost 2010–2023 (abs.)\nChange (%)\n\n\n\n\nComunidad de Madrid\n−5,946\n−26.3%\n\n\nCastilla y León\n−3,639\n−24.0%\n\n\nGalicia\n−3,876\n−23.5%\n\n\nPrincipado de Asturias\n−1,432\n−22.9%\n\n\nCastilla-La Mancha\n−1,904\n−20.8%\n\n\nCanarias\n−861\n−10.2%\n\n\nAndalucía\n−3,712\n−10.1%\n\n\nCeuta\n−20\n−8.4%\n\n\nMelilla\n−12\n−5.7%\n\n\nNavarra\n−9\n−0.4%\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSource: INE DIRCE, as reconstructed by Newtral (García, 2024). Autonomous communities ordered by relative loss. The remaining communities fall between the extremes shown and are omitted for space.\nThe low figure for Andalucía in the relative column is consistent with the caveat entered in §A.1. The autonomous community contains both the coastal provinces whose tourism-driven expansion has added beverage establishments over the period and the inland and residential districts whose neighbourhood bars have been closing; the two movements partly cancel in the aggregate. A province-level breakdown would be required to see the pattern more clearly, and is not currently available in published form.",
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    "section": "10.4 Granada: a documented inventory of closures",
    "text": "10.4 Granada: a documented inventory of closures\nBecause DIRCE does not publish a province-level series disaggregated by local function, the Granada-specific evidence in this volume draws on local press reporting. The inventory below is necessarily partial: it records establishments whose closure or demolition was considered sufficiently notable to be covered in Ideal, Granada Hoy, Granada Digital, Cadena SER Radio Granada, or the regional edition of El País, between 2017 and 2024. Establishments that closed quietly — which is to say, most of them — do not appear.\n\n\n\nTable 10.3: Documented closures of long-standing establishments in Granada, 2017–2024.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nYear\nEstablishment\nLocation\nNotes\n\n\n\n\n2017\nFarmacia Zambrano\nC. Reyes Católicos, 24\nSince 1876; included for context\n\n\n2019\nBar La Sabanilla\nC. San Sebastián\nSince 1883; demolished after ruin order\n\n\npre-2020\nBodegas Espadafor\nGran Vía\nEmblematic; closed prior to pandemic\n\n\n2020\nCafé Lisboa\nPlaza Nueva\nClosed during first-wave lockdowns\n\n\n2020\nBar Luis XV\nAvda. de Madrid\nProprietor retired; viability lost\n\n\n2020\nCortijo Charavinillo\nVega de Granada\nRural-edge restaurant; closed 2020\n\n\n2020\nEl Chanquete\nPedro Antonio de Alarcón\nSeafood specialist; transferred\n\n\n2020\nKudamm I\nPedro Antonio de Alarcón\nHispano-German; small premises unviable\n\n\n2020\nLa Blanca Paloma\nVarious\nClosed during first-wave lockdowns\n\n\n2020\nLa Bella y la Bestia\nCentral (4 premises)\nFour-premises operation collapsed\n\n\n2023\nEl Ventorrillo\nJunto Palacio de Congresos\n100 years; demolished for 5-storey block\n\n\n2023\nBar Alhambra\nC. Cristo de la Yedra\n60 years; owner retiring; attached note\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAttached note on Bar Alhambra. The proprietor, interviewed by Granada Hoy shortly before closure, attributed the neighbourhood’s decline in part to the departure of the Facultad de Medicina and the relocation of services away from the old Clínico. The observation is consistent with the argument advanced in the Introduction regarding the Barrio de los Doctores: the perimeter of affordable sociability that formed around the three large hospitals depended on a continuous flow of staff, students and visiting families, and was vulnerable to any reconfiguration of the institutions it served. When the medical faculty and the central hospital functions were moved, the economic basis for the bars that had served them was removed at the same time, though not at the same pace.",
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    "section": "10.5 Province-wide impact during the pandemic",
    "text": "10.5 Province-wide impact during the pandemic\nThe Federación Provincial de Hostelería y Turismo de Granada estimated, at the close of the first pandemic year, that 1,500 hospitality businesses had ceased operation in the province of Granada, with an associated loss of between 8,000 and 10,000 jobs (Granada Digital, 2022). The federation’s president, Gregorio García, had earlier projected a minimum closure rate of fifteen per cent among associated businesses, which he considered potentially optimistic. National estimates by the consultancy UVE Solutions placed the pandemic-period loss of HORECA outlets in Spain at around fourteen per cent. These figures are not directly comparable to the DIRCE series in §A.2, which records only net annual change in registered establishments and smooths across the year.",
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    "text": "10.6 A note on replacement\nThe most consistent finding across the reporting consulted is that the locales vacated by closing neighbourhood bars have not, in general, been replaced by establishments of the same type. Where replacement has occurred, it has tended towards two models: conversion of the premises to residential use, particularly in central districts under housing pressure; and occupation by establishments operating under chain or group structures, whether local (Casa Ysla, Puerta Bernina, La Cueva de 1900, Los Manueles, Los Diamantes, La Esquinita, Bar Aliatar) or national. Several of these groups expanded during the pandemic period, in part to absorb staff from their own closed premises and in part to take advantage of favourable terms on vacated locales. The UVE Solutions report for 2024 records that organised hospitality grew by 9.9% in the year while independent hospitality grew by only 1.6%, a divergence consistent with the pattern observed in Granada.\nThis is not, in itself, a judgement about the quality of the establishments involved. It is an observation about structure. The question of whether a city in which most bars are outlets of a group operates, for its residents, as the same kind of place as a city in which most bars are independent single-proprietor businesses is a question the volume addresses in the chapters that follow.",
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    "section": "10.7 Sources",
    "text": "10.7 Sources\nPrimary aggregated data: INE, Directorio Central de Empresas (DIRCE), annual series for CNAE 5610 and 5630, 2008–2024.\nPress reconstructions and commentary: García, Y. (2024), “¿Por qué cada vez hay menos bares en España? Desde 2010 han desaparecido el 17%”, Newtral, 1 January; “Sangría en la hostelería: España pierde 40.000 bares”, Libre Mercado, October 2025; “España dejará de ser un país de bares”, La Iberia, November 2025.\nGranada-specific reporting: Barrera, J. F. (2020), “Los bares de Granada que han cerrado…”, Ideal, 6 September; Romero, A. R., “Se pierde un bar de barrio…”, Granada Hoy; López Rivera, M. (2022), “La hostelería de Granada se apunta al modelo de las cadenas”, Granada Digital; Álvarez, C. (2023), “Negocios míticos a los que Granada ha dicho adiós”, Ideal, 21 March; Troyano, R. (2020), “La agonía de este propietario de bar en Granada: ‘Cierro hoy’”, Cadena SER Radio Granada, 9 November.\nConsultancy reporting: UVE Solutions (2024), UVE Data Market Horeca 2024, Madrid.",
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    "section": "10.8 Rental Prices",
    "text": "10.8 Rental Prices\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFigure 10.1: Average rental price per m², Granada historic districts, 2015–2024. Source: Idealista (2024); INE, Encuesta Continua de Hogares. Prices deflated to 2015 euros using CPI (INE, 2024).\n\n\n\n\n\nMethodological note. Central districts defined as Realejo, Centro, Albaicín, and Beiro (INE census section codes […]). Prices deflated using the Spanish CPI general index (INE, base year 2015). Figures for 2022–2024 are provisional pending INE confirmation. See Cócola-Gant (2018) for the analytic framework applied to comparable cases.",
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    "text": "10.9 Tourist Accommodation Licences\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFigure 10.2: Approximate distribution of active tourist accommodation licences (VUT, whole dwelling) and beds by district, Granada, 2026. Source: Author’s elaboration based on Junta de Andalucía, Registro de Turismo de Andalucía (RTA).\n\n\n\n\n\nMethodological note. Figures are based on the total number of viviendas de uso turístico (whole dwellings, not rooms) registered in the Registro de Turismo de Andalucía (RTA) for the municipality of Granada in 2026, which amount to 3,462 dwellings and more than 17,500 beds. The intra-urban distribution by district shown here is an approximate reconstruction, intended to reflect the strong concentration in Centro-Sagrario, Albaicín and Realejo-Fígares reported by municipal and regional sources, rather than an exact administrative breakdown.",
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    "text": "10.10 Commerce Evolution\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFigure 10.3: Proximity commerce establishments, Granada historic centre, 2010–2023 (indexed, 2010 = 100). Source: INE, Directorio Central de Empresas (DIRCE); CNAE-2009 codes 47.2–47.7.\n\n\n\n\n\nMethodological note. Proximity commerce defined as CNAE-2009 codes 47.2 (food and drink), 47.3 (fuel), 47.4 (ICT), 47.5 (household goods), 47.6 (cultural and recreational), and 47.7 (other specialist retail). Historic centre boundary follows the Conjunto Histórico-Artístico declaration perimeter. Establishments include both self-employed (autónomos) and company registrations.",
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    "section": "10.11 Tourist-to-Resident Ratio",
    "text": "10.11 Tourist-to-Resident Ratio\n\n\n\n\nTable 10.4: Tourist overnight stays vs. resident population, Granada, selected years. Source: INE, Encuesta de Ocupación Hotelera (EOH); Padrón Municipal.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nYear\nResidents\nOvernights\nRatio\n\n\n\n\n2,015\n234,800\n1,820,000\n7.8\n\n\n2,018\n232,700\n2,140,000\n9.2\n\n\n2,019\n231,100\n2,380,000\n10.3\n\n\n2,021\n228,600\n1,650,000\n7.2\n\n\n2,022\n227,400\n2,210,000\n9.7\n\n\n2,023\n226,900\n2,490,000\n11.0\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNote. Ratio = overnight stays ÷ resident population. A ratio above 8–10 is associated in the comparative literature with measurable degradation of services for permanent residents (Fremdling et al., 2023). Figures for 2021 reflect COVID-19 restrictions. [PLACEHOLDER — verify all figures with INE sources]",
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    "section": "10.12 Data Sources Summary",
    "text": "10.12 Data Sources Summary\n\n\n\nTable 10.5: Data sources for Vol. I indicators. Items marked [DATA NEEDED] require verification before final render.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIndicator\nSource\nYear\nURL / Access\n\n\n\n\nRental prices\nIdealista; INE\n2015–2024\nidealista.com/informes\n\n\nTourist licences\nJunta de Andalucía RTAND\n2023\njuntadeandalucia.es/turismo\n\n\nCommerce evolution\nINE DIRCE, CNAE 47.2–47.7\n2010–2023\nine.es/dirce\n\n\nStudent enrolment / housing\nUGR Memoria Académica; INE\n2024\nugr.es/memoria\n\n\nNoise / acoustic data\nAyto. Granada; EEA\n[TBC]\n[DATA NEEDED]\n\n\nTourist-to-resident ratio\nINE EOH; Padrón\n2015–2023\nine.es/eoh",
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    "section": "10.13 Sanctions: the Andalusian comparator",
    "text": "10.13 Sanctions: the Andalusian comparator\nThe single institutional comparison of municipal traffic sanctions across Andalusian capitals on record was conducted by the Defensor del Pueblo Andaluz (Defensor del Pueblo Andaluz, 2014) as part of an ex officio enquiry. The figures it produced, here normalised by contemporaneous population, are reproduced in Table 10.6. The dictamen itself observed that the discrepancy could not be explained by population, vehicle fleet, or any other ordinary variable, and concluded that the difference “must lead the local authorities of that Council to reflect on what is happening”. Twelve years on, the reflection has not been published.\n\n\n\n\nTable 10.6: Expedientes sancionadores de tráfico iniciados por los ayuntamientos de Granada, Málaga, Córdoba y Cádiz en 2008 y 2012, normalizados por población. Fuente: Defensor del Pueblo Andaluz (2014); población a 1 de enero de cada año, INE Padrón continuo.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMunicipio\nPoblación 2008\nExpedientes 2008\nPor 1.000 hab. 2008\nPoblación 2012\nExpedientes 2012\nPor 1.000 hab. 2012\n\n\n\n\nGranada\n236.207\n258.933\n1.096\n239.017\n215.383\n901\n\n\nMálaga\n566.447\n181.646\n321\n568.479\n137.173\n241\n\n\nCórdoba\n325.453\n68.713\n211\n328.704\n74.572\n227\n\n\nCádiz\n126.766\n31.743\n250\n123.948\n33.443\n270\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe pattern is, in the technical sense of the word, anomalous. At the high point of the period audited, the city of Granada was opening more than one traffic sanction per inhabitant per year — a rate roughly four times that of Córdoba, a comparable inland provincial capital, and roughly four times that of Málaga, which had more than twice Granada’s population and considerably more vehicles. Even at the lower end of the period, with sanctions falling from 258,933 to 215,383, Granada’s per-capita rate remained between three and four times those of its peers. The Ombudsman’s dictamen explicitly ruled out the most obvious candidate explanation — that granadinos drive worse than malagueños or cordobeses — on the grounds that no plausible behavioural difference of that magnitude exists or has ever been documented.\n\nThe comparison set has acknowledged limits and they should be named. Málaga is more than twice Granada’s size; Cádiz is half of it; Córdoba is the closest peer in both population and provincial-capital function. Even after these caveats, Granada’s per-capita sanction rate stands outside any plausible normal range for a Spanish provincial capital of its category. National-scale press analyses since the dictamen — most notably the studies periodically published by the Fundación Línea Directa — have continued to identify Granada among the five most prolific sanctioning municipalities in Spain, in the company of Madrid, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca and Bilbao (Fundación Línea Directa, 2016); the company is not flattering and the explanation is not forthcoming.",
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    "section": "10.14 A note on what this table cannot show",
    "text": "10.14 A note on what this table cannot show\nThe reader who has reached this point is entitled to ask why the table covers only Andalusian capitals and does not extend to the provincial capitals of comparable size elsewhere in Spain — Vitoria, Valladolid, Oviedo, Pamplona, A Coruña — which the chapter’s argument might seem naturally to invite. The honest answer is that no comparable institutional audit exists for those cities, and that the apparently equivalent figures one can assemble from press releases, municipal budgets and DGT spreadsheets are not in fact equivalent: each municipality counts, classifies and reports differently; the boundary between “sanción de tráfico” and “sanción de movilidad” varies; the treatment of expedientes that begin and are subsequently voided differs; and the published totals are not always disaggregated from those of provincial-level traffic police. A table built on those figures would have the appearance of rigour without the substance, which is the worst combination in this kind of work.\nWhat the comparison set above does support is a single, defensible claim: within the institutional context for which a proper audit exists — the eight Andalusian capitals — Granada has been, demonstrably and over a sustained period, an outlier of a kind that the responsible authority itself was unable to explain. The chapter rests on that claim and not on a more ambitious one.\nFor the urban-mortality dimension, the chapter relies on the provincial-level figures published annually by the Comisión Provincial de Tráfico (Redacción ahoraGranada, 2026); these are not directly comparable to municipal-level figures from other capitals, and no attempt is made here to force them into a comparison they cannot sustain. The DGT’s own consolidated urban balance for 2024 — 488 fatalities and 5,043 hospitalised casualties in Spanish urban roads, of which 79 per cent were vulnerable users (Dirección General de Tráfico, 2025) — is the figure against which local trends should be read, but the desegregation by municipality is not published in a form that would allow a clean intercity table.\n\n\n\n\nCócola-Gant, Agustín. (2018). Tourism gentrification. In Loretta Lees & Martin Phillips (Eds.), Handbook of gentrification studies (pp. 281–293). Edward Elgar.\n\n\nDefensor del Pueblo Andaluz. (2014). Queremos saber porqué las sanciones de tráfico en Granada son muy superiores al resto de provincias con similar parque móvil. Queja de oficio, resumen del resultado. https://www.defensordelpuebloandaluz.es/queremos-saber-porque-las-sanciones-de-trafico-en-granada-son-muy-superior-al-resto-de-provincias\n\n\nDirección General de Tráfico. (2025). Balance de siniestralidad vial. Vías urbanas, año 2024. Nota de prensa, DGT. https://www.dgt.es/comunicacion/notas-de-prensa/20250708-descienden-un-6-los-fallecidos-por-siniestro-de-trafico-en-las-ciudades/\n\n\nFundación Línea Directa. (2016). Estudio sobre las multas municipales en españa, 2011–2014. Reseñado en Revista Tráfico y Seguridad Vial (DGT). https://revista.dgt.es/es/noticias/nacional/2016/04ABRIL/0426-Estudio-multas-municipales-Linea-Directa.shtml\n\n\nRedacción ahoraGranada. (2026). Las víctimas mortales en carretera en Granada descienden un 11% pero aumentan los heridos hospitalizados. ahoraGranada. https://www.ahoragranada.com/noticias/las-victimas-mortales-en-carretera-en-granada-descienden-un-11-pero-aumentan-los-heridos-hospitalizados/",
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    "title": "Glossary of Terms in Occasional Use",
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    "text": "The following terms appear in the analytical literature, in municipal communications, and in the prospectuses of property developers, sometimes with identical wording and entirely different intentions. The entries below attempt to clarify both usages. The rigorous definition is offered in good faith. The disambiguation is offered in the same spirit.\n\n\nAuthenticity\nRigorous definition. In Zukin’s (2010) account, authenticity describes the accumulated social history of a place — its working-class inhabitants, its vernacular architecture, its unglamorous service economy — which gives it distinctiveness and therefore market value, and which is progressively destroyed by the very market that has recognised it. Authenticity is not a stable property of places; it is a resource that is identified, commodified, and consumed until it is no longer present, at which point it is replaced by representations of itself.\n\nOperational disambiguation. When a property developer describes a neighbourhood as authentic, the term functions as a forward-looking valuation rather than a description of current conditions. It identifies a place whose social character has not yet been fully converted into price, and signals the intention to complete that conversion. The resident who believes the description is a compliment has not yet understood the prospectus.\n\n\n\n\nCarrying Capacity\nRigorous definition. The threshold beyond which an urban system can no longer perform its primary functions for permanent residents without measurable degradation: in services, in noise levels, in housing availability, in the spatial conditions of everyday life. The concept is derived from ecological systems theory and applied to urban contexts to describe the point at which visitor volume exceeds the system’s capacity for self-repair and normal function.\n\nOperational disambiguation. The concept has no legally binding standing in Spanish urban planning law. When invoked by municipal authorities, it appears exclusively in documents produced after the threshold has been exceeded, as evidence that the situation was being monitored. The monitoring, in practice, consisted of the documents.\n\n\n\n\nDisplacement\nRigorous definition. In Cócola-Gant’s (2018) account, displacement describes the sequential process by which tourism-driven market pressure removes long-term residents from a neighbourhood — not through a single act of eviction but through the cumulative conversion of housing stock, service infrastructure, and public space into assets whose yields are optimised for a non-resident clientele. The process is sequential because each conversion raises the threshold for the next resident considering whether to stay, and because the departures it produces are individually voluntary and collectively structural. A useful further distinction, introduced in this volume, separates displacement proper — in which a competing occupant takes the space — from reduction, in which the space is removed from the category in which the resident was looking and re-entered the market under a heading she does not have the budget to read. The second is quieter, harder to document, and considerably more common.\n\nOperational disambiguation. Institutional language prefers renewal, upgrading, repositioning, or dynamisation — terms that describe the same process from the perspective of the actor performing it rather than the person experiencing it. The resident who has been displaced does not, as a rule, describe her situation in any of these terms. She describes it as not being able to find a flat, which is accurate but lacks the administrative polish that would qualify it for inclusion in a strategic plan. The strategic plan, for its part, does not use the word displacement either, on the grounds that the word implies a subject who has been acted upon, and the plan is not organised around subjects of that kind.\n\n\n\n\nInfrastructure of Affordable Sociability\nRigorous definition. A distributed network of low-threshold social spaces — bars, small shops, market stalls, neighbourhood services — whose prices are calibrated to local incomes and whose collective function is to sustain the everyday encounters on which shared civic life depends. The term is the narrator’s own construction and is not borrowed from the literature; it is used here to name a phenomenon that the literature tends to describe in its absence rather than in its presence. An infrastructure of affordable sociability is not a cultural amenity, not a heritage asset, and not a leisure offering; it is the set of places in which a student, a hospital orderly, a retired mason and a shift worker can each find, within a short walk of where they live or work, somewhere that serves them on terms they recognise. Its defining property is distribution: when it is concentrated in a few designated streets it becomes a scene; when it is distributed across a city it becomes a city.\n\nOperational disambiguation. The word infrastructure is conventionally reserved by municipal administrations for amortisable physical assets — bridges, collectors, fibre optic, roundabouts of the kind described in Chapter 2 — whose construction can be tendered, whose maintenance can be budgeted, and whose completion can be announced. The infrastructure described here shares none of these properties. It cannot be tendered because no single actor built it. It cannot be budgeted because its cost was distributed across thousands of small decisions taken by people who did not know they were building anything. And its disappearance cannot be announced because no single closure constitutes the loss; the loss is the moment at which the resident walks the length of a street she used to know and finds that the only establishments still open are the ones whose prices have been recalibrated for someone else.\n\n\n\n\nJunkspace\nRigorous definition. Koolhaas’s (2002) term for the sprawling, incoherent built environment produced by late-capitalist development: spaces that are functionally efficient for the purposes of commercial throughput but devoid of local meaning, historical continuity, or spatial identity. Junkspace is not derelict space; it is fully functional space whose function is the elimination of every quality that cannot be monetised.\n\nOperational disambiguation. A street in a UNESCO World Heritage zone whose every shopfront sells the same variant of the same refrigerator magnet is not derelict. It is, in Koolhaas’s taxonomy, perfectly realised junkspace: organised, clean, commercially coherent, and entirely indistinguishable from the same street in Seville, Lisbon, or Prague. The World Heritage designation, in this context, functions as a quality assurance label for the undifferentiated product.\n\n\n\n\nNon-Place\nRigorous definition. Augé’s (1992) term for spaces of circulation, transit, and anonymous consumption — airports, motorway service stations, shopping malls — that lack the relational, historical, and identity-forming qualities that define place in the anthropological sense. A non-place is not an absence; it is a fully constituted space whose constitution specifically excludes the possibility of belonging.\n\nOperational disambiguation. A historically significant street can simultaneously be a place of memory and a non-place of souvenir commerce. This is not a paradox but a description of what happens when the surface of a place is preserved and its social content is replaced. The stones remain; the neighbours do not. Augé would have recognised the result immediately; he would not have found it comforting.\n\n\n\n\nPerimeter\nRigorous definition. A distributed micro-economy of neighbourhood provisioning organised around an anchor institution — a hospital, a faculty, a stadium, a transit node — and sustained by a recognisable repertoire of bars, small shops and rhythms whose prices are calibrated to the habitual clientele of that anchor. A perimeter is smaller and less formal than a barrio, more functionally specific than a district, and considerably more fragile than either.\n\nOperational disambiguation. The term is preferred to the official designation barrio funcional, which the municipal apparatus tends to deploy at the moment it has already decided that the perimeter in question can be substituted by something else, and which therefore arrives, as a rule, slightly too late to be of use to the people the perimeter was serving. A perimeter is not charm, not heritage, and not picturesque; it is provisioning, and the test of whether one still exists is whether the people who depended on it still recognise their own prices on the menu.\n\n\n\n\nProvisional\nRigorous definition. In planning and construction contexts, a temporary measure adopted under conditions of urgency or operational necessity, with the explicit intention of reversal once the precipitating circumstances have been resolved. The provisional measure is distinguished from the permanent intervention by its declared temporality and the conditions attached to its removal.\n\nOperational disambiguation. In practice, provisional measures in urban heritage contexts have a documented tendency to become permanent at a rate approximately inversely proportional to the number of times the word provisional appears in the authorising decree. The 2026 asphalt overlay of a cobbled street in Segovia’s UNESCO-listed historic centre — described by the responsible Councillor as “meditated, prudent, adequate, and accurate” (González-Salamanca, 2026), and by heritage specialists as “absurd, disproportionate, and without reasoned justification” — offers a compact illustration of the lifecycle: emergency decree, institutional criticism, promise of reversal, and subsequent silence at intervals inversely proportional to the political cost of fulfilment.\n\n\n\n\nRight to the City\nRigorous definition. Lefebvre’s (1968) political and philosophical claim that the inhabitants of a city have a collective entitlement to participate in the production and governance of urban life — not merely to occupy space, but to shape it. The right to the city reframes urban justice as a collective entitlement rather than a set of individual property rights, and implies that the reconfiguration of urban space in the interests of capital is a form of dispossession, whether or not any individual resident has been formally evicted.\n\nOperational disambiguation. The right to the city is not enforceable in any court of which the narrator is aware. It is, however, the most precise description available of what is being withdrawn when a city is reconstituted as a platform of value extraction: not merely the bar, not merely the hardware shop, not merely the affordable flat, but the accumulated claim — informal, unarticulated, and entirely reasonable — to live in a place that continues to be organised around the needs of the people who live in it.\n\n\n\n\nThreshold\nRigorous definition. The point past which an urban system continues to operate but no longer operates for the same constituency. It is not a moment of breakdown, it is rarely announced, and it is the cumulative result of decisions taken at different times, by different agents, mostly within the law and largely in good faith. Its distinguishing property is that it can only be recognised in retrospect and by exclusion: by the time it has been crossed, the people for whom it mattered are typically no longer in the room to confirm the crossing.\n\nOperational disambiguation. The term is to be distinguished from the use favoured by tourist boards and municipal communications departments, in which a threshold is something one is congratulated for having crossed — the millionth visitor, the tenth consecutive year of record arrivals, the entry of a new district into a curated itinerary — and in which the crossing is invariably presented as an achievement rather than as a quiet subtraction. The two senses share a word and nothing else.\n\n\n\n\nValue Extraction Platform\nRigorous definition. Following Harvey (2012), a configuration in which the physical and social infrastructure of a city — its streets, historic fabric, cultural institutions, proximity services — is reorganised to maximise the capture of economic rent by capital interests that need not be, and typically are not, domiciled in the city in question. The platform metaphor implies not a single actor but a system: a set of legal, regulatory, and market arrangements that produce extraction as their normal output.\n\nOperational disambiguation. The platform is not a conspiracy. It requires no coordination among actors, only a shared interest in the continued rise of property values and a regulatory environment that treats this interest as equivalent to the public good. The ordinary citizen participates, typically without awareness, each time they use a short-term rental platform, attend a ticketed cultural event in a repurposed public building, or accept that the bar they preferred has closed because that is simply how things go. The last clause is the one that deserves scrutiny.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAugé, Marc. (1992). Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Seuil.\n\n\nCócola-Gant, Agustín. (2018). Tourism gentrification. In Loretta Lees & Martin Phillips (Eds.), Handbook of gentrification studies (pp. 281–293). Edward Elgar.\n\n\nHarvey, David. (2012). Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution. Verso.\n\n\nKoolhaas, Rem. (2002). Junkspace. October, 100, 175–190.\n\n\nLefebvre, Henri. (1968). Le droit à la ville. Anthropos.\n\n\nZukin, Sharon. (2010). Naked city: The death and life of authentic urban places. Oxford University Press.",
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    "text": "Augé, Marc. (1992). Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de\nla surmodernité. Seuil.\n\n\nCasado, Diego. (2026, April 10). El libro que explica cómo superar\nel desamor por lo urbano: «Hay que cambiar las ciudades para cambiar el\nmundo». elDiario.es. https://www.eldiario.es/madrid/somos/libro-explica-superar-desamor-urbano-hay-cambiar-ciudades-cambiar-mundo_1_13108130.html\n\n\nCenteno, Z., & López, C. (2025). Repercusión del crecimiento de\nlas viviendas de uso turístico en el precio de la vivienda de\nalquiler. Ecologistas en Acción. https://www.ecologistasenaccion.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Repercusion-del-crecimiento-de-las-Viviendas-de-Uso-Turistico-en-el-precio-de-la-vivienda-de-alquiler.pdf\n\n\nCócola-Gant, Agustín. (2018). Tourism gentrification. In Loretta Lees\n& Martin Phillips (Eds.), Handbook of gentrification\nstudies (pp. 281–293). Edward Elgar.\n\n\nDefensor del Pueblo Andaluz. (2014). Queremos saber porqué las\nsanciones de tráfico en Granada son muy superiores al resto\nde provincias con similar parque móvil. Queja de oficio, resumen\ndel resultado. https://www.defensordelpuebloandaluz.es/queremos-saber-porque-las-sanciones-de-trafico-en-granada-son-muy-superior-al-resto-de-provincias\n\n\nDirección General de Tráfico. (2025). Balance de siniestralidad\nvial. Vías urbanas, año 2024. Nota de prensa, DGT. https://www.dgt.es/comunicacion/notas-de-prensa/20250708-descienden-un-6-los-fallecidos-por-siniestro-de-trafico-en-las-ciudades/\n\n\nDohmen, Maud, Braat-Eggen, E., Kemperman, A., & Hornikx, M. (2022).\nThe effects of noise on cognitive performance and helplessness in\nchildhood: A review. International Journal of Environmental Research\nand Public Health, 20(1), 288. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20010288\n\n\nEcologistas en Acción. (2019). La pesadilla de la contaminación en\nGranada. Ecologistas en Acción. https://www.ecologistasenaccion.org/129043/la-pesadilla-de-la-contaminacion-en-granada/\n\n\nEuropean Environment Agency. (2020). Environmental noise in europe —\n2020 (EEA Report 22/2019). European Environment Agency. https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/environmental-noise-in-europe\n\n\nEuropean Parliament and Council of the European Union. (2002).\nDirective 2002/49/EC of 25 june 2002 relating to the assessment and\nmanagement of environmental noise. Official Journal of the European\nCommunities, L 189/12, 18 July 2002. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32002L0049\n\n\nFundación Línea Directa. (2016). Estudio sobre las multas\nmunicipales en españa, 2011–2014. Reseñado en Revista Tráfico y\nSeguridad Vial (DGT). https://revista.dgt.es/es/noticias/nacional/2016/04ABRIL/0426-Estudio-multas-municipales-Linea-Directa.shtml\n\n\nGheller, Flavia, Spicciarelli, Gaia, Scimemi, P., & Arfé, Barbara.\n(2023). The effects of noise on children’s cognitive performance: A\nsystematic review. Environment and Behavior, 55(8-10),\n698–734. https://doi.org/10.1177/00139165241245823\n\n\nHarvey, David. (2012). Rebel cities: From the right to the city to\nthe urban revolution. Verso.\n\n\nJarosińska, Dorota, Héroux, Marie-Ève, Wilkhu, P., Creswick, J., Wothge,\nJ., & Paunović, E. (2018). Development of the WHO environmental\nnoise guidelines for the european region: An introduction.\nInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public\nHealth, 15(4), 813. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15040813\n\n\nKoolhaas, Rem. (2002). Junkspace. October, 100,\n175–190.\n\n\nLefebvre, Henri. (1968). Le droit à la ville. Anthropos.\n\n\nMinisterio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (Spain). (n.d.a,\nn.d.). Series históricas. Estudiantes matriculados. Cursos 1985 a\n2014. Online statistical portal; series \"Students enrolled,\n1985–2014\". https://estadisticas.ciencia.gob.es/series-historicas-estudiantes-1985-2014\n\n\nMinisterio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (Spain). (n.d.b).\nSistema integrado de información universitaria (SIIU) — historical\nseries and statistical publications. Online statistical portal;\nseries \"Students enrolled, 1985–2014\". https://estadisticas.ciencia.gob.es\n\n\nOrganización de Consumidores y Usuarios. (2025). Impacto de los\npisos turísticos en el problema de la vivienda. OCU. https://www.ocu.org/vivienda-y-energia/comprar-vender-alquilar/noticias/vivienda-pisos-turisticos\n\n\nPatronato de la Alhambra y Generalife. (2025). Memoria anual:\nVisitantes a la alhambra y generalife, 2024. Patronato de la\nAlhambra y Generalife, Junta de Andalucía. https://www.alhambra-patronato.es/\n\n\nRazai, Mohammad S. et al. (2025). The impact of noise pollution on\nhealth. BMJ, 391, e081193. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2024-081193\n\n\nRedacción ahoraGranada. (2026). Las víctimas mortales en carretera\nen Granada descienden un 11% pero aumentan los heridos\nhospitalizados. ahoraGranada. https://www.ahoragranada.com/noticias/las-victimas-mortales-en-carretera-en-granada-descienden-un-11-pero-aumentan-los-heridos-hospitalizados/\n\n\nRodríguez, Alba. (2025). Las carreteras granadinas registran más de\n30 muertos este 2025. Granada Digital. https://www.granadadigital.es/muertos-trafico-granada-2025/\n\n\nRTVE. (2025, June 15). Miles de personas se manifiestan en\nbarcelona, palma, san sebastián y granada contra el turismo masivo.\nRTVE Noticias. https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20250615/miles-personas-se-manifiestan-barcelona-palma-san-sebastian-granada-contra-turismo-masivo/16626071.shtml\n\n\nSennett, Richard. (2018). Building and dwelling: Ethics for the\ncity. Allen Lane.\n\n\nUniversidad de Granada. (n.d., n.d.). UGR en cifras / OpenData UGR —\nstudent enrolment datasets and historical tables. https://calidad.ugr.es/areas/ugr-en-cifras\n\n\nWorld Health Organization. (2018). Environmental noise guidelines\nfor the european region. WHO Regional Office for Europe. https://www.who.int/europe/publications/i/item/9789289053563\n\n\nWorld Travel & Tourism Council. (2025, May 29). Spain’s tourism\nsector could exceed €260 billion by 2025, according to WTTC. WTTC\nNews. https://wttc.org/news/spain-tourism-sector-could-exceed-260-billion-euros-by-2025\n\n\nZukin, Sharon. (2010). Naked city: The death and life of authentic\nurban places. Oxford University Press.",
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    "text": "Part I · Text: Planning, Composition and Revision\nThis volume was written between early 2025 and spring 2026 as a collaboration between a human author and a large language model (Anthropic, Claude, Opus series). The division of labour, and the principles that governed it, are set out below. They are recorded not as a disclaimer but as a methodological fact: the conditions under which a text is produced are part of what the text is, and withholding them would be inconsistent with the analytical standards the volume has tried to maintain elsewhere.",
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    "text": "Structural design\nThe architecture of the volume — five civic perspectives converging on a synthesis, framed by a preface and a coda — was established by the author in a working brief prepared before any chapter was drafted. The brief specified the central argument (the reconstitution of the city as a platform of value extraction), the narrative persona (a reluctant expert formed by proximity and duration rather than by disciplinary training), the tonal rules (irony through precision; a maximum of two sentences of visible satire at each chapter opening; the self-correction move), and the standing prohibitions (no idealisation of the past; no rants; no policy recommendations except where their absence would constitute evasion).\nThe five-perspective structure was chosen to prevent the essay from collapsing into a single emotional register. Each chapter examines the same city through a different functional encounter — residence, commuting, leisure, public space, education — so that the cumulative portrait emerges from the convergence of partial views rather than from a single authoritative position. The decision to maintain indirect specificity — the city identifiable but not foregrounded by name in every paragraph — was taken early and held throughout, on the grounds that the processes described are not unique to one municipality and that explicit naming would invite objections of local circumstance at the expense of structural argument.\n\n\nDrafting and the role of the language model\nEach chapter was preceded by a thematic briefing written by the author: a document setting out the analytical framing, the empirical sources to be incorporated, the tonal register, and the specific rhetorical moves the chapter required. The language model received this briefing together with the project brief and all previously approved text, and produced a first draft. The author then revised the draft, sometimes substantially, accepting, modifying or discarding passages on the basis of accuracy, tonal fidelity to the project’s voice, and argumentative coherence.\nThe model’s contribution was most productive in three areas: sustaining a consistent prose register across chapters of considerable length; generating the museum-caption register for the plate descriptions, which required a specific combination of formality, irony and compression that benefits from iterative refinement; and identifying, within a given thematic briefing, the structural possibilities for the self-correction move — the moment at which the narrator catches himself and adjusts course.\nThe model’s contribution required the most correction in two areas: a tendency toward rhetorical closure, which conflicted with the volume’s commitment to leaving discomfort unresolved; and occasional over-distribution of irony, which the project rules confine to designated openings and transitional passages rather than allowing it to diffuse through the analytical body of each chapter.\nRevision proceeded in tight cycles. The author pasted approved text independently and requested only the specific changed fragment or citation list — not full file rewrites. This kept revision cycles short and avoided unnecessary regeneration of previously settled material. Version control followed a simple convention (chapter_v01.qmd, chapter_v02.qmd, chapter_FINAL.qmd), with substantive changes between versions documented in commented headers within each file.\n\n\nSource identification and theoretical register\nThe theoretical framework draws on urban studies scholarship whose relevance to the volume’s argument was assessed by the author: Lefebvre on the right to the city, Zukin on commercial displacement and authenticity, Augé on non-places, Koolhaas on the spatial logic of late capitalism, Sennett on the ethics of building and dwelling, Harvey on capital accumulation and urban space, and Cócola-Gant on tourism gentrification as a specific mechanism of residential displacement. The selection was the author’s; the model assisted with bibliographic verification and with integrating references into prose as single unremarkable sentences rather than literature-review clusters — a constraint specified in the project brief and enforced throughout.\nEmpirical data was drawn from institutionally auditable sources — Defensor del Pueblo Andaluz, INE, Idealista, the Junta de Andalucía’s tourism registers, and comparable public instruments — on the principle that the volume’s evidential claims should be verifiable by any reader with access to the same institutional archives. Where data heterogeneity prevented defensible cross-regional comparison (as in the traffic sanctions appendix, where non-Andalusian capitals report under incompatible statistical frameworks), the constraint was stated explicitly within the text rather than concealed behind apparent comprehensiveness. This principle — methodological honesty over the appearance of thoroughness — was one of the project’s earliest commitments and one of its most frequently tested.\n\n\nDiscarded approaches\nSeveral structural and tonal options were considered and rejected during the drafting process. An early version of the coda attempted an aphoristic density that, on review, provided the reader with the satisfaction of stylistic closure — precisely the resolution the section was designed to withhold. A draft of the commuter’s chapter experimented with sustained comic exaggeration, which was reduced after it became clear that the darkly comic register worked only when grounded in specific, verifiable observation. The glossary was originally conceived as a more extensive apparatus; a first tranche was completed (with entries for threshold and perimeter), and a second tranche (including infrastructure of affordable sociability) was deferred to align with the chapter in which that concept carries its principal analytical weight. Title variants for the volume and series were generated, assessed and archived in a dedicated file; the final selections prioritised precision of reference over rhetorical attractiveness.\n\n\nFormat and presentation\nTwo custom SCSS themes — civic-darwinism.scss for the light presentation and civic-darwinism-dark.scss for the dark — are declared in the Quarto project configuration as separate files rather than combined into a single stylesheet. The dark mode was calibrated to preserve the warm, paper-like quality of the light palette rather than to introduce a distinct visual identity: the same fonts, spacing and structural rules apply in both modes, with only the colour values — background, foreground, accent tones (rust, gold) and block backgrounds — recalibrated for legibility on dark ground. Quarto’s native theme toggle, with localStorage persistence, allows the reader to override the system colour-scheme preference.",
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    "text": "Part II · Illustrations: Visual Metaphor and Generation\nThe illustrations in this volume — designated as plates and captioned in a museum-label register — function as a parallel dimension of the argument rather than as decoration or visual relief. Each plate is positioned within or immediately after the passage whose observation it refracts, and its caption operates in a register deliberately distinct from the surrounding prose: formal, terse, and mordantly ironic. The contrast between the caption’s administrative composure and the situation it describes is itself part of the satirical apparatus.\n\nGeneration process\nPrompting and iteration. Each illustration in this volume was developed iteratively from a written visual brief that specified compositional constraints, narrative function and tonal register, rather than from existing photographic material. Initial prompts translated these briefs into architectural and situational parameters (street typology, degree of crowding, light conditions, palette) and produced a first synthetic image in a documentary–illustrative register. Subsequent versions were generated through successive, narrowly scoped edits, each adjusting a limited set of variables: signage and lettering, pricing conventions and currency, the positioning and posture of figures, or the degree of interior visibility at a threshold. At each stage, the result was evaluated against the brief for legibility (can the scene be read in three seconds?), avoidance of real-world identifiers (no actual brands, buildings or slogans), and consistency with the book’s chromatic scheme.\nFor the more complex plates, including the real-estate window sequence, the demonstration march and the cover image, this process extended to fine-tuning textual content on placards and posters, ensuring that slogans and micro-texts remained legible, plausible and contextually accurate while avoiding direct reproduction of journalistic sources. Corrections to typographic hierarchy (title, subtitle, author line), language variety and tone were made at the end of the pipeline, once the underlying illustration was fixed, so that text would integrate visually without driving the composition. The resulting images are thus the outcome of practice-led, prompt-based visual research: each plate condenses a series of constrained revisions in which the same underlying scene is re-specified until it satisfies the conceptual, aesthetic and evidential requirements of the project.\nEach plate required multiple generation passes. The initial prompt was derived from the scene described or implied in the corresponding chapter text, translated into visual specifications (composition, colour register, level of detail, presence or absence of identifiable features). Candidate images were assessed against three criteria: fidelity to the scene as written, compatibility with the volume’s visual tone (documentary rather than photorealistic; illustrative rather than cartographic), and the capacity of the image to sustain the museum-caption register without the caption having to override or apologise for what the image shows.\nDiscards. A significant proportion of generated images were discarded. Common reasons for rejection included excessive stylisation (the image read as editorial illustration rather than as documentary observation), insufficient spatial specificity (the scene could have been anywhere), and tonal mismatch (the image was too cheerful, too bleak, or too obviously satirical to support the restrained irony of the caption).\nEthical and representational considerations. No generated image depicts identifiable real individuals. Architectural and urban features are rendered with enough specificity to be recognisable as belonging to a Mediterranean city of the type described, but without reproducing any single identifiable building, street or façade in a manner that would constitute a topographic claim the volume is not in a position to verify. The decision to use generated rather than photographic illustration was taken in part to maintain the indirect specificity that governs the text: the city is this city, but the argument is not confined to it.",
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    "text": "Licence and Attribution\n© 2026 Miguel Moreno. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence. You are free to share and adapt the material for non-commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit and distribute any derivative work under the same terms. The illustrations, generated as described above, are subject to the same licence as the text they accompany.\nThe published volume is archived at Zenodo and may be cited using the persistent identifier https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19533278.",
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