On 22 November 2014, two housing activism collectives, the Anti Eviction Mapping Project and Eviction Free San Francisco, called for a protest against ‘the Airbnb takeover of San Francisco’, USA (Anti-Eviction Mapping Project 2014), right in front of Fort Mason Center, which was hosting an ‘Open Airbnb Host Conference’. Both organizations were denouncing Airbnb’s role in the rapid gentrification and shortage of affordable housing in the city. After gathering in front of the entrance, the activists held signs that read ‘Airbnb, don’t evict me!’ or ‘I lost my apartment to a tourist. It’s unfAirbnb’. Claiming that the so-called ‘sharing economy’1 is in fact a selfish economy, they raised the issue of Airbnb triggering the removal of units from the rental stock available to local residents, therefore aggravating the housing crisis responsible for the eviction of thousands of San Franciscans.

On 23 October 2014, a group of activists gathered in front of the centro juvenil (youth centre) in Barón, one of the 42 hills of Valparaíso, Chile, to organize a pasacalles (march) aimed at ponerse de pie por su dignidad y patrimonio (standing up for one’s dignity and heritage). After setting up a banner, the crowd headed down the hill towards the ocean and stopped in front of the San Francisco church, a symbol of the city’s slowly decaying historical heritage. The crowd then walked towards the recently destroyed Hospital Ferroviario, one of the city’s working-class icons soon to be replaced by a luxury condominium with ‘the best view of Valparaíso’. After several speakers defended the verdadero patrimonio (real heritage), the protesters ended the march chanting ¡Barón no se vende, el barrio se defende! (Barón is not for sale, the barrio defends itself).

The comparison of the struggles unravelling in San Francisco and Valparaíso that these two incidents exemplify allows a cross-contextual analysis of what activism and resistance reveal in terms of processes of dispossession triggered by tourism capital flows. On the one hand, in the case of Valparaíso, the coordinated politics of tourism, in particular through the designation of some of the city’s historic districts as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, appear to have dramatically fuelled the gentrification of some of the city’s neighbourhoods (Jacquot 2005), such as Barón. On the other hand, San Francisco is currently experiencing what has been referred to as a ‘hyper-gentrification process’ (Brahinsky 2014) – in part caused by the so-called ‘Tech Boom 2.0’ (Opillard forthcoming). In this process, the existing housing crisis has been aggravated by the success of online short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb, through which landlords can profit from the growth of the ‘sharing economy’ and remove their properties from the regular rental market in order to rent them to visitors and tourists.

The concept of ‘tourism gentrification’ can be applied to both cases to encompass processes of economic, socio-demographic, cultural and material changes in urban space. Nonetheless, tourism gentrification per se has yet to be clearly defined (Gotham 2010), and it seems that the use of this concept tends to overlap between studies of tourism-induced city-centre rehabilitation (Salin 2002) or heritage reclamation (Jacquot 2006) on the one hand, and studies on gentrification on the other (Lees et al. 2010). Following Gotham (2010), in this chapter I argue that the concept of tourism gentrification is an effective tool to analyse the local effects of changes in policy decisions and of the intervention of new actors (Swyngedouw 1997; Brenner 2001) in cities currently experiencing the effects of a surge in tourism flows and capital. I also stress the fact that ethnographic observations of the resistance to distinct processes of tourism gentrification can help shed light on the intricate co-construction of urban development agendas and the surge of tourism flows.2 The chapter first sketches the theoretical framework that makes the concept of tourism gentrification relevant for the understanding of global and local processes of power restructuring in contemporary (tourist) cities. These processes are then approached through the comparison of the politics of tourism, and of the resistance to their impacts, in the city of Valparaíso (Chile) and the City and County of San Francisco (United States).

Tourism gentrification: politics of scale, global and local shifts

In order to understand tourism gentrification processes, it is essential to elaborate upon their specificity with regard to paradigmatic processes of gentrification on the one hand, and to the increasingly complex nature of tourism developments and practices in the urban sphere on the other.

Waves of gentrification and urban change

Research on gentrification has attracted a lot of attention in past decades. The debates over the triggering of gentrification processes in various contexts have created a dynamic research field in which scholars have mostly argued over both demand-side and production-side explanations. On the one hand, demand-side explanations suggest that ‘markets and (the) state respond to consumer demand for gentrification’, making it essential to analyse the ‘switch from suburban to urban aspirations’ (Brown-Saracino 2010: 27) of what David Ley calls the ‘new middle class’ (Ley 1996). The emergence of a new consumer potential embodied in ‘white collar workers associated with a post-industrial, service oriented economy’ (Brown-Saracino 2010: 65) thus shapes gentrification processes while the market seizes the opportunity which these consumers’ aspirations represent. On the other hand, the ‘generalization’ of gentrification patterns in multiple contexts has made it possible to talk about ‘global urban strategies’ (Smith 2002) and their specific enactment in various settings (Bridge et al. 2011; Lees 2012). Neil Smith’s explanation of the gentrification processes through the rent gap, i.e. ‘the disparity between the potential ground rent level and the actual ground rent capitalized under the present land use’ (Smith 1996: 65), revealed the mechanisms by which gentrification can be a ‘form of collective social action at the neighbourhood level’ (ibid.), whether it is initiated by the state or by financial institutions. His depiction of the Lower East Side’s battles in the 1990s specifically focused on the real estate market’s mechanisms that contributed to the emergence of ‘new frontiers’ within the city (Smith 1996). In his later works, Neil Smith identified three waves of gentrification, which account for both the expansion and intensification of the process and the re-articulation of market and state relations (Hackworth and Smith 2001).

In light of the ongoing ‘financialisation of urban production’ (Le Goix and Halbert, 2012; Aalbers 2015), the global spread of gentrification, as well as the accelerating ‘super gentrification’ (Lees 2000) of world cities like New York, London or, indeed San Francisco, Smith’s definition of these three waves is today more relevant than ever. An aspect that Smith only raised implicitly was the role tourist flows and the tourism-related investments and interests play in the production, extension and intensification of gentrification processes. This issue was later picked up and elaborated upon by Gotham (2010) who introduced the concept of ‘tourism gentrification’ to discuss how tourism – and in particular tourism-oriented promotion strategies – encourage and provoke gentrification. Focusing on the case of New Orleans’ Vieux Carré (French Quarter), he highlighted especially ‘the role of state policy [. . .] and the actions of large corporate entertainment firms’ in the socio-spatial transformation of the neighbourhood, but at the same time claimed that tourism gentrification ‘presents a challenge to traditional explanations of gentrification that assume demand-side or production-side factors drive the process’ (p.149).

Tourism gentrification: power struggles, material and discursive impacts

The challenges researchers face when trying to identify the intricacy between tourism and processes of gentrification are numerous. One of them, which will not be thoroughly discussed here, is the disentanglement of tourism-related factors from other forces leading to neighbourhood change in particular cities. Another is the tackling of both demand-side and production-side models, a dichotomy that often confines the analysis of gentrification to both a predefined set of mechanisms – tourism practices versus tourism policy – and a strict causal link – individual practices influencing market-led developments, state policy filtering down to the local. Following the work of Gotham (2010), I argue that the concept of tourism gentrification is both a heuristic tool to overcome this dichotomy and an operational concept to seize the imbrication of global and local processes. On the one hand, the ever-increasing mobility and evolving consumption preferences of the middle class are said to have resulted in significant changes with regard to cities’ tourism and leisure landscapes. On the other hand, numerous studies have identified tourism economic interests as an important factor contributing to policies resulting in gentrification, while the emergence – and the territorial impacts – of new actors such as Airbnb further complicates the interplay among forces shaping gentrification processes.

In this context, I argue here that tourism gentrification does not only refer to ‘the transformation of middle-class neighbourhoods into a relatively affluent and exclusive enclave marked by a proliferation of corporate entertainment and tourism venues’ (Gotham 2010: 148). Rather, I want to expand its scope to include the consequences of the power shifts provoked by tourism gentrification, insisting on the discursive processes accelerating or counteracting the transformation of gentrifying spaces. A constant struggle against erasure and for the persistence of collective memory lies at the heart of gentrification processes (Lee and Yeoh 2005), since both the commodification of collective memory (Kearns and Philo 1993) and the ‘mutual forgetting of what came before the constructions of new buildings, restaurants, and businesses [are] critical to the creation of sites based on gentrified consumption’ (Raquel Mirabal 2009: 17). The concept of tourism gentrification provides the opportunity to identify the ways in which changing touristic ‘landscapes of power’ (Zukin 1993) reconfigure both the way space is remembered and the way people identify with it.

The following section aims to illustrate the complexity of the processes of tourism gentrification, by firstly drawing attention to the declaration of parts of Valparaíso as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the impact this has had on discursive and material processes of neighbourhood change. The city’s designation process exemplifies the growing influence of new actors in local governance and urban development following the UNESCO nomination. The transformation of the city that has arisen as a result has been contested. Subsequently, I will explore how recent developments in the so-called ‘sharing economy’ have fuelled processes of gentrification in San Francisco, leading to political struggles over the legalization of a private corporation’s practices, Airbnb. This illustrates the blurred lines between demand-side and supply-side analysis in tourism gentrification research.

Tourism policy and tourism gentrification in two neoliberal contexts

Tourism gentrification plays out differently in different places depending on a variety of factors – global, national and local, as well as agential and structural. In this section two case studies3 – the city of Valparaíso, Chile and the City and County of San Francisco, United States – are explored to depict two very distinct types of urban tourism policies. On many levels, San Francisco and Valparaíso have more in common than one might expect. Both are coastal cities built upon dozens of steep hillsides; both cities’ histories are intrinsically tied to their ports, and both cities were transformed into boomtowns and magnets for European immigrants during the Gold Rush. These and other similarities – both are, for example, well known for their unique and varied architectural heritage dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as a long history of countercultural and bohemian movements – should not obscure the gulf that otherwise separates them. One of the most prosperous cities in one of the most prosperous countries of the world, San Francisco is today experiencing a rapid growth in population, with an estimated 852,469 inhabitants growing by 5.9 per cent between 2011 and 2015 and an increase of visitors by 6.5 per cent between 2013 and 2014 to 18 million visitors. Its economic prosperity, thanks to the proximity of the Silicon Valley, makes it one of the most wealthy cities in the United States, with a median income reaching 75,604$ in 2013 (United States Census Bureau 2015). The demographic and economic situation of Valparaíso stands in sharp contrast. With an estimated population of 269,446 inhabitants in 2012, which decreased by 2 per cent between 2002 and 2012, Valparaíso, Chile’s third-largest city and in the past sometimes referred to as the country’s ‘little San Francisco’, is meanwhile facing a difficult economic situation: the average household income in 2009 was just above $12,000 a year, with high levels of inequality (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile 2012). In parallel, the number of tourists who stayed in hotels in the Valparaíso region (Quinta Región) between 2010 and 2013 increased by 48 per cent from 537,371 to 799,246 (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas 2013). Both cities’ economies rely on their tourism industries in very distinct ways. While the Chilean central government and Valparaíso’s local government count on tourism as a key sector to trigger the city’s economic recovery, the ongoing tourism boom in San Francisco partly stems from the existing dynamism of the city’s economy.

Heritage reclamation (‘recuperación patrimonial’) in the wake of the UNESCO designation: discourses and power struggles over the making of local heritage in Valparaíso, Chile

Valparaíso is remarkable for many different reasons: its cove shape and colourful houses sprinkling the city’s 42 cerros (hills), the nineteenth-century architecture that European migrants (Germans, French, British, Italians) brought along with them, the artistic and bohemian lifestyle that still attracts many tourists. These amenities started to be thought of as touristic assets by local decision-makers in the 1990s with the city government’s decision to submit a bid to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The process that led to the bid, as described by Jacquot (2005), lasted for ten years and was characterized by intense discussions, disputes and power struggles over what was unique to Valparaíso’s local heritage (patrimonio) and consequently worthy of being included in the city’s bid to be added to the UNESCO World Heritage list. In the first nomination dossier that the city government submitted to ICOMOS, the non-profit organization in charge of the evaluation of World Heritage Site candidacies, the discourse defining the patrimonio underlined the

universal and noticeable values of the amphitheatre city, composed of the superposition of the geographical features of the bay, of specific architecture and urbanism, shaped by the natural landscape and anthropic intervention through the city’s historic development, which ties together, combines and makes its own the natural and built elements.

(Jacquot 2005: 395)

While the city government was elaborating the bid, the Chilean central government prepared a plan to support the development of the city. In 2000, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning developed a ‘plan to revitalize the historic centre’ (Jacquot 2007: 283), and in 2002 an exceptional initiative by the President Ricardo Lagos launched the Plan Valparaíso, which aimed at ‘opening the seashore, promoting and facilitating investments and transforming Valparaíso into a heritage and cultural city’ (ibid.).

The first UNESCO bid failed to convince ICOMOS and was turned down in 2000, according to Guerrero Valdebenito (2012) because of a lack of experience of local actors and insufficient preparation. The second attempt, this time designed by the city government, the regional administration, the Council of National Monuments and the national Ministry of Public Works, included a systematic listing of the buildings with heritage value. The perimeter concerned the areas closest to the harbour – the Barrio Puerto – along with two hills with a noticeable architectural landscape – the Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepción, highlighting the ‘exceptional testimony of a phase of the nineteenth century globalization’ (Jacquot 2007).

Following the granting of the UNESCO designation in 2003, the material consequences of the implementation of the heritage preservation perimeter in terms of tourism gentrification processes have been quickly felt, albeit in different ways in different parts of the city. The hospitality industry, headed by the semi-public Corporation for the Promotion of Production (Corporación de Fomento de la Producción), rapidly increased the infrastructure to host national and international tourists in the two hills of the designated perimeter. In these two neighbourhoods, the city government additionally subsidized the painting of facades and street pavements by contracting a fifty million dollar loan from the Interamerican Bank for Development. Although there is no official data at the neighbourhood level on second-home ownership, evidence suggests that the designation of the UNESCO perimeter triggered the purchase of many properties by santiaguinos (inhabitants of Santiago de Chile, the capital city) and Europeans seeking to invest in real estate with the promise of high rates of return. In his works, Jacquot suggests that ‘the Santiaguinos . . . are important agents of this gentrification, buying houses or apartments in Valparaíso, often as a second home’ (2007: 322). The multiplication of hotels, hospedajes and restaurants following the UNESCO designation4 is another indicator of the neighbourhood’s transition, as revealed in an interview conducted in October 2014 with a French restaurant owner who had run his business in the Cerro Alegre since 1998. He described the rapid installation of restaurants alongside his own, the subsequent increase in rents and sale prices, and the pressure on small existing businesses, many of which were forced to move as a result.

The contrast between the hills mentioned above and the Barrio Puerto, Valparaíso’s ‘port neighbourhood’ and one of the oldest, most traditional parts of the city, is striking. Also a part of the UNESCO preservation area, Barrio Puerto used to be a centre of commerce and social life and experienced a particularly drastic process of decline as a result of the demise of Valparaíso’s maritime and port industry after the opening of the Panama Canal. The declining fortunes of the port led to high concentrations of socially marginalized groups (Retamales Quintero 2010), a lack of public and private investment as well as a dilapidation of the area’s building stock. The replacement of the Barrio Puerto’s historical narrative – i.e. the port as the vehicle of a long-standing social mix (Chandía 2013) – with the idea of heritage as a commodity (Aravena Nuñez and Sobarzo 2009) is symbolized by the increasing number of folkloric souvenir stores and walking tours depicting the local ‘bohemianism’.

Today, the neighbourhood is at the centre of a second phase of touristic development, materialized by the imminent construction of a seaside resort called Mall Barón. This twelve-hectare project, facilitated by the privatization of Chile’s harbour administration in 1997 (the Empresa Portuaria de Chile, renamed Empresa Portuaria de Valparaíso – EPV), follows the model of cities like ‘Boston, New York and Baltimore [where] great investments were made in old abandoned port precincts which were transformed into public spaces of great value for their populations and in touristic sites’ (MallPlaza 2012). In this area, real-estate developers have exerted intense pressures to bypass existing historic preservation ordinances as well as zoning and height restrictions (Jacquot 2007). While the first phase of heritage restoration which accompanied the UNESCO designation rested on the promotion of a nostalgic vision of the city’s nineteenth-century apogee (Aravena Nuñez 2006; Aravena Nuñez and Sobarzo 2009; Gervais-Lambony 2012; Jacquot 2007), this latest phase is characterized by an emphasis on international festivals and conferences as a means to generate development and foster the ‘revival’ of the declining ciudad puerto. The yearly festival Puerto de Ideas, which seeks to promote the works of local and international top scientists (financed by the Coca Cola Foundation), has been located in the derelict Severín building, one of the most emblematic properties of the city that has laid in ruins for decades, from which tons of trash and waste were removed for the occasion. In his inauguration speech in 2014, the city mayor insisted on making this festival an opportunity to capture the attention of investors willing to help and ‘recuperate’ the Barrio Puerto, quoting the example of the imminent construction of a neuroscience research centre in the same building. The festival illustrates the local government’s more recent ambition, alongside tourism development, to deploy – and exploit – cultural resources in order to transform Valparaíso from a trading, industrial city into a city of ‘knowledge’ and ‘creativity’, in line with the ideas of Landry (2000) and Florida (2002).

Tourism policy as apparent laissez-faire: the corporate-led touristification of San Francisco

With millions coming to see the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, the city’s steep hills and the surrounding areas from Muir Woods to the Napa, Sonoma and Silicon Valleys, San Francisco is one of the United States’ major domestic and international tourist destinations. The city is the third most popular urban destination in the country among international tourists behind New York City and Los Angeles, with 18 million visitors in 2014 generating a record-breaking $10.7 billion in visitor spending (San Francisco Travel Association 2015). Perhaps unsurprisingly then, tourism has also for a long time been recognized as a crucial driver of urban change. McDougall and Mitnick (1998), for instance, already claimed in the 1990s that San Francisco was subjected to a ‘Disneyland-style thematization’ as a result of the influx and influence of tourists: ‘whole neighbourhoods have been destroyed, recreated, and redecorated as tourist destinations by urban planners who use the same strategies as film production designers to transform the city into a collection of picturesque facades’ (p. 153). While San Francisco is often described as one of the few large US-American cities in which activists have had a real and sustained impact on urban and neighbourhood development (Hartmann 2002; Beitel 2013; Tracy 2013), tourism as a policy area has been dominated for decades by the interests of the tourism industry. Described by Chester Hartman as one of the ‘principal driving forces behind the transformation of the city’ (p. 20), the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB), in particular, played an instrumental role in numerous initiatives to stimulate tourism development. It has now been renamed ‘San Francisco Travel’, a private, not-for-profit membership organization, ‘aggressively marketing and selling San Francisco to attract visitors’ (San Francisco Travel Association 2015). Exemplifying the ‘thin line between the public and the private sector’ (Hartmann 2002: 21) that tends to characterize tourism marketing organizations and headed by a Board of Directors made up of 45 business leaders from various companies, its vision is to ‘ensure that San Francisco is the most compelling destination in the world’.

In the context of a very well structured and wealthy industry promoting the development of tourist attractions and convention centres, the recent emergence of corporations surfing the wave of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ tends to complexify the analysis. Online platforms like Airbnb and VRBO that allow owners and tenants to rent parts of or their entire apartments for short periods of time are both indicative of, and integral to, a profound reconfiguration of tourism practices and markets. Airbnb was started in 2008 in San Francisco and is today a company worth 25.5 billion dollars (Carson 2015), with approximately 500,000 listings and 350,000 hosts in about 34,000 cities around the world. At the time of writing it was estimated that the number of Airbnb listings in San Francisco was between 5,249 and 6,113 (Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office 2015), 34.7 per cent of them from hosts that have multiple listings (Cox 2015). Within the total number of listings, 59.2 per cent are entire homes with an average price of $261 per night. The geography of Airbnb listings in San Francisco reveals a higher number of offers in the Downtown area, Haight and Ashbury, the Mission, the Castro and Bernal Heights, as shown in Figure 7.1.

Airbnb is currently the object of a major controversy over the role that short-term rentals play in San Francisco’s housing crisis. The consequences of online rental platforms on local housing markets were described in a study delivered in May 2015 to David Campos, supervisor of the Mission District, showing for example that ‘in the Mission, 29 per cent of [vacant rental housing units], or 199, were listed on the website. Another estimate states the Mission percentage could be as high as 40 per cent and as high as 43 per cent in the Haight’ (Sabatini 2015). Although it has proven difficult to clearly link tenants’ evictions and the surge in Airbnb listings (Said 2014a), some cases demonstrate that homeowners prefer to take their properties out of the rental market and rent them through the online platform, which allows them to significantly increase their rental income (Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office 2015). Loopholes in state legislation – mostly the Ellis Act5 – allow landlords to exit the ‘normal’ rental market by evicting tenants from their properties without any justification, which facilitates the conversion of properties into permanent short-term rentals (Hill 2015).

The impact that online rental platforms have on the housing market has consequently been widely discussed in the local political arena, and companies like Airbnb are regularly accused of adding fuel to the housing crisis, which had already been deepened by the effects of the so-called ‘Tech-boom 2.0’ (Opillard forthcoming; Beitel 2013) that is affecting the Bay Area. Other than the effects that Airbnb listings have on the housing market, critiques have pointed out that Airbnb did not pay the city hotel tax from 2008 to 2014, thus owing the city 25 million dollars in hotel tax (Said 2014b), and that most of its 7,029 listings (Cox 2015) were not complying with local legislation which imposes a ceiling of 30 days on residential rentals.

Resisting tourism gentrification

Both the contexts and paths of tourism gentrification vary greatly in the two cities under investigation. On the one hand, Valparaíso’s gentrification process stems from the prioritization of ‘heritage’ by both the central and local government as part of, and in parallel to, the UNESCO designation of a local protection perimeter, which has incentivized external investments from both individuals and international corporations. On the other hand, San Francisco’s tourism gentrification can be ascribed, not least, to the long-standing influence of private tourism corporations in the local economy, as well as, more recently, the emergence of new players in the ‘sharing economy’ like Airbnb. Nonetheless, common elements emerge from this analysis: both cases of gentrification provoke the displacement of existing communities and their dispossession from their homes. Along with these processes, the narratives that contribute to building collective appropriation by long-term inhabitants tend to shift, and the power struggles that can be witnessed are those of communities fighting against the dispossession of their collective identity and memory of space. The last section of this chapter will focus on some of the communities’ responses to processes of tourism gentrification, specifically stressing the contextual elements that seem to facilitate or restrict the possibilities for the building of grassroots mobilization, political power and control over the making of space.

San Francisco’s community activism against loss and displacement

In San Francisco, over the past years the housing rights and tenants’ movement has again grown in importance. While it is not specifically directed towards tourism gentrification, it seeks to fight the consequences of gentrification at large, tourism gentrification being one of the many processes that provoke displacement and dispossession (Beitel 2013).

Groups and repertoires of contention in the housing movement

On 7 February 2014, after a series of local meetings in several districts of San Francisco called Neighbourhood Tenants Conventions, the Tenderloin Community School hosted the Citywide Tenants Convention. The convention was the first major event of the Anti-Displacement Coalition (SFADC) which had been established in 2013 by various community groups to ‘address the wave of evictions and landlord harassment forcing thousands from their homes and neighbourhoods’ (Anti-Displacement Coalition 2014). The convention agreed on a joint resolution regarding San Francisco’s deepening housing and affordability crisis that was later submitted to the Board of Supervisors, the legislative body within the government of the city and county of San Francisco. The convention also served as a starting point for the organization of two ballot initiatives: an anti-speculation tax (Proposition G) that was put up for vote to the citizens of San Francisco in November 2014 and failed to be accepted; and a ballot measure put up for vote in November 2015 asking voters to decide on tougher regulations on vacation rentals in private homes (Proposition F).

In the Anti-Displacement Coalition, two collectives have stood out: the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AMP) and Eviction Free San Francisco (EFSF). As a direct action group, EFSF exemplifies anti-capitalist community activism. The fight over cases of evictions mostly revolves around three modes of action: protesting in public spaces, rallying and publicly denouncing ‘greedy’ landlords and speculators. The AMP’s modes of action correspond to the pattern of artistic and ‘tech activism’ specific to the Bay Area (Lallement 2015). Using technology as a tool to implement and empower community activism, the group makes maps, links housing developments and evictions to real-estate speculators and collects oral histories of displacement, using both their own collected data and the available data on evictions and housing ownership.

Both collectives are based in the Mission district, where the fight against displacement is historically strong. The Tenants Union acts as one of the main resources of many gravitating groups: it offers a workspace, material and technical support (mainly to EFSF and the AMP) in the Mission district, legal resources and volunteer-based tenants’ counselling. The Housing Rights Committee, another ‘housing clinic’, provides space for meetings, banner making and legal support to tenants, backing the Tenants Union in its missions. Other organizations like Our Mission No Eviction and Causa Justa:Just Cause work more specifically to support Black and Latino residents, while the Chinatown Community Development Corporation actively supports the Chinese community.

The first and most visible project that the AMP group implemented was the Ellis Act Evictions Maps, which identified areas that have been struck the most by the displacement of tenants (Figure 7.2). The AMP’s maps have had a great echo in the tenants’ movement and have inspired the making of other maps more directly related to the fights around tourism gentrification (see Figure 7.1), as discussed below. They specifically shed light on the importance of the creation and use of data as a tool for social movements to produce alternative narratives on neighbourhood change and gentrification (Raquel Mirabal 2009).

The making of tourism as a public issue: the Airbnb fight within the structure of political opportunities

The battle over Airbnb’s right to offer short-term rentals has gained significant coverage in 2015. Up to February 2015, renting a space for less than 30 days was illegal in San Francisco, making a lot of Airbnb’s rentals illegal. Yet the Board of Supervisor’s decision on 7 October 2014 to legalise most of the company’s listings through David Chiu’s (supervisor of District 3) legislation made it possible to rent out spaces within the limit of 90 days, as long as owners live in the rented space for the rest of the year and with the condition that they register with the City (Jones 2014). Some supervisors closer to the tenants’ movement in the city, like David Campos (supervisor of District 9), opposed the measure in the Planning Commission, arguing that since it did not include any obligation for Airbnb to share their listings with the City, it deprived the municipal government of its capacity to enforce the ‘Airbnb law’. Campos clearly stated the influence that the company is having in the preparation of local legislation concerning short-term rentals:

I believe that home sharing and short-term rentals have a place in San Francisco but what doesn’t have a place in San Francisco is the idea that a corporation can write a law, then ignore the very law that it wrote, and then refuse to provide the very basic information that is needed to enforce that law.

(Raile 2014)

The fight in the Board of Supervisors over new legislation revealed the political tactics of Airbnb, whose ‘board members Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, and Silicon Valley super-angel Ron Conway basically bought the good graces of the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors through $674,000 in contributions to a supportive political action committee’ (Schaal 2014). Intense campaigns took place in November 2015 over the vote on Proposition F and the election of the District 3 Supervisor. These revealed the omnipresence of Airbnb as a source of contention. While the organizations mentioned above were fighting to push for a pro-tenant candidate in District 3 – a district particularly affected by illegal Airbnb apartment conversions (Hill 2015) – the battle over Proposition F to toughen regulations on vacation rentals in private homes was subject to intense lobbying from Airbnb. The company invested 8 million dollars in the campaign against Proposition F, making it the most expensive campaign in the city’s history. After the proposition was defeated in the ballot, Airbnb revealed its political strategy to invest in over ‘“100 clubs”, a network of home-sharing “guilds” across the US’, launching what the company calls an ‘Airbnb host movement’ to support the forthcoming conflicts with local governments (Lehane 2015) while comparing its political influence to that of the National Rifle Association (Alba 2015).

This local political fight underlined the importance of both the use and production of data to frame the political debate around the company’s effects on the housing market: while Airbnb has refused to disclose its listings’ data to public officials, a policy analysis report by the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office of the Board of Supervisor (Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office 2015) was transmitted to supervisor David Campos which underlines the effects of Airbnb on the housing market. For housing activists, the production of alternative data is also crucial. On a local level, both the AMP and EFSF groups have launched research projects on what they call ‘Airbnb evictions’ which turn apartments into short-term rentals. On a national level, the Inside Airbnb project developed by Murray Cox (Figure 7.1), ‘an independent digital storyteller, community activist and technologist’ (Cox 2015), offers alternative counts of the number of Airbnb listings, rate of occupancy and rate of multiple listings, contrasting with the data used by the Board of Supervisors’ analyst. Like the AMP-produced maps, the map and graphics created by Murray Cox show how ‘tech activism’ provides tools to turn the effects of Airbnb into a public issue (Cefaï 1996).

Valparaíso’s activism: community resistance against private developments

By contrast with San Francisco’s well-structured and institutionalized tenants movement, participant observation in several organizations in Valparaíso revealed both the fragility and heterogeneity of collective movements. The following section will briefly explore the mobilizations surrounding tourism gentrification in Valparaíso and analyse the elements that contribute to the building of community political power over the making of space.

Tourism gentrification and the ‘heritage governmentality’

In December 2013, the academic Pablo Aravena Nuñez and the lawyer Pablo Andueza delivered, along with more than fifty citizen organizations, a report to the UNESCO inspectors entitled Valparaíso Reclamado (Aravena Nuñez and Andueza 2013). It analysed local policy-making with regard to the World Heritage Site and stressed the influence of private corporations on decision making over urban planning issues: ‘It is therefore worrying to see how the heritage management of the city – given up to the private sector without proper regulation – sometimes seems to be going straight “against” Valparaíso’ (ibid.: 10–11). The dispossession described here corroborates the idea of a transfer of power to the private sector: ‘Who administers our World Heritage Site? Everything indicates that only in appearances is it the entity designed by the nomination in 2003, which is to say the city government. In fact, EPV decides upon what to do on the seashore’ (ibid.). The report reviews the recent history of the city’s transformation. It insists on the several political shifts leading to the deep transformation of planning regulations and policies since Valparaíso’s inscription on the UNESCO’s World Heritage list. In this context, the Mall Barón appears to be only the ‘tip of the iceberg’: the extension of various industrial sites (Terminal 2 and Sitio 3) along with the touristic development for cruises (terminal de cruceros) show, according to the report, coordinated plans for intensive development of the seashore. These plans contradict many of the principles and recommendations put forward by UNESCO concerning the safeguarding of heritage sites as well as the zoning laws that had been put in place for the heritage area and its surroundings (ibid.: 21, 22, 23).

At the same time, this latest development phase is not at odds with but actually the direct consequence of the touristification of the city. I argue here, following Sobarzo (2008), that the spread of a heritage-based discourse in Valparaíso from the late 1990s onwards corresponds to the implementation of a ‘heritage governmentality’. The concept is adapted from Foucault’s definition of governmentality (Foucault 2004), which refers to the specific techniques of government and control of the modern state. Sobarzo insists on the neoliberal character of heritage governmentality, arguing that, in the case of Valparaíso, the weakening of state regulations and the concentration of power in the hands of lobbies

is a distinctive trait of the explosion of the real estate market, and in particular in relation to the concept of ‘heritage reclamation’, which meant the disappearance of livelihoods relying on urban systems in the process of extinction (barrios, small stores, plazas and parks etc.).

(2008: 5)

The city’s heritage reclamation efforts appear to be crucial factors in the change in what Sobarzo (ibid.) calls the city’s ‘economic regime’ since the early 2000s. Instead of developing and improving the living conditions of existing residents, the current hegemonic ‘touristic logics’ is characterized by several processes:

1. Fear by the tourist of the dreadful city [. . .]: dogs and trash in the streets, urban chaos, crime. 2. Generation of new peripheral zones due to the displacement of native populations. 3. Hygienisation of the access to the centres of capital: population shift in the heritage zones, renovation of the harbour zone, converted in touristic service centre. 4. Creation of a symptom which displaces the preoccupation for the origin of inequality towards its modes of expression: depoliticised ‘chosisme’ expressed through heritage. 5. Huge amounts of money transferred to the private sector straight from the State [. . .]. 6. Higher living costs inside the heritage perimeter [. . .]. 7. Decline of the small retail in the harbour zone and replacement by chains [. . .] and 8. Proletarianisation of the touristic jobs.

(Ibid.: 8)

Drawing on the social and economic history of Chile’s neoliberal turn since the military coup in 1973, Sobarzo sees the touristification of the city as the latest form of a neoliberal government intervention to expand the market’s imprint (Paley 2001; Brenner and Theodore 2002; Sobarzo 2008; Aravena Nuñez and Sobarzo 2009).

Groups and repertoires of contention in the Coordinación de Defensa de Valparaíso

In this context, the most visible battle in terms of resistance to tourism development is most certainly the ten-year fight against the construction of a resort and commercial touristic complex on the city’s seashore, the above-mentioned Mall Barón, down the Cerro Barón. As Jacquot argues, the fight to preserve the seashore from high-rise developments was in the 2000s frontally led by both No al Mall Barón and the organization Ciudadanos por Valparaíso, two organizations which produced a discourse over the preservation of an ‘unaltered’ authentic architecture (Jacquot 2006). The fight to give the seashore back to the people is at present led by the organization No al Mall Barón, which has been slowing down the construction process by challenging the project in many different ways, in particular by resorting recurrently to a particular discourse invoking heritage, insisting on the dissonance that a mall on the seashore would create with the nearby UNESCO heritage site. In this case, No al Mall Barón utilizes the UNESCO narrative of a preserved World Heritage City to counteract the increasing interest of private developers in both the shoreline and the hill neighbourhoods.

The two groups mentioned above exemplified the fights led between 2005 and 2012 by mostly middle-class organizers with a strong capacity to project their claims and discourse in the local, national and international media. In the early 2010s, a different kind of mobilization started to take shape, coordinating the efforts of local groups in a citywide coalition called the Coordinadora de Defensa de Valparaíso (CDV). On 12 April 2014, the most important fire that the city had experienced in years killed 15 people, displaced more than 12,500 residents and burnt 3,000 houses to the ground. This catastrophe itself tells a lot about the way in which collective movements were then forced to both change the focus and narrative of their actions. Before the fire, the Coordinación de Defensa de Valparaíso was just beginning to take shape, fighting against the changes in the plan regulador6 that would allow massive urban development projects in the hilly neighbourhoods of the city, where constructions are not solidified and often illegal. With the fire, several distinct groups met in order to fulfil the role of the overwhelmed municipal services by bringing food to affected residents and helping victims of the fire. After a great deal of organizing, the CDV started publishing press releases which insisted on the fact that ‘the fire sheds light on the insecurity and tough life that lots of inhabitants of the city heights are living, abandoned by the state apparatus and in the midst of the municipal administration’s inefficacy’ (CDV 2014). Adding to this debate, on 4 December 2014, the Contraloría, the highest jurisdiction in Chile, identified the municipal government as being mainly responsible for the fatal consequences of the fire as it failed to ensure that sufficient fire protection measures were in place. This decision helped to generate additional attention and support for the contentions and activities of the CDV which, as it gained more visibility, decided to create a second field of action, in the form of a network of neighbourhood organizations named Cabildos (Councils).

The term Cabildo is used as a reference to the colonial times, during which the taking up of political power by local elites through the Cabildos abiertos (open councils) led to the process of Chilean independence. In Valparaíso, a number of community leaders from several hills decided to form the Cabildo communal, whose mission is ‘to supplant the municipal management and criticise the plans to redevelop entire areas by displacing poverty’, as one leader expressed it in an interview in December 2014. On a micro-local level, during the few months of my observation, from October to December 2014, four Cabildos were active, gathering each week from 15 to 30 people. Each Cabildo pursues its own specific issues, e.g. the issue of garbage accumulation and lack of drinking water in the Cerro Cordillera, or the development of a mall on the seashore and aggressive real-estate practices in the Cerro Barón. Each Cabildo is conceived as a tool for the coordination of several pre-existing organizations in its neighbourhood, among which are radical housing cooperatives (Red Habitat Valparaíso), autonomous community centres (Centro Santa Ana) and youth community centres (Centro Juvenil Barόn).

In various cases within the small-scale fights led by the Cabildos, the notion of heritage has been re-appropriated and its meaning transformed. Heritage is then defined as the very neighbourhood infrastructure and facilities that allow citizens to have access to public services and fulfil their basic needs. The UNESCO preservation perimeter actually puts this specific heritage at risk, the Cabildos argue, by commodifying architectural icons and leaving aside social infrastructure. The Cabildos describe the transformation of the city’s public services (swimming pools, libraries, hospitals, schools) and small-scale neighbourhood commercial facilities into private retail infrastructure as a sign of the city government’s economic disinvestment. More specifically, the tourism industry along with real-estate developers are singled out as taking advantage of the recent process of ‘heritage recuperation’, making Valparaíso a touristic destination rather than a decent place to live for its inhabitants.

The fights surrounding the former Hospital Ferroviario, a vivid symbol of the last amenities used by railroad workers in the Cerro Barón, are a particularly relevant example of these struggles. Activists embarked on a multifaceted campaign to protect the hospital from demolition and redevelopment into a new condominium complex, ranging from the creation of banners (Figure 7.4), the fight through the municipal board and lawsuits for harassment of the elderly. Eventually, the Cerro Barón activist networks were not successful in protecting the building but the struggle initiated the production of a heritage claim called ‘Heritage for whom?’ (¿Patrimonio para quién?), making the former hospital a symbol for the struggle over community possessions.

In this context, the structuring of a coordinated political discourse by local mobilizations confronting municipal decisions reveals the intricacy of the combined impacts of tourism development and of the economic disengagement of the city government. On two different scales, both the CDV and local Cabildos, in their struggle, highlight the fact that tourism development has been the trigger that started the interest of the private sector in the city. Tourism gentrification in parts of the UNESCO perimeter and the growing interest of real-estate corporations for the shoreline therefore appear as two distinct but closely related processes.

Conclusion

International comparisons pose conceptual as well as practical challenges. They run the risk of correlating factors that rely on ‘complex geographical contingencies’ (Lees 2012: 161). Yet, within international comparisons lies the key to understanding how global dynamics and phenomena such as increasing tourism and mobility flows play out in specific contexts. The study presented here is aimed at a cross-contextual analysis of processes of dispossession triggered by tourism capital flows as well as of the community responses they sparked. In both cases, it was argued that the concept of ‘tourism gentrification’ can be applied, and that government policy and business interests have played a key role in facilitating the transformation the two cities have experienced. The cases of Valparaíso and San Francisco, in other words, lend support to Gotham’s claim that tourism gentrification, rather than simply a reflection of market laws of supply and demand, is first and foremost indicative of an interplay of global and local forces as well as new institutional arrangements between actors in the public and private sector.

Significantly, however, these arrangements and interplays take on different forms in different contexts: Valparaíso’s socio-spatial change needs to be examined in the context of the actions of ‘traditional city boosters’ like the ones Gotham identified in New Orleans, as well as the city’s inscription in the UNESCO’s World Heritage List. The case of San Francisco meanwhile is indicative of the emergence of a new player whose business model relies heavily on the ‘disruption’ of the traditional hotel industry and the housing market (Said 2012), but which also complexifies conventional production-side models of gentrification and the demand and supply distinctions they tend to rely upon. In addition, Airbnb brings about new challenges for those resisting processes of tourism gentrification. By exploiting the value-laden idea of ‘sharing’, creating the illusion of offering a business model that is owned by no one and open to all and, more recently, casting itself as a ‘saviour of the middle class’ (Said 2015) for residents feeling the squeeze of higher rents, Airbnb camouflages and ‘sugarcoats’ both the processes of dispossession its business contributes to and the profits it accumulates from these processes. ‘Sugarcoating’ – a term used by Slater (2006) to criticize depoliticizing, demand-side narratives of gentrification – is meanwhile also an issue locals grapple with in Valparaíso, where the virtue of historic preservation or reclamation of a certain kind of heritage has become an essential means for elites to (re-)assert their – moral and material – authority over urban space. Perhaps best thought of as the ‘performative in the political’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013), such morally charged narratives, which underlie practices and policies, play a role which should not be underestimated in place and space making (Raquel Mirabal 2009). Future research on – and protests against – (tourism) gentrification are well advised to critically engage with them (Slater 2006).