The housing portal started 15 years ago with two air mattresses in San Francisco. It advertises that you meet “real people” and gain “real experiences”. What is not in this fable is money – and what is happening to the cities.
A street in the Marais in Paris, in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg or in El Born, Barcelona, on a Sunday morning. At first glance an old residential area with spruced up old buildings, cafés, restaurants. But after a short time the picture begins to crack. Tourists come out of every second house entrance with their trolley suitcases, stand on the street and type something on their phones. Upstairs, on the balcony of a house, a cleaning lady is standing by the wrought-iron railing, shaking out the blankets. Below is a small café with a price board in English and the note “No Cash”. The atmosphere has something slightly virtual, like in image films of planned residential complexes. No one who really lives here has passed by for a quarter of an hour. The quiet side street feels more like a holiday resort, like a kind of inverted Las Vegas: not a no man’s land in which facades of buildings steeped in history have been erected, but buildings steeped in history that have become the no man’s land of global tourism.