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The difference between tourist and traveller has been around for a long time, and most of us want to boast of the latter. The tourist, that round-the-clock visitor of places and buildings, collector of more or less brief and superficial experiences that help him to tell anecdotes and pretend to be interesting, and the traveller, the thoughtful and aware Baudelairean flaneur who has been seduced by the introspection of places and of himself from a standstill and almost endless time.1
Javier del Pino, a journalist, talked once about the paella correspondent 2 in relation to his time in Washington carrying out that task, a character similar to the expatriate who inhabits the barbecue urbanism, whom I know well, and always has an opinion3 about the country that is based in an experience most of the times limited to his job in an international company, where he is surrounded by expats like him, along with his tireless organizational capacities for paellas and barbeques gatherings in his free time, an excellent occasion to celebrate with his pairs the great goals in life he has achieved and the heroic of his feat.
The barbecue urbanite expat also likes to underline in these gatherings how well he has adapted to his host country, along with his ability to enjoy it and the locals, whom in magnificent English he will always refer to as “my friend”, in such a way that the language and cultural barrier is overwhelmed by an empathy based on the evident superiority of the one who exercises it with such self-confidence.
In Covid times of lockdown and claims of fifteen-minute cities,4 it may be necessary to rethink how we also shape the city with our actions and decisions. After all, energy efficiency5 is nothing more than the quotient between the energy consumed and the diversity and complexity of uses and functions of an environment or ecosystem.
The debate then may be whether a neighbourhood like La Moraleja in Madrid fits into that definition of a city, in the same way that a gated community or a compound does, a small town that you cross on foot in those fifteen minutes or a large bourgeois residential or any neighbourhood. Thinking about the interactions that can occur in each of them, it seems unlikely.
Francisco Javier Casas Cobo holds a PhD in Architecture (ETSA Madrid) and a Masters in Analysis, Theory and History in Architecture (ETSA Madrid) and is Lecturer of the College of Engineering of Alfaisal University in Riaydh (Saudi Arabia).
Text translated by the author