**1. Introduction**

In recent years, there has been increasing concern about the impact of intensive tourism, both politically and academically. This has been especially noticeable in southern European cities such as Athens, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Rome, among others. Ref [1] Spain's status as a tourist power has increased the prominence of this type of process.

Ref [2] This type of impact has attracted the attention of the World Tourism Organization and the European Parliament. Although concern about the impact of tourism is not new, the recent focus is in response to an intensification of tourist flows and the expansion of tourism processes into new areas. There may be several reasons for this. For relatively poor regions, tourism has become the main way of attracting economic resources [3]. Furthermore, in recent years, the role of certain innovations in the tourism sector has developed or strengthened with a significant impact, such as low-cost airlines, cruise tourism, and the more recent emergence of online platforms that offer tourist accommodation [4,5]

In this way, tourism has become the main source of income for many cities in the country, leading to the professionalization of the sector and the increasing use of new technologies [6] that can offer high quality services and enable access from different social classes, in addition to the strong internationalization that has been growing in recent years. Since the economic crisis of 2008, tourism has gained even more prominence in job creation and in its share of the GDP [7]. This has coincided with some social alarm about the saturation of visitors in certain cities, especially in historic centers, with particular attention to the growth of tourist apartments [8,9]. The impact of temporary tourist rentals and Airbnb-type platforms has changed consumption patterns in the tourist accommodation sector [10]; while multiplying the possibilities for tourists to visit cities and access a wide range of experiences, it has been able to boost the number of tourists, both in traditionally touristy and non-touristy cities, leading to some congestion and competition for space with

**Citation:** Parralejo, J.-J.; Díaz-Parra, I. Gentrification and Touristification in the Central Urban Areas of Seville and Cádiz. *Urban Sci.* **2021**, *5*, 40. https://doi.org/10.3390/ urbansci5020040

Academic Editors: Deborah Edwards and Frank Witlox

Received: 15 February 2021 Accepted: 29 April 2021 Published: 2 May 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

conventional rentals in the most visited historic areas. This brings up the issue of the need for state regulation of these activities [11].

The term *touristification*, which can be defined as the ongoing transformation of urban environments from tourism and tourists, has become especially popular in Spanish academia in the last five years and is closely linked to the studies on gentrification in the central areas of large cities that were starting to be developed a decade ago. This narrative mostly originated from the idea of tourism gentrification, which was first introduced by Gotham [12] and has since been followed up by many researchers [13,14].

Questioning the appropriateness of talking about tourism gentrification, Jover and Díaz-Parra [15] argue for the need to differentiate traditional residential gentrification and touristification, given that, despite responding to similar mechanisms, these two processes would have different demographic effects. According to Clark [16], gentrification refers to the phenomenon of the substitution of residents and users of a certain urban sector for others who have greater purchasing power, mediated by investment in the built environment of the traditional population of a neighborhood. This element would respond to the classic conceptualization of Smith [17], who explained gentrification as a consequence of the reinvestment of real estate capital in previously devalued areas the main driver of this transformation being the benefit derived from the increase in land rents, which is called the rent gap. The notion of transnational gentrification, by contrast, can be interpreted as the process of new residents with higher status coming from other countries. Touristification, on the other hand, could be seen as a substitution for tourists and occasional visitors rather than for new households of a higher social class than the pre-existing ones [18]. Jover and Díaz-Parra [15] highlight this difference, insofar as touristification, unlike gentrification, should lead to some depopulation (in relation to established residents). Other authors point to the lack of evidence on the relationship between tourist rentals and population displacement [19]. In turn, ref [20] speak of a tourist rent gap that would place the driving force of the process in the existing difference between conventional rentals and tourist rentals.

This work is part of a broader doctoral study on the processes of gentrification and touristification in the Andalusian cities of Cádiz and Seville. The first part of the project is mainly focused on the exploratory and descriptive analysis of the impact of the intensification of tourist uses on housing, and the structure and socio-demographic evolution of the central areas of these cities.

Figure 1 shows where the historic centers of Seville and Cádiz are located within their municipalities.

**Figure 1.** Historic centers of Seville and Cádiz. Source: Prepared by the authors with data from the IECA [21].

The cases of Seville and Cádiz are of considerable interest. Both are tourist cities with large historic centers that have become important economic resources for the local economy, with a recognized history and evolution in recent decades. By studying Seville (an inland city) and Cádiz (a coastal city), the study can be extrapolated to other cities with similarities to Seville and Cádiz. Seville, with around 690,000 residents [22], is the Andalusian city with the highest number of tourist dwellings and the second city in Spain, after Madrid. It has the largest proportion of residential dwellings dedicated to tourist use in its historic center and receives almost 3 million visitors a year. On the other hand, Cádiz, with more than 116,000 residents [22], occupies a more secondary position with respect to the number of tourist apartments, but it is the city where cruise tourism has grown the most in recent years, outside the island territories, reaching more than 260,000 visitors.

After this short introduction, which includes a brief state of affairs, the work includes a methodological section which describes the steps followed in the analysis, sources used, and justification of the different indicators. The results are presented below, where we comparatively and consecutively explore, firstly, the data on tourist dwellings and housing uses and, secondly, the socio-demographic evolution of the population. The article ends with a brief conclusion section.

#### **2. Methodology**

An exploratory comparative analysis will be carried out between the two cities. This analysis is divided into two distinct parts. The first part focuses on data on housing and tourist rentals. The second part analyses the socio-demographic changes in these cities. The study area is defined by the municipal districts of both cities and, within these, the historic centers, defined by their walled enclosure. The study period covers the development of these cities during the 21st century, starting in 2001, the date of the penultimate population and housing census, and ending in 2018, the date on which the latest census data was published by the Andalusian Institute of Statistics and Cartography. The temporality of the data varies according to the source. It is possible to obtain the demographic data for each year between 2001 and 2018, while the housing data are mostly provided only synchronously for 2018.

The analysis of demographic statistics is based on the hypothesis that the increase in tourist apartments, as a result of the impact of platforms such as Airbnb [23], could put a brake on the trend of the last two decades in Andalusian historic centers. This could lead to a reversal, or at least a halt to the demographic decline they have been experiencing since the second half of the 20th century. These previous gains would be the result of a process of gentrification, so touristification and gentrification would have contradictory effects on this type of space.

The study of housing draws on a variety of sources. Firstly, we use the information provided by the population and housing census, which has the known limitation of its periodicity, so we only have data from 2001 and 2010. However, it does offer some interesting information on the use of housing. The data on tourist dwellings are based on the compilation of data on the Datahippo platform [24]. At present, Datahippo does not provide time series, so only stock data are available. The impact of online platforms that allow the transformation of dwellings into tourist apartments (Airbnb, Homeaway, etc.) is limited to the last five years and the official registers only started to operate a couple of years ago, when it became mandatory to declare dwellings for tourist purposes [25]. For the impact of tourist rentals operating via digital platforms, the reference date is 2012, the year in which Airbnb went international and opened its first office in Spain (Barcelona).

The difference between conventional and tourist rentals, understood as a proxy for the aforementioned tourist rent gap [20], has been taken as an explanatory variable. The data on conventional rentals have been extracted from the website Idealista.com [26]; the data on tourist rentals were taken directly from the Airbnb platform. Both were used to identify the average prices of tourist rentals in the historic centers of these cities. The obstacle to the tourist rental price data is the extreme variability of rental prices throughout the year. This has been partially overcome by obtaining the data for different periods of the year (high season and low season). For this, it has been necessary to make two assumptions in order to compare the two types of rentals. First, it has been assumed that there are three months of the high season and nine months of the low season. In the high season, Seville can exceed 500,000 overnight stays and Cádiz 67,000 according to data from the Hotel Occupancy Survey (EOH) [27] of the National Statistics Institute (INE 2018). The specific high season data for both cities have been obtained from two festivals declared of International Tourist Interest, which is an honorary distinction granted in Spain by the General Secretariat of Tourism of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism, and Trade. The festival in Seville is the traditional Easter festival, with more than 90% hotel occupancy according to the Seville and Province Hotel Association [28]. On the other hand, the festival in Cádiz is the famous Carnival, celebrated in the city where hotel occupancy reaches 95% according to the Federation of Hotel Businessmen of the Province of Cádiz [29]. The other assumption is that the tourist dwelling would be rented for the whole month in the three months of high season and half of the month in the nine months of low season.

In view of the lack of data on the size of tourist rentals, the rentals in two-bedroom dwellings were compared. The differences for the types of housing and different times of the year are used to extract an average, an indicator that would roughly reflect the difference in profits between conventional and tourist rentals as a driver of touristification. It should be borne in mind that it is intended to approximate the benefit of renting a property, although real estate, administrative, or fiscal costs should also be taken into account to obtain a more realistic figure.

Table 1 below gives the indicators of the first part of the work to be analyzed.



For the socio-demographic dimension, data were obtained from the Population and Housing Census of 2001 and 2011 and from the Population Register, between 2001–2018, provided by the National Statistics Institute (INE) and the Andalusian Institute of Statistics and Cartography (IECA). The Population and Housing Census has the advantage of presenting data on socio-occupational status and educational attainment, which can be used as a proxy for the status of the population in a given urban sector.

The gentrification indicator is constructed from the variation in the percentage of the population with professional and technical occupations. The so-called Marcuse index is used [30], where the operational definition is the relative change of a socio-economic group in the area in question, minus the relative change of the same group in the city. This allows us to know whether, in a given area, a social group that is contextually considered privileged has grown at a faster or slower rate than that of the city. The transnational gentrification indicator again uses Marcuse's index, but it takes as a privileged group the foreign population from the EU-15, the US and Japan, which would reflect what is generally recognized as core countries or countries with a higher level of development. This is a rather uncontroversial choice if we are talking about the first decade of the 21st century.

Table 2 presents the socio-demographic indicators, which is the second part of the work to be analyzed.


