Gentrification is the makeover process that a town undergoes when wealthier people move in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, and often displacing current inhabitants in the process.
Ironically, its original character – that which first made it marketable as a destination – is sacrificed by the efforts of developers to appease its affluent visitors.
Byron Bae
This happened to Byron Bay. What was once a sleepy seaside village for whalers and pig farmers is now a hyperactive parade for influencers with selfie-sticks and Hollywood glitterati, hoping to enjoin themselves to the ‘cool vibe’ of the place.
Byron still sits on that beautiful Bay, but it’s quiet old charm is mouldering somewhere in the soup of big brand-stores that have cloned the streetscape to behave like all the other ‘bohemian’ surf towns around the world.
Byron Bay is still utterly beautiful on a good day.
But on a bad day, spent navigating parking fines, fin-chops at The Pass, the catwalk on the footpaths, and the guy-in-the-park who wants to fight you, Byron can be a nightmare: a very pretty nightmare.
In his chapter, ‘Problematising Place Promotion and Commodification,’ Nigel Morgan states in his 2014 book, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Tourism, that ‘tourism discourse’ gives places ‘personalities,’ homogenising them with a vibe.
‘This immobilises our dynamic world,’ says Morgan, ‘changing it to spectacle and straitjacketing it in cliché’
‘The representations of a place suck out its historical matter, embalming it in myth.’
For instance, Byron Bay is a home for people of varying ages and personalities with a rich history in production, and yet today it exists in the public mind only in two images – that of a stoned surfer or a plastic-lipped influencer.
Places were once known for the items they produced. Nowadays, they are known for the ‘vibes’ they produce.
Perhaps we have become less practical in today’s age, instead dwelling in a deluded bubble of shallow fascinations.
‘F*ck the customer’
Noel Gallagher was talking about music when he said ‘F*ck the customer – he doesn’t know what he wants.’
But the same principle goes for tourism. When developers kill a town’s originality by supplying the same branded stores, and array of beige cafes serving expensive coffee with strange milk, they are trying to focus group the place to its customer.
But in these surf towns, less is actually more. The rugged is fresh and the uncommon is hope-inspiring for visitors.
‘Commodified places often become a celebration of the culture of the copy,’ Morgan said.
The global crawl of the ‘surf-town’ trend is representative of this.
I see the same symbols on every coastline I visit around the world, from Indonesia to Portugal, and from Sri Lanka to Peru. Nowhere is safe from smashed avo on toast or Nicki Minaj’s ‘Starships.’
Taghazout: prayer calls with Tinder swipes
Last year, I visited Taghazout – a surf town on the Moroccan coast.
This was an interesting town, because if you stopped and looked around for two minutes, you’d see tradition and modernity grinding simultaneously.
For many Westerners, Taghazout is a destination ‘to get tubed, lit and laid,’ and yet for locals it is still a home – a place of practice, not hedonism. Every night in Taghazout, the call to prayer bounces along the desert cliffs like a ghost.
It is a reminder of a history, and a strict set of local values that survive beneath the thin layer of ‘Westerner’ film accumulated on the surface of the place.
In between the holidaymakers’ vanity parade, taxi drivers point their prayer rugs toward Mecca and pray in the carparks.
While the vacationers sleep off their stork hangovers, bands of grandmothers work in little pink tile kitchens, frying onion for ‘msemmen,’ and flattening dough possibly with the same technique passed down since Carthaginian times.
On Main Beach, three women wearing black hijab’s stride past all the cooking vacant flesh like it isn’t even there. On the same beach, Muhammed and Ismael rent surfboards and wetsuits to tourists learning to surf.
‘We sleep on the beach each night so that no one will steal our surfboards,’ says Ismael, pointing to a little tent and a tagine on a bed of coals.
‘One of us must always keep watch, because ours is a desirable business around here,’ says Muhammad.
When I hear of this dedication and see the extent to which foreign money feeds local families, I understand that it is ignorant to demonise tourism.
The problem lies in gentrification, and when contrived development remodels the town for affluent guests who do not appreciate the place beyond how it can serve their own desires.
On a walk through the backstreets one morning I met the ‘George Clooney of Taghazout.’
He introduced himself to me as such.
The resemblance was uncanny. Leaning cynically down from his porch, he expressed his concerns about Taghazout’s gentrification, and its growth from a tiny fishing village into the epicentre of Moroccan surf culture.
‘This place is becoming like a slab of meat attracting all the flies,’ Moroccan Clooney said.
‘I used to surf at Anchor Point, but now it’s full of idiots from all over the world who don’t understand proper surf etiquette. They’ve just wanted to stand up on a board so they can have “tum tum”. Now this town is full of guys with soft boards looking for tum tum. They don’t respect our values…’
‘What is tum tum?’ I asked him. With a grin, Clooney demonstrated the act of ‘tum-tum,’ thrusting his hips back and forth like an old hand.
Social media degrades tourism
Taghazout still held admirably on to its local customs, weathering the storm of cross-cultural confusion. Worryingly however, the growing force of social media and influencer culture could utterly ruin places like this, as tourists flock to ‘Instagrammable’ destinations purely for a selfie.
Never before has travel been so performative and self-centred.
This global fixation on ‘capturing the aesthetic’ causes gentrification, because ‘trending’ destinations are literally tidied up to provide satisfactory photo material.
This degraded type of tourism is white-washing fresh, stimulating places around the world. To be shocked, and curious, and to face the unknown is part of the human experience. Once these places are gone, they are gone forever.
This is a nuanced issue, because tourism is a balancing act between local economic growth and cultural preservation.
A middle-ground is needed between the unforgiving sweep of modernity, and the peaceful stability of tradition.
Above all else, a town must continue to function as a place that supports its originals first.
It shouldn’t be constructed into an image for a select group of affluent guests.
Pancho Symes is an Echo intern.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
