In this paper, I explore the impacts of holiday rentals in the historic centre of Barcelona. The intention is to contribute towards a conceptualisation of this unexplored phenomenon with the aim of better understanding why it represents the new gentrification battlefront in several tourist destinations. I suggest that the rhetoric of the sharing economy conceals the fact that holiday rentals are actually a new business opportunity for investors, tourist companies and individual landlords and, for this reason, long-term residents represent a barrier to capital accumulation. I show that there is an increasing conversion of housing into accommodation for visitors and that such conversion involves different forms of displacement. Importantly, when residents move out, the only buyers tend to be tourist investors. In such a context, I suggest that the growth of vacation flats produces conditions that solely enable the reproduction of further accommodation for visitors, rather than for long-term residential use. I call this process ‘collective displacement’, that is to say, a substitution of residential life by tourism. Ultimately, throughout this paper I suggest the importance of undertaking critical research relevant to those experiencing urban inequalities. Documenting and producing data about the way in which displacement takes place can be a crucial political tool for those who are fighting for staying put.

d o s s i e r L a reconquista de las áreas centrales por parte del capital inmobiliario ha marcado buena parte de las transformaciones urbanas vividas en América Latina en los últimos años. En este contexto, el uso de los términos "gentrificación", "acumulación por desposesión", "desplazamiento" o "derecho a la ciudad" se ha difundido de forma creciente. Aunque se trate de conceptos surgidos en el contexto académico anglosajón, los mismos han sido reapropiados sobre todo por movimientos sociales urbanos. Más allá de las especificidades que dichos conceptos adquieren en diferentes contextos geográficos, su uso deriva del hecho de que, en última instancia, sirven para evidenciar la violencia del capital inmobiliario, esto es, las desigualdades de clase inherentes a la producción de la ciudad en el capitalismo contemporáneo. En Latinoamérica, la especulación inmobiliaria también ha devenido uno de los principales medios de acumulación, sobre todo mediante la inversión de capital en espacios usados por las clases populares. La característica fundamental de estos procesos es que

This paper focuses on the historic connections between tourist promotion as a factor for both capital attraction and competitiveness and its influence on the urban configuration of Barcelona. Today, tourism represents a strategic value in the urban organisation of Barcelona and constitutes an excuse for the design, management and planning of the city, but the genealogy of this process has not been considered. In analysing this origin, the paper emphasises the validity of the strategies that were used at the beginning of the 20 th century and makes a parallelism with the current promotion of the city. The tourist construction of Barcelona originated in the framework of the bourgeois ideology, which placed aesthetic and cultural values as a core idea of its discourse. Both the urban reconfiguration and the monumental construction of Barcelona were a prerequisite and a consequence of this promotion.