Why not Logroño? Why not Logrono? If the capital of La Rioja is looking for a slogan for its next municipal campaign, it has been served on a platter by the Smiths, a couple from Kansas who settled in the city a few months ago with his baby, Quentin. The Smith family had already gained some notoriety on Tik Tok, where they have accumulated almost 20,000 followers, for their videos in which they express their enthusiasm for almost everything that has to do with life in Spain, from the orange juicers in the supermarkets to traffic lights with a timer (and a "little man who tells you how to walk"). But it was a moving video in which they declared their love for their adopted city that made them transcend that social network.
“The people are spectacular. The food is amazing. The wine is not from this world”, they say in the video. "It's very safe. It is spectacular for families, great quality of life, the cost of living is affordable and you are surrounded by mountains”, they add. It's an improvement on the last time a speech about Logroño went viral, when Carmen Maura went to El Hormiguero in 2019 and said that she had been surprised by the city, which she described as a "place you wouldn't normally go".
Therein lies the viralization of the video of the Smiths and others that belong to that subgenre, that of "foreigners romanticizing medium-sized Spanish cities", which is generating a kind of Tuscanization of places with little reputation for beauty. The Canadian student who loves Getafe (and the Spanish “campuses”, including the Delikia coffee machines) and Leganés and the American who found everything she was looking for in Melilla and Ceuta has also become very popular.
“I have seen the video from Logroño and I empathize with the appreciation that this family makes of sociability, good food, comfort, security and the lifestyle that many Spaniards take for granted,” says Brian Rosa, geographer and researcher at Pompeu Fabra University, and himself an American established in Barcelona. “Perhaps I can only be bothered by two things: that they say that living there is very affordable, because that is conditioned by the fact that they come from another place where salaries and prices are higher; and that they feel the need to proclaim it”.
“Are they trying to convince other Americans to move to small and medium-sized cities in Spain? I don't think this will become a massive trend, and perhaps it would be less damaging for small cities, but this type of migration for lifestyle is becoming a big problem in cities like Barcelona and Lisbon, skyrocketing housing prices." Rosa reflects.
Beyond the specific phenomenon, what these tiktokers could be discovering is that the medium-sized Spanish cities, especially the provincial capitals, which have a very defined historical personality, could be the cities of the original 15 minutes. The inventor of this term, Colombian urban planner Carlos Moreno, who has worked closely with the mayoress of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and many other city councilors around the world to implement his idea, has been in Madrid and Barcelona this week promoting his book The Revolution of Proximity (Alliance).
While attending La Vanguardia, he received a call from The Sunday Times. In fact, he had never been so in demand. This is because last week some 2,000 residents of the Oxfordshire region of England demonstrated with banners against "the 15-minute city" because they see the mobility plans of the area authorities as a plan to "lock up the neighbors in their neighborhood and not let them leave”. Moreno takes it with humor. "Not only did I never imagine my term on a banner, it is that I have gone from being a professor at the Sorbonne to being an evil devil, a member of an invisible world government."
The fact that an urban concept that has been around for a few years – and which, as Brian Rosa points out, is not new either, because it responds to ideals that have been discussed since the beginning of urban planning as a discipline – has slipped into the conspiracy agenda due to several factors. . “The circle has been closed. Climate change is an invention, vaccines are a 5G chip and now habitable cities are proof that there is an invisible world government. It is something very representative of our time, there is a strong conspiracy movement capable of imagining the darkest things”. These paranoid ideas, by the way, have had a certain echo on the margins of the Spanish far-right: in the 13TV program El gato al agua and on fanatical Twitter there has also been talk of anti-car urbanism as a totalitarian threat.
Moreno also sees it as something positive: urban plans have never been talked about so much and so passionately, as the inhabitants of Barcelona know well, who are preparing for heated municipal elections with the superilles at the center of the discussion.
Regarding the medium-sized Spanish cities, which he knows well, he points out that they can represent that ideal of coexistence (city of 15 minutes and territory of 30) if they preserve their essence and do not aspire to become metropolises or "spread out" to house neighborhoods of isolated houses with difficulty in accessing services that pushes people to use the individual vehicle and triggers CO2 emissions.
Neither can they become the “beautiful” historical settings, which are visited on weekends from the capitals, but not very active against which Sergio Andrés Cabello warned in his book La España where nothing ever happens (Akal). "What we want with these intermediate cities is that their own dynamics be the creation of local employment, relationships, local short circuits and the generation of homes with quality of life" and warns of the growing trend towards the "scattered city" in those provincial and county capitals.
The examples that for decades have been considered exemplary, those of Pontevedra, with its pedestrianized center and its 20% increase in population, or Vitoria, which has always been sold as the anti-monumental city (unlike Donosti and Bilbao) but excellently habitable, are still valid for Moreno. He also points to others: "Zaragoza is doing well and the Santander case is very interesting, they have launched a regenerative model based on the encounter with nature that can be very virtuous." And, yes, Logroño too. "It's very interesting what's happening there."
I can't help but ask Moreno about my hometown, Tarragona, where I don't live but visit often, and which would have everything a priori to live a vibrant present: privileged geography (excellent beaches), capital of a conurbation that includes other powerful towns such as Reus, Cambrils, Salou and Valls and a local economy that combines industry and services. And yet, the urban center of the capital languishes without any municipal government having been able to wake it from its torpor, with an absolute spillover of urban life towards the outskirts and a lifestyle that almost pushes people to take the car to do any daily act, from going to the movies to celebrating a child's birthday. Moreno, who first visited it 40 years ago and has recently returned, confirms my suspicions. She believes that the satelliteization with respect to Barcelona would have affected her.
The urban planner does not believe in "cutting and pasting" to solve the problems of these urban centers, in applying the solutions that have worked in one place in others. “What you have to have is sources of inspiration. Pontevedra, for example, is very inspiring”.
Brian Rosa also does not think that the model of the Spanish provincial town, with its friendly life (high density, ability to walk to almost any destination, intergenerational leisure) and also with its dark aspects – see La Regenta, Calle Mayor, by Juan Antonio Bardem , and half of the work of Carmen Martín Gaite. After all, the term “provincial” comes from somewhere – they are easily exportable. In case the Smiths or many Smiths wanted, for example, to recover a Logroño in Kansas.
“In principle, I don't think that work is going to be decentralized so much –says the geographer– but I do believe that people should be able to solve all their daily needs on foot, by bike or on short trips by urban transport. And that is the case in many Spanish cities, although not in the suburban developments or in the peripheral neighborhoods created in the late Franco regime”. In Northern Europe and the United States, Rosa points out, there are not many places, not even in cities, where you can live without cars, which are not a luxury but an expensive necessity.
“Concepts like the 15-minute city could be applied to the United States before the dominance of the automobile. Single-use areas with better infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists should be eliminated again. However, that lifestyle is only desirable for the privileged and the middle class. Pedestrian zones are often associated in the United States with left-wing thinking and economically exclusive zones. Both in Spain and in the United States, he points out, the emphasis on eliminating the barriers imposed by road traffic has led in many cases to gentrifying historically stigmatized areas that suddenly become more desirable.
Finally, an economically and socially thriving provincial city has a rebound effect: it improves the quality of life in its rural environment. That is to say, the Spain of the provinces also alleviates the emptied Spain. Vicente Pinilla, director of the chair of Depopulation and Creativity at the University of Zaragoza points in this regard. “The provinces in which there is an active city retain more rural population. In the years of the rural exodus, there was the idea that the capitals sucked. Here, for example, a book called Aragón contra Zaragoza became very popular, but now we have seen that this is not the case”.
It also points out that the next emptied Spain will be that of the medium-sized cities that will gradually lose population, as is already the case in Castilla. The charm that foreign tiktokers appreciate is not capable by itself of stopping opposing forces such as satelliteization with respect to large cities or the loss of weight of local economies. The question “Why not Logroño?” is very good, and the answer, quite complex.
