MALASAÑA, MALASANA

Mapping gentrification over the years in Calle San Vicente Ferrer.
Project for “Quantitative Methods”, Prof. María Esteban, October-November 2023.

CONTEXT

This project maps the evolution of gentrification in Malasaña, a Madrilenian neighborhood that is famous for being a cosmopolitan hub, frequented by tourists, international students and residents alike. Malasaña historically has a high concentration of artists and members of the Madrilenian counterculture movement, La Movida Madrileña, but has since seen a rise in the number of businesses and apartments oriented towards non-residents and non-Spanish speakers. While it has created a great reputation for Malasaña, the process of gentrification that was impulsed by mass tourism has some dark sides to it.

Please note that the introduction is a part of the final submission explaining the origins of the concept and defining the street segment that will be mapped.

INTRODUCTION

Calle San Vicente Ferrer is a mixed-use environment - Low-rise residential buildings and tourism/leisure-oriented businesses occupying the street level. The street has one of the highest concentrations of commercial activity in Malasaña, driven by a large number of cafes, restaurants, bars, shops and clubs on the eastern side, between the intersections with Calle Santa Lucia and Corredera Alta de San Pedro (the western and eastern boundaries for my segment, respectively).

After observing the commercial space, I realized that they could be sorted by orientation based on their interior design: the “vintage bulb” cafes catering to international tourists, “flowery” niche cuisine restaurants, “backlit liquor cabinet” bars that repurpose vintage aesthetics, “repurposed decor” restaurants that serve high-end cuisine, and “tabernas”, that existed before the tourism boom.

“Localities can be more closely connected to sites thousands of miles away than to their immediate surroundings.” (Dodge et al., 2011) Gentrification is one of the main issues that Malasaña in general has to deal with, and the existence of several “layers” of business types in the street is evidence of the remarketing of the area as a “tourist-friendly area” with the erosion of the local Spanish cultural appeal of old establishments that were closed and converted into an “international”-centric commercial preference.

My idea is to create an “timeline of old to new” layering system that showcases the old uses of the commercial space of SVF, and how they have been superseded over the years with newer establishments, how it led to the birth to the aforementioned categories, and how the complex structure of the timeline of SVF’s development.

RESEARCH PROCESS

The first part of the process was identifying where to get my data from, which wound up being the Portal de Datos Abiertos del Ayuntamiento de Madrid, where I was able to collate the street’s commercial locales registered with the city hall and find historical data going back to 2014. I used the “Censo de locales, sus actividades y terrazas de hostelería y restauración” to for the former, and the “Censo de locales, sus actividades y terrazas de hostelería y restauración. Historico” for the older data. However, comparing data going back to only 2014 was not enough to showcase how the street’s businesses have changed, so I took to Google Street View to find the oldest record of stores and their “letreros”, and the oldest data that was available goes back to 2008. I wrote down the names of businesses, side by side with the 2014 and 2022 data sorted by building number, to ensure that any stores that have remained open are used in the same slot for later analysis.

The second part was identifying what I am mapping; I wanted to map the changes to each locale, indicate certain categories of stores and ‘aesthetics’ that I had identified, and highlight businesses with an interesting background that is relevant to the problem of gentrification that was reported in the news.

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