With plans in Costa Rica at the beginning of February, and a separate set of plans in Guatemala and Belize towards the end of the month, I found myself with a week to kill in Central America. Logistically it made the most sense to travel to Panama, and given I'm always up for an adventure somewhere new I decided to hell with it and pointed myself in the direction of the country known for its hats, its canal, and some rather embarrassing papers.
So there I was, in Panama City, a very strange place indeed.
On the advice of a friend I booked a hotel in Casco Viejo (not Virus, which is what autocorrect wanted!), the colonial quarter filled with beautiful low-slung buildings and studded with cocktail bars and restaurants aimed at a well-heeled crowd. It's gorgeous, safe, and easy to navigate on foot. As you head the few short metres towards the coast you get views along the bay of a Dubai-like skyline, endless shiny towers of glass and steel I can only assume are monuments to Mammon.
If you wanted a short city break with nice weather, beautiful scenery, and all manner of delicious ceviche you could do a lot worse than to stay here. It's glossy, it's Instagrammable, and (if you're accustomed to spending in dollars, euros, or pounds) it feels like excellent value. What it doesn't feel like is Central America.
And yet, even amongst all the shiny-shiny of sensitively restored historic buildings, there's a sense that all this gloss is just a veneer. You only have to walk a block or two beyond the fancy squares lined with cocktail bars to find poverty, derelict buildings, and protest signs decrying the evils of gentrification.
I had a load of laundry that needed doing, and so I found myself those essential two blocks back in a lavanderia that doubled as a hangout for the local tourist police, whom I saw make no fewer than three arrests in the ninety minutes between the time I was supposed to collect my clothes and when the load was actually ready. It was all the impetus I needed to try and find the real city hiding beneath the gloss.
Me being me (Walker by name, walker by nature), there was no chance whatsoever that I'd stick within the confines of Casco Viejo ā if nothing else, the Mercado de Mariscos required a short walk through what has to be the world's smallest Chinatown and across to the harbour. And within a few hundred metres the gloss started to peel away and I found myself walking through streets that were a riot of noise from competing stereos, endless streams of carts searing hotdogs for salchipapas (sliced hotdogs mixed in with a generous portion of French fries for the post-drinking snack of dreams), and discount stores shouting VENDEMOS TODOS.Ā
By the time I'd walked the length of Avenida B (evocative name or what?), my environs were far more in keeping with what I expect from a Latin American city, buzzy chaos punctuated with panaderias and bodegas straight out of central casting. I'd been offered sex, drugs, and cheap ādesignerā handbags. It was around three in the afternoon, hardly vice oāclock. So little different to London, to New York, to any major city you could care to mention. (My personal record for being offered drugs goes to Brussels, where I was still inside the Eurostar bit of Gare du Midi when approached with the offer of hashish.)
Gentrification is the same wherever you go in the world, people being pushed out of their neighbourhoods by businesses and tenants seeking cheaper rents, and whose investments end up driving up the cost of living and driving out the original occupants. As far as Iāve been able to make out in Panama, the struggle for Casco Viejo is at least a decade old. In 2016 the journal Urban Studies published a study entitled āTransnational gentrification: globalisation and neighbourhood change in Panamaās Casco Antiguoā, and which was submitted for publication in 2014.
What sets Panamanian gentrification apart from that weāre used to moaning about in the likes of Williamsburg or Shoreditch is the transnational element mentioned above ā those driving up market rents in the city are largely members of the global rootless elite, Theresa Mayās infamous ācitizens of nowhereā. These are faceless investors, people who buy and own properties around the world that they may never visit, who use expensive accountants to avoid property taxes and never spend a penny in the local community.
Strangely, in London, the neighbourhoods most affected by transnational investment are the likes of Kensington, Mayfair, and Holland Park, expensive areas where an actual house will cost you over Ā£20 million, but where the windows are almost all dark at night and the few cornershops and neighbourhood restaurants long since closed for lack of custom. Yes, our hearts all bleed for the few inconvenienced squillionaires left holding the forts.
But whatever your feelings about the global rich, a hollowed out neighbourhood is a terrible thing for a city. People move to cities because of the employment opportunities, for the buzz of urban life, but when half the windows stay dark at night because the properties are left vacant by owner-unoccupiers who may or may not visit once a year, those opportunities start to fade. When the local bars, shops, and restaurants close because there are no residents to serve, that means service industry jobs lost for those who rely on people and life to pay their wages. When the workers lose their jobs (having long since lost the ability to afford local rent), they move further and further out. When shops and nightlife die, so too does the impetus for young people leaving university to suck up the higher cost of living in exchange for a city that gives you life.
The only hope we have is that as we collapse our cities one by one, that they again become cheap enough for the artists, the creatives, the weirdos, and the dreamers, who will rebuild an environment attractive enough to pull the rich back in, at which point the cycle will begin anew. What are we even doing any more?
Gentrification is a tricky one. They've done it in a few places here in Hong Kong, sometimes it worked, other times it only worked to push local people and businesses out.