EXCLUSIVE LIVING HOTEL. Is this a hotel that is both exclusive and alive? Or is it a hotel where one can live in an exclusive manner? Depending on the order in which they combine the three words, the reader will hear one meaning or the other.
The intended meaning is, of course, the second one, in which the first two words are grouped together as a compound adjective. Question: What kind of hotel is it? Answer: One that enables exclusive living. Yet although we know it’s not intended, the other meaning lingers on, ghostly and tenacious: a living hotel, a dying city centre.
The forces of life and death haunt tourism just as pervasively as the notions of authentic and false. The hotel in this image is in Porto, and Porto attracts tourists because it is vibrant. It is a dense city full of life: washing hanging from balconies, pedestrians, tiny cafés and greengrocers and bakeries in almost every street, odd-shaped doorways, steep alleys, views over crowded rooftops, students in traditional black cloaks, buskers, people going about their business. But tourism inflates rents and property prices. The people who hang out their washing and who buy a coffee every day at the same cafe will have their rental contract terminated and will move elsewhere. Exclusive Living. My life here excludes the possibility of your life here.
And what is Exclusive Living? Could it be living alone? Or could it be living in a space where one excludes people one doesn't know, or want to know?
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