The last local underwear shop in Venice closed a decade ago. Since then, residents of this city of islands have had to go to the mainland to make such essential purchases. This is a warning sign. Any city that sacrifices itself on the altar of mass tourism will be abandoned by its people when they can no longer afford the cost of housing, food, and basic everyday necessities.

We’re starting to see Venice without Venetians. It’s happening here in Barcelona, too, a city of 2 million inhabitants that hosted 7.5 million tourists last year. The city council, run by the Catalan right, has said that it wants to increase this to 10 million visitors per year.

These mind-boggling figures have led to open conflict this summer. In tourism hotspots of the city, the scale of visitor numbers is affecting not only residents’ quality of life, but their very ability to live in the area. This summer, in La Barceloneta, the city’s historic seafaring neighbourhood, there have been neighbourhood assemblies, protest and, in one case, tensions with naked tourists who didn’t realise that they were in a city, not a theme park. In the past few months there have also been demonstrations against businesses involved in the illegal rental of apartments, an activity that the city council has only begun to combat recently.

Neighbourhood communities are central to the culture of southern Europe. They are where life happens. Yet people who live in areas popular with tourists are at risk of being forced out, by speculators who raise the rents of apartments and shop premises in pursuit of the tourist market. If they manage to stay, they have to put up with noise and pollution that are difficult to combine with daily life. It’s paradoxical, but uncontrolled mass tourism ends up destroying the very things that made a city attractive to visitors in the first place: the unique atmosphere of the local culture.

Most people identify the 1992 Olympic Games as the turning point for tourism in Barcelona. Geographer David Harvey has argued that the interests of the then IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch in the Barcelona property market were connected to the decision to hold the games in the city. Since then, the uncontrolled growth of the tourism industry has been intimately linked with structural corruption in Spain. When Itziar González, a local socialist politician, tried to regulate tourist apartments and hotels in the city, she was isolated by her own party, received death threats, and was ultimately forced to resign.

The economic crisis and the collapse of the construction boom in Spain have led to deindustrialisation across the country. An over-reliance on the service sector has led to the exploitation of tourism by the city. Without a doubt, it’s a sector that creates jobs (it makes up 15% of the city’s GDP), but these jobs are often badly paid with slave-like working conditions. At the same time, economic speculation in the city is having worrying consequences, such as a hotel trade that knows its strength and has access to and disproportionate influence over politicians.

In Barcelona, the democratic crisis that is taking place across Europe has been accompanied by the replacement of the welfare state with the debt-collecting state and the crisis of the post-Franco regime (a regime controlled by Brussels), and delegitimised by kleptocracy and systematic corruption. The tourism crisis in Barcelona is further proof of the emptiness of the promises of neo-liberalism that deregulation and privatisation will allow us all to prosper.

Of course, the answer is not to attack tourism. Everyone is a tourist at some point in their life. Rather, we have to regulate the sector, return to the traditions of local urban planning, and put the rights of residents before those of big business.

The way of life for all Barcelonans is seriously under threat. And the only solution is to win back democracy for the city. This is precisely what the residents of La Barceloneta are doing – defending their neighbourhood, their city, from the free market and from the political elites that are putting our home up for sale. And this has inspired the creation of Guanyem Barcelona (Let’s Win Back Barcelona), a citizen platform launched by neighbourhood activists, social and political movements, professionals and academics, that has set itself the challenge of winning the May 2015 municipal elections to democratise the city and put its institutions at the service of the common good.