The article proposes a provocative metaphor: the city as a “third skin”, a surface reshaped by tourism-driven spectacle, capitalist simulation, and aesthetic homogenization. Miquel Bartual critiques the way cities like Valencia have been reformatted into consumable objects, shedding their lived complexity to satisfy the visual and emotional appetites of global tourism. Drawing from Enlightenment and Romantic traditions, he charts how tourism emerges from an obsession with discovery, memory, and emotional transference, only to be co-opted into neoliberal spatial control. This new “skin” of the city prioritizes image over use, consumption over cohabitation, turning urban form into a designed mirage that alienates residents while seducing visitors. The architectural and urban transformations aligned with this logic, such as heritage restorations and cultural theming, perform a kind of urban whitening—smoothing over contradictions, silencing local narratives, and evacuating historical depth. In such contexts, urban space ceases to be lived and instead becomes staged. The article warns that this commodified skin, though seductive, obscures a deeper crisis: a disappearance of collective subjectivity, a disintegration of ecological and political urban life, and a profound estrangement of the citizen from their habitat. The third skin is thus not a benign surface but a membrane of disconnection, calling for critical resistance and the recovery of urban authenticity.
Miquel Bartual, M. (2015) ‘La tercera piel’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 5(2), pp. 179–185. Available at: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=5372722.
