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The rise of secret plans: people no longer want to do things, they want to live them

2023-05-27T10:41:20.238Z

Highlights: Barby Gantor, 29, has 131,500 followers on TikTok and some of his videos are close to one million views. She recommends cafes, restaurants, cocktail bars, terraces, exhibitions or plans in the capital that he defines as "secret" or "clandestine" Martín López Cano started Madrid Diferente, a blog about the city, a decade ago. He says the growth of this type of search could be a response to the pandemic.


From websites specialized in hyperlocal tourism to 'tiktokers' experts in discovering the latest to an audience thirsty for unique and different activities, cities reinvent themselves in the eyes of their inhabitants who seek to turn every moment into an experience


In mid-May, a girl set up a party in Madrid attended by 1,400 people. The girl is called Barbara, although on TikTok she is known as Barby Gantor, simply, and as she defines herself: "The girl of the plans of Madrid". He has 131,500 followers on TikTok and some of his videos are close to one million views. In them he recommends cafes, restaurants, cocktail bars, terraces, exhibitions or plans in the capital that he defines as "secret" or "clandestine". If Barby Gant recommends a restaurant, it may be difficult to find an available table in the following weeks. If Barby Gant recommends a terrace on a Madrid rooftop, in a few weeks there will not fit a pin. And if you recommend a curious place where they make a specialty — cinnamon rolls, a New York-style bagel or a cronut (a mix of croissant and doughnut) — a queue of people eager to try the trendy product will start to form. The TikTok miracle. A few weeks ago, she set up her own plan: "It was an experiment, I wanted to measure my true convening power," explains Gant, 29, to EL PAÍS, "and it was a big surprise: there were many stands to get tattoos, make up or comb your hair and a lot of experiences."

Like Barby Gant's profile, on social networks – especially on TikTok, but also on Instagram – there is a proliferation of accounts that invite you to discover (or rediscover) a city, to see it with different eyes and to live it in a different way. They are not dedicated to newcomers, although some Erasmus students also come to them for inspiration. "Most of the people who follow me are from Madrid, and they write to me saying, 'I can't believe I've been here all my life and didn't know this place,'" Gant explains. The word "experience" seems to be the key: people no longer want to do things, they want to live experiences. "The videos that have gone viral on my channel are usually of two types: the first, when a plan is free and the second, when it is something out of the ordinary, something special and different, an experience," he explains. He gives as an example a restaurant where, as in Richard Curtis' film AMatter of Time, diners dine completely in the dark, or a series of clandestine concerts that are organized on various rooftops of the city of Madrid and whose location the guests find out only 24 hours before.

Read moreThe rise and explosion of '-recipes' or why all the food on TikTok is disgusting

This boom of plans and offers within the city is not new to Martín López Cano. A little over a decade ago, this journalist by training became unemployed. Naturally curious, he used to buy all the local supplements from the newspapers and kept small clippings with the most interesting plans in Madrid, whether they were restaurant openings or exhibitions. "My friends knew it and always asked me: 'Hey, Martin, where can I go to dinner?' or 'What can I do this weekend?'" Lopez thought about doing something with all that information and with the free time he had. And then he started a blog: "I realized that at that time there was little such local information about the city on the internet," he explains. He called it Madrid Diferente.

"I started writing reviews about sites that just opened. And of course, since I had no competition, I channeled all the visits and that allowed me to grow very quickly." Martín López says that, during those years, every time he took out a restaurant on his blog, it filled the reservations for a whole month. For him we are living another cycle of the internet: first it was blogs and now, social networks. "It's just communicating in another language and through other channels. What is certain is the number of people that a video on TikTok or Instagram can reach, "he explains. Madrid Diferente currently has 206,000 followers on Instagram, and just over 6,700 on TikTok.

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A post shared by BEST PLANS IN MADRID (@madriddiferente)

The growth of this type of search could be a pandemic response: "The pandemic played a very important role. In the end, after two years practically locked up, people really wanted to make plans and left their homes wanting to do things, "explains Gant. For Martín López Cano, the pandemic could have been an incubator for new projects that are now coming to light, but the real change in the way we live leisure in cities, especially in the Spanish capital, took place much earlier: "With the liberalization of commerce in 2012, the center of Madrid began to wake up on weekends. Before, leisure was closely related to nightlife and, suddenly, the day gained ground, "explains López. "Suddenly, on a Sunday morning there was life, shops, cafes and restaurants began to open and, later, the generational changes also came. In the eighties he went out a lot. Now, young people don't go out as much, they take care of themselves more and look for more plans to occupy all day."

What does this interest say about us, the users? What do we seek when trying to fill our lives with special, unique, original and different plans? "Experience has a lot of relevance in all contemporary marketing," explains Beatriz García, a member of the Metropolitan Observatory, a project that brings together various multidisciplinary groups in a space for reflection on the phenomena of transformation that characterize contemporary metropolises today, based on the case of Madrid. "I'm sure you remember that celebrated and award-winning car ad that asked the consumer, 'Do you like to drive?' I wasn't appealing to the qualities of the car, but to the feeling of feeling the air coming through the window, to the illusion of freedom behind the wheel on a road. What is sold is an experience, a sensory period of time."

This same form of evasion now comes to us through social networks and is enhanced by the constant comparison between our lives and that of others and the inevitable fear of missing something. It also moves to our own cities in shorter periods of time, due to the precarious employment of young people and the lack of both time and economic resources: "Before, the travel experience allowed you to move to another place, to another culture, meet new people and live in conditions different from yours. The journey was considered a process of experience because it involved growth, development, often transformation." Now, explains Beatriz García, these experiential periods are encapsulated within our day to day: "In this increasingly limited search for disconnection, especially within the maelstrom of the city, we seek that coffee is not only the coffee you drink before entering the office, but a kind of sensory experience. our moment."

This accelerated consumption of experiences, elevated to the umpteenth power by the added speed of the huge offer in social networks, leads us to inhabit cities differently, not so much as citizens, but as tourists within our metropolis, marking the boxes of what we must do as in a gymnasium. As Beatriz García explains: "There is a permanent sale of novelty as novelty because it is novelty, which is an important part of the capitalist production and marketing system." The new replaces the old, the latest replaces the old, and the original what we used to always do.

A terrace overlooking the Madrid of skyscrapers. Artur Debat (Getty Images)

"And a curious paradox is created between the idea of exclusivity (secret plans, unique plans, different plans) and, on the other hand, the standardization to which tourism tends, which ends up offering the same thing in all cities in the world," continues García. "In the end, we move in prefabricated scenarios that are identical to those anywhere else." That exclusive plan of a classical music concert on a flirtatious terrace in the center of your city happens at the same time in Paris or New York, and that green matchacoffee permeates the feeds of half the world or, at least, half the world on Instagram.

Martín López is clear that he does not want to feed the monster of the algorithm and the city as a novelty and, in a way, he continues to see Madrid Diferente as that small blog that reported on local news for the local: "We seek to inform, not generate content, because we are a medium, not an amateur account nor do we dedicate ourselves to this so that they invite us to a restaurant". Barby Gant, for her part, wants to think of her followers more as a community, in a speech that appeals to the loneliness that feels differently in a big city full of people and the possibilities of creating a real social network: "I'm always pushing people to make plans alone and thus meet others. I also spend a lot of time creating groups of unknown people through Telegram, and I've met a lot of people who have said to me, 'Hey, I met this great group because of you.'" Changing the way we inhabit our own city: that would be quite an experience.

Source: elparis

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