Reading about overtourism and degrowth didn’t feel like encountering a new idea.
It felt like recognizing a language for something I had been circling for a long time.
The word arrived late.
The sensitivity came early.
Long before I became a nomad, I learned — without naming it — that places behave like ecosystems.
They don’t thrive through endless growth.
They hold when they remain livable.
My childhood near Heidelberg was shaped by space and slowness.
Streets were not traffic corridors.
They were places to linger, to meet, to pass time.
We walked to school.
We moved without supervision.
Learning happened on the way — through play, argument, boredom, getting lost, finding back.
Only much later did I understand how formative that had been.
It left me with an internal reference point — not intellectual, but bodily.
A sense for when a place feels stretched.
When encounters become forced.
When movement accelerates beyond human rhythm.
That reference travels with me.
Moving through cities now, I notice the questions I ask have shifted.
Not how attractive a place is.
Not how many people it can host.
But what it still needs.
How much pressure it can take before something essential thins out.
Living nomadically has sharpened this attention.
I arrive without ownership.
I stay long enough to notice patterns.
In cities shaped by mass tourism, everyday life bends first.
Housing tightens.
Shops change tone.
Streets lose familiarity.
At a certain point, a place stops responding to those who live there.
It starts performing for those who pass through.
What is lost isn’t only environmental or economic.
It’s relational.
When visitors outnumber residents, a city shifts from home to backdrop.
The idea of degrowth resonates because it questions something I rarely questioned before:
the assumption that more is always better.
More movement.
More volume.
More visibility.
My own life — lighter in possessions, less fixed in structure — has taught me otherwise.
Less can mean more attention.
More presence.
More meaning.
The same seems true for cities.
Their real value lives in what cannot be scaled:
trust, silence, recognition, unplanned encounter, a sense of belonging.
These things erode quietly.
They rarely appear in numbers.
Once gone, they are difficult to restore.
Degrowth reframes the conversation.
Not as limitation, but as care.
This article didn’t give me an answer.
It clarified a question I had been carrying:
What makes a place — like a life — inhabitable?
And how much is enough?
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