Global Gentrification—Are Digital Nomads Ruining Everything? (Part 1 of 4)

The first edition of a four-part series of Substack Letters exploring the issues, realities and impacts of digital nomads on the global gentrification landscape.

Hi friends 👋

This week’s edition of Global Natives is a special post in collaboration with my friend Marko Ayling, a travel writer and author of an excellent newsletter called The Missive here on Substack.

Over the next four weeks, Marko and I will engage in a back-and-forth dialogue about a thorny subject that impacts both the global mobility landscape (my speciality) and the travel landscape (his speciality): digital nomads and global gentrification.

Marko published on this issue for the first time last summer and I wrote a chapter on the topic as part of the book version of Global Natives, so we thought it was about time we came together and started a conversation in public. The goal here is simple: we want to examine the problem of gentrification—not only in one place, but from a truly global perspective—and then steer our thinking toward possible solutions.

In this first post, I’ll set the scene about what’s happening. In the next one, Marko will respond to the questions I’ve raised…