Red Part 1.
Read Part 2.
Following on from the first two articles in this series exploring how Batumi has changed in recent years, this final instalment takes a step back to consider a bigger question: what happens when rapid economic growth begins to reshape not only our cities, but our sense of who we are?
Batumi is a city in transformation.
Walk along the seafront and it is impossible not to notice how much the city has changed. New hotels, restaurants, apartment blocks and entertainment venues continue to appear, while visitors arrive from an ever-growing list of countries. For a city that was once a relatively quiet Black Sea resort, the pace of change has been remarkable. And change, of course, is not inherently a bad thing.
Georgia needs investment. It needs jobs, infrastructure and opportunities for its young people. Tourism has become an important part of the country’s economy, and international visitors bring money, ideas and connections that can benefit communities far beyond the summer season. The question is not whether Georgia should develop. The question is what kind of development does Georgia want?
Batumi provides an interesting case study because so much of the country’s wider transformation can be seen here in concentrated form. The city has become increasingly international, and with that has come a mixture of languages, cultures, businesses and expectations.
For many people, this is exactly what a successful tourist destination should look like. For others, there is an understandable concern that somewhere along the road to becoming an international destination, Batumi could begin to lose some of the qualities that made people want to visit in the first place.
There is an irony here.
Tourists do not travel to Georgia because it looks like everywhere else. They come for the mountains, the Black Sea, the food, the wine, the hospitality, the history and the Georgian language. They come because Georgia has its own character.
If a city becomes so focused on accommodating external demand that its own identity becomes secondary, what exactly is it that visitors are ultimately coming to experience? This is particularly relevant when considering language.
The increasing visibility of Russian in parts of Batumi has become a sensitive subject, for understandable historical and political reasons. But the issue is larger than Russian alone. English, Turkish, Arabic and other languages are also increasingly present as Georgia becomes more internationally connected.
A multilingual city can be a vibrant city. But there is an important distinction between being welcoming to other languages and allowing the country’s own language to become peripheral. Georgia should not have to choose between being open to the world and being unmistakably Georgian. In fact, its greatest economic strength may lie in doing both.
There is a tendency to think of cultural identity as something that needs to be protected from economic development. But perhaps the better approach is to recognize culture as part of Georgia’s economic capital.
Georgian food is an asset. Georgian wine is an asset. Georgian music, architecture, traditions and hospitality are assets. The Georgian language itself is an asset.
These are not obstacles to tourism. They are precisely what make Georgia interesting to tourists in the first place. The challenge is making sure that the economic benefits of internationalization do not gradually erode the very things that make the country distinctive. That requires more than simply telling tourists to respect Georgian culture. It requires thoughtful decisions from government, businesses and local communities about how cities are developed, who benefits from that development, and what kind of tourism Georgia actually wants.
Rapid growth can bring prosperity, but it can also bring rising property prices, pressure on infrastructure, seasonal employment and communities that feel increasingly disconnected from the places in which they live.
A city cannot be judged successful simply by the number of cranes in its skyline or the number of tourists passing through its airport. The people who live there have to feel that they are part of its future. And this is perhaps the most important question for Batumi.
Who is the city being developed for?
The answer cannot simply be tourists. Nor can it be investors. Nor should it be those who have recently arrived from elsewhere. It has to include the people who have lived there for generations, as well as those who have chosen to make Georgia their home more recently. That does not mean resisting change. It means making sure that change has a Georgian center of gravity.
Georgia has already demonstrated that it can attract international attention without becoming invisible within that attention. Its culture has traveled far beyond its borders precisely because it has remained distinctive. The opportunity now is to build an economy that strengthens that distinctiveness rather than diluting it.
Perhaps the future should not be about deciding between Georgian identity and international openness. Perhaps the ambition should be to create a Georgia confident enough in its own identity to welcome the world without feeling the need to become something else for it.
Batumi will continue to change. There is no realistic way, and perhaps no reason, to stop it. The cranes will keep rising. The hotels will keep opening. New visitors will keep arriving. But alongside the question of how much Georgia can grow, there is another question that may ultimately matter more:
Can Georgia grow while still recognizing itself in the mirror?
If it can, then economic progress need not come at the expense of identity. It could, instead, become the means by which Georgia protects, celebrates and shares that identity with the rest of the world.
OP-Ed by Mary Andersen
