The Nomad is a series of stories, fascinations, encounters, observations, experiences, joy of the moments by me, Ulrike Reinhard – all around my travels. Stay tuned!
My “connection” to an article I just read in adventure.com which is titled ” ‘degrowth’ is the most powerful solution to overtourism” written by Shirley Nieuwland. It is focused on cities.
When I read about overtourism and the idea of “degrowth,” it feels less like a new theory and more like a language for something I’ve been circling my entire life. Long before I became a nomad, before I lived in India or crossed borders lightly and often, I learned – almost unconsciously – that places are fragile ecosystems. Cities, villages, landscapes: they thrive not when they grow endlessly, but when they remain livable.
My childhood in the suburbs of Heidelberg was shaped by space, slowness, and a quiet sense of trust. Streets weren’t corridors for cars; they were extensions of our homes. We walked to school, gathered in courtyards, wandered into fields, and learned early how to move through the world without constant supervision. Learning didn’t feel like a separate activity – it happened while walking, playing, listening, arguing, getting lost, and finding our way back.
Only much later did I understand how formative that environment had been. It gave me an internal measure, a kind of emotional yardstick for what a place feels like when it works. When there is room to move. When encounters aren’t forced. When life unfolds at a human pace.
That quiet benchmark has followed me ever since. As I move through cities today I catch myself asking a different kind of question. Not the one planners and tourism boards usually ask: How many people can this place attract? But the simpler, more fragile one Shirley Nieuwland articulates so well: What does this place need? Not how many bodies it can absorb, but how well it can still breathe.
Living as a nomad has sharpened this sensitivity. I move through places lightly, by choice. I stay longer, observe more, and notice what mass movement does to everyday life. Venice, Barcelona, Amsterdam –cities reduced to backdrops, their residents squeezed out by numbers that no street, no bakery, no housing market can realistically absorb. The tragedy of overtourism is not only environmental or economic; it’s relational. The moment visitors outnumber locals, a place stops being a living home and turns into a stage set.
Degrowth, as described in this article, resonates with me because it challenges a belief we rarely pause to examine: that more is inherently better. More flights, more beds, more visitors, more revenue. It’s the language of spreadsheets, not of lived places. Cities, however, are not balance sheets. They are emotional ecosystems.
My own life – stripped of possessions, fixed income, and permanent address – has taught me that value doesn’t automatically grow with volume. Less can mean more intensity, more attention, more meaning. The same applies to cities. Their real worth often lies in things that don’t show up in GDP calculations: the ability to walk without being pushed along, to recognize faces, to have unplanned encounters, to offer children a sense of safety and elders a sense of relevance.
A city’s true assets are fragile. Trust takes time to grow and seconds to erode. Silence, once lost, is hard to recover. Belonging cannot be scaled. When growth becomes the dominant metric, these non-economic values are often treated as externalities – nice to have, but expendable. Yet they are exactly what turn a city from a destination into a home.
Degrowth reframes the conversation. It asks us to look beyond efficiency and profit and instead consider dignity, livability, and human rhythm. It invites us to ask not how productive a city is, but how inhabitable it remains. In that sense, degrowth isn’t about restriction – it’s about protection. Protecting what makes a place quietly precious long before it becomes popular.
Travel is a privilege, and I’ve learned to treat it as such. I don’t need to go everywhere, and I don’t need to show every place to others. Some journeys can wait. Some destinations are better left unnamed. Some places ask to be cared for quietly, not consumed publicly.
For me, degrowth in travel doesn’t mean staying put—it means moving with intention. Staying longer. Arriving with curiosity instead of demands. Leaving as little trace as possible. Choosing how, when, and why I move, rather than letting movement become an end in itself.
In that sense, this article isn’t separate from my story; it’s part of the same question that runs through this book: What makes a place – like a life – worth living in? And how much is enough?