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Making Sense of (New) Social Mobilisations, Conflicts and Contention in the Tourist City: A Typology

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Social Movements and Public Policies in Southern European Cities

Part of the book series: Urban and Landscape Perspectives ((URBANLAND,volume 21))

Abstract

Over the past decade, manifestations of social discontent against the impacts of tourism on urban spaces have been on the rise in many tourist cities, pointing to an increasing politicisation “from below” of what had been a non- or minor issue in urban political struggles (Novy and Colomb 2016, 2019). While tourism generates wealth, its negative impacts and adverse side effects have been increasingly problematised and contested. The chapter first discusses what major (new) trends and factors can potentially explain this discontent. It then offers a preliminary typology of the social mobilisations and forms of collective action which have emerged around the impacts of the visitor economy on urban spaces and dwellers, in European cities and beyond. It concludes by outlining the public policy responses to these developments and by sketching directions for a cross-disciplinary, comparative research agenda on the topic.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The neologism turismofobia was reportedly coined in 2007 by Spanish tourism scholar Antonio Donaire, who criticised the rise of “anti-tourism” sentiments in social, media and academic circles in Spain (Yanes 2017). In parallel, the concept of “touristofobia” was also used by urban anthropologist Manuel Delgado in an opinion piece in the Spanish newspaper El País in 2008. Those terms have since been increasingly used in the media in various languages (Milano 2017).

  2. 2.

    We use the expression “visitor economy” to refer to the fact that it is not just traditional “leisure tourists” who visit cities, but all sorts of visitors “making a visit to a main destination outside his/her usual environment for less than a year for any main purpose [including] holidays, leisure and recreation, business, health, education or other purposes” (IRTS 2008, quoted in: ONS 2012).

  3. 3.

    In non-urban environments such as coastal areas, islands, natural and cultural heritage sites, conflicts around the environmental, cultural and social equity impacts of the visitor economy on local communities had attracted academic attention much earlier, since the 1970s (e.g. Boissevain 1996).

  4. 4.

    The link between tourism and gentrification (both residential and commercial) is complex. Tourism is often one of many factors that fuel changes in urban residential markets and provoke displacement and dispossession, alongside rent deregulations, changes in housing tenures (e.g. decline in social housing), socio-demographic changes as well as private- or public sector-led regeneration projects. This raises methodological and empirical challenges in distinguishing between the specific impacts of tourism and the impacts of other dynamics shaping urban and neighbourhood change.

  5. 5.

    One could question whether these developments are more applicable to some geographical contexts than others, as existing analyses of the shift towards leisure, consumption and tourism in (Anglophone) urban political economy are overwhelmingly rooted in the experience of large European and North American cities. Yet there are increasingly less national and local governments which do not aspire to develop tourism in some way. In Central and Latin America, local and national governments began as early as the late 1970s to encourage the redevelopment of historic city centres for tourism consumption, a process which has been reinforced over the past two decades (Janoschka et al. 2014). Strategies of consumption-driven economic development have also been adopted in a number of globalizing cities, such as Dubai (Elsheshtawy 2009), Singapore and other large cities in South-East Asia (Chang 1997; Luger 2016).

  6. 6.

    To the authors’ knowledge, there is to date no international comparative review published in the languages we reviewed (English, Spanish, German and French) on the diverse social mobilisations that have emerged in response to tourism’s ascendancy in cities. The empirical materials from which we have built the typology are derived from three sources: first, the in-depth literature review and editorial work done jointly by both authors to bring to fruition an edited book which explores the diversity of struggles, social conflicts and mobilisations around urban tourism (Colomb and Novy 2016), with contributions from sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, political scientists, planners and architects, covering more than 16 cities in Europe, North America, South America and Asia. The book did not include a comparative, cross-cutting analysis of all the cases covered in it: this was subsequently developed after its publication to produce the typology presented in this chapter. This was complemented by additional case-study materials from ongoing research carried out by the first author (Claire Colomb) on the politicisation and conflicts surrounding the proliferation of short-term holiday rentals in more than ten European cities (in collaboration with Thomas Aguilera, Francesca Artioli and Tatiana Moreira de Souza), and on social mobilisations around tourism in Barcelona, and from research carried out by the second author (Johannes Novy) on the contested role of tourism in local politics, urban development and planning in European and North American cities.

  7. 7.

    An interesting counter-example worth mentioning here is that in some of the European and North-American cities where vocal coalitions of grassroots initiatives have emerged against the adverse impacts of mass tourism – and have been accused of intolerance against visitors and “strangers” – many of the individual activists and organisations involved come from Left-wing social movements or political traditions which have been defending the welcoming of migrants and refugees in their city (e.g. in San Francisco, Berlin or Barcelona).

  8. 8.

    This corresponds to the responses recently articulated by some tourism industry players who have taken notice of the challenges and conflicts which too much tourism creates. The 2017 UNWTO & WTM Ministers’ Summit was, for example dedicated to the issue of “overtourism”. From the perspective of those actors, growth is, as Taleb Rifai (UNWTO 2017) put it at the above-mentioned summit, “not the enemy; it’s how we manage it that counts”. “Over-tourism” is reduced to a problem of lack of management and regulation (see the symbolic measures taken in 2018 by the municipal government of Venice to contain mass tourism flows through access gates channelling pedestrian flows to key sites, Brunton 2018). The fact that all destinations have a maximum carrying capacity in terms of infrastructure and resources is left out from the discussion.

  9. 9.

    Interesting issues of “positionality” and “research ethics” arise: as researchers are also tourists in their free time and “temporary city users” when doing field work in locations other than their own place of residence, they too contribute to the processes at play in tourist cities (e.g. by renting an Airbnb apartment). But researchers are also sometimes urban activists who are engaged in collective mobilisations around the contentious issues evoked here, which raises the potential for creative and helpful forms of participatory action research or scholarly activism.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, London, UK

    Claire Colomb

  2. School of Architecture and Cities, University of Westminster, London, UK

    Johannes Novy

Authors
  1. Claire Colomb
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  2. Johannes Novy
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Correspondence to Claire Colomb .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Architecture and Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia, Venezia, Italy

    Laura Fregolent

  2. Department de Geografia, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Oriol Nel·lo

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Colomb, C., Novy, J. (2021). Making Sense of (New) Social Mobilisations, Conflicts and Contention in the Tourist City: A Typology. In: Fregolent, L., Nel·lo, O. (eds) Social Movements and Public Policies in Southern European Cities. Urban and Landscape Perspectives, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52754-9_4

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