Dear trinet colleagues (and anyone
else reading this),
Many thanks for the overwhelming
number of replies on 'overtourism'. I'll reply individually of course, off
trinet, but I'll share anything relevant on there too.
A few quick points on
overtourism:
Overtourism has become very
quickly a ubiquitous term. In the UK media / professional media it was
everywhere last Summer, prominent since, and I am sure will be featured very
prominently this Summer. It is a very broad term of course - there is very
little that could not be seen as relating in some way to 'overtourism'. I guess
we need to be clear what we mean or discussions could be too broad and less
meaningful as a result.
Some on trinet and elsewhere are
suggesting it is a new word for an old problem. Maybe so, but in the spirit of
the sociologist Joel Best it is worth thinking about how, when and why
something comes to be perceived as
a 'social problem', in this case the
subject of protest and wider public debate.
The sharing / platform economy,
specifically AirBnB, is clearly very prominent in criticisms of overtourism.
There is a broader debate on how cities are shaped by ‘tourism real estate’ as
David Harvey referred to it in a recent talk.
I think that the newspaper
coverage of overtourism is coverage of real issues, but also involves a
particular orientation towards those issues. That orientation is often quite
pessimistic in my view - that problems are intractable, maybe a product of
human greed, that there are ‘cultural limits’ to travel that we (‘we’ being the
travelling classes presumably, not the majority who are not international
tourists) are responsible for breaching.
An alternative orientation is the
more solution focused discussion. This often seeks to maintain tourism growth
(and the benefits thereof), whilst mitigating the negatives through policy
(such as limiting AirBnB) and planning (better infrastructure). This
orientation can be rather more upbeat – that we can, and should try to, ‘have
our cake and eat it’.
So sometimes, the invocation of overtourism
is more than a reference to problems in a city or a community associated with
tourism; it also involves a wider philosophical orientation towards
human-nature and inter cultural relations. I read a fair few articles in the UK press that I
regard as a sort of ‘holiday Malthusianism’, really an a priori pessimism regarding the capacity of places to cope with
expanding tourist populations culturally or economically. Yet it is forgotten that for
every place with struggling with numbers, there is another desperate for
tourism development to support livelihoods and contribute to meaningful
development.
Overtourism and the politics of identity: Inevitably the way we ‘read’ tourism
and its problems (as tourists or academics) is refracted through the prevailing
political lens. As inter cultural encounters are increasingly being viewed
through the prism of identity politics, the sense of there being ‘cultural
limits’ to tourism in a city or globally tends to be viewed somewhat differently to a decade ago. Then of course there are also
dynamics that are specific to place – the relationship between the 2017 Barcelona protests and the Catalan nationalist youth group Arran Jovent for example.
I am interested in many
aspects of this, principally: overtourism as social problem; cities & city
limits to tourism; the politics of
anti-tourism protests. This Autumn I am helping to organise public debates in
London and Valetta on overtourism. I’ll keep you posted via trinet /e-mail.
