I am convening a couple of public
events, in London
and Valletta respectively,
with the support of the Academy of Ideas
and also the Institute for Tourism,Travel and Culture at the University of Malta.
The purpose of the events is to get a wide range of views from the public and
also from stakeholders. I am interested in people’s perceptions not just of tourism
in their particular town, city or village, but in how they view tourism more
broadly: as a threat, an inconvenience, an opportunity, culturally enriching
and so on. Do they buy the more pessimistic narratives of environmental or
cultural tipping points,
or are they more sanguine about leisure mobility?
I am not disputing the existence
of problems, sometimes substantial, but my inclination is that these problems
are looked at through a rather partial lens by many commentators and academics,
one that elevates the problem to the level of a social problem. By a social problem I mean a problem that is
interpreted as being severe, pervasive and symptomatic of a wider malaise in
contemporary culture.
My provisional contention is that
there are dangers inherent in the pessimistic way leisure travel is perceived
through the prism of ‘overtourism’ – it can involve a retreat from problems
rather than a search for solutions. It can also involve some rather negative assumptions about tourists and about cultural encounters generally.
It is often critical of the role of technology (the platform capitalism of
AirBnB).
I also think there has been a tendency to accentuate negatives as intrinsic to all leisure travel, and to disregard the
incredibly positive legacy of growing mobility. The recently circulated
petition from the Tourism Alert and Action Forum is a case in point.
If you are able to attend the
events, that would be a great opportunity to discuss the issues with lots of
others people, network, and of course continue the debate outside the lecture
hall in the cafes and bars.
In the spirit of social
construction, overtourism is not simply a factually defined problem to be
solved (as it seems to be treated more often that not), but it also involves an
orientation towards and interpretation of the facts and social conditions. I’d
like to look at what the rapid rise of this new category ‘overtourism’ tells us
about ourselves as well as changes in objective conditions.
A number of interesting
perspectives are out there, via news sites, academic articles etc: degrowth,
‘anti-tourism’ tourism, risks of cultural offence or appropriation, dangers
inherent in platform capitalism such as AirBnB.
I am interested in narratives
that can perhaps challenge some of the pessimistic thinking. So for example, the
much maligned AirBnB, in theory at least, can facilitate transfers of
populations for leisure between cities without the need for new development
(possibly freeing up land for residential development, which is also an issue
in many cities). It also can act as an important source of income for hard up
city dwellers. Yet some of the commentaries around its regulation decry the
model per se.
Overtourism is castigated for
diminishing culture, yet many cultural icons enjoyed by local people are directly
funded by the tourist spend, Barcelona’s
Sagrada Familia being a good example.
Whereas overtourism is presented as an external threat to a culture, in fact it
can equally be seen as participation in a shared culture of mobility (as many
of our hosts are travelling too) or of leisure (as many residents are
effectively ‘tourists in their own city’.
In the spirit of futurology, I
think it is important to engage in a bit of future oriented, even utopian, thinking too. How about extending low cost air
travel to more places to ease congestion
on the existing ones, and why not explore the capacity of poorer countries,
where the industry may be marginal or non existent (‘undertourism’?), to
benefit from this? China is developing its holiday resorts fast.
Is that a model that we could see more of in the continent of Africa as part of
a more general economic transformation in the not too distant future? Is that
possible? Some may ask is it even desirable?
I’d welcome any ideas, blogs,
discussions etc. I’ll post mine on here.
