Overtourism: is it over for the growth of tourism? Event held at the University of Malta, October, 23rd October 2018

On October 23rd I chaired  a public event in Malta on the much hyped phenomenon of 'overtourism'. The event was organised by the Academy of Ideas, in conjunction with the Institute for Travel Tourism and Culture, as a satellite event as part of the annual Battle of Ideas Festival.

The recording is available here .

The panellists and details are available here.

It was a great event - very interesting to hear a range of views from such a diverse audience. Many thanks to Dr Marie Avellino and Dr John Ebejer at the University for hosting the event.

overtourism notes - upcoming events in London and Malta

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.

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trinet 'overtourism' discussion

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.