Tourism and Everyday Life in the Contemporary City

Thomas Frisch, Christoph Sommer, Luise Stoltenberg, Natalie Stors, Thomas Frisch, Christoph Sommer, Luise Stoltenberg, Natalie Stors

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429016493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book explores the phenomena of the urban everyday and new urban tourism. It provides a systematic framework and draws on a mix of theoretical and empirical work to look at the increasing intermingling of 'tourists' and 'residents'.

Tourism and urban everyday life are deeply connected in a mutually constitutive way. Tourism has become a key momentum of urban development and affects cities beyond its economic dimension. Urban everyday life itself can turn into a matter of tourist interest for people searching for experiences off the beaten track. Even living in a city as a resident involves moments, activities and practices which could be labelled as 'touristic'. These observations demonstrate some of the various layers in which urban tourism and everyday city life are intertwined. This book gathers multiple interdisciplinary approaches, a diversity of topics and methodological variety to examine this complex relationship. It presents a systematic framework for the dynamic research field of new urban tourism along three dimensions: the extraordinary mundane, encounters and contact zones, and urban co-production.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers across fields such as Tourism and Mobility Studies, Urban Studies, Leisure Studies, Tourism Geography, and Tourism Sociology.

1Tourism and everyday life in the contemporary city

An introduction

Natalie Stors, Luise Stoltenberg, Christoph Sommer and Thomas Frisch

The entanglement of urban tourism with everyday city life

Tourism and urban everyday life are deeply connected in a mutually constitutive way. On the one hand, this seems quite obvious, as tourism’s effect on the everyday life of local communities has been a topic for tourism research since its very beginnings (e.g., Sharpley 2014, Jurowski et al. 1997, Smith 1989, Cohen 1988). On the other hand, the rather restricted idea of cities as ‘destinations’ inhabited by locals and visited by tourists is an established and persistent one. As such, thinking about tourism beyond “a series of discrete, localized events consisting of ‘travel, arrival, activity, purchase and departure’” (Franklin and Crang 2001, p. 6), is still a pressing and promising endeavour for both urban and tourism studies. In order to shed more light on the manifold dimensions of the deeply interrelated connection between urban tourism and city life, this section looks at four aspects of this connection.

First of all, urban tourism affects cities in an often subtle, yet pervasive manner. As a result, the profound ways in which tourism shapes contemporary cities can prove hard to pinpoint. This shaping not only takes place at crowded sights, famous museums and designated neighbourhoods, but pervades the city as a whole. It is worth considering, for instance, the extent to which tourism-related urban economies structure the everyday work of many residents (Spirou 2011, Veijola 2010, Tufts 2006); how urban infrastructures respond profoundly to demands from visitors from far and wide (Law 2002, Le-Klähn and Hall 2015); and even how the daily repetition of activities, structured patterns and rhythms organize the look and feel of major sights (Edensor 1998, 2001). These examples clearly support the argument that “tourist activities are not so separate from the places that are visited” (Sheller and Urry 2004, p. 5, emphasis added), but, in fact, are deeply entangled with urban everyday realities. As an inherent part of the city, they are, of course, not solely restricted to use by visitors. In fact, “[t]ourists tend to share their experiences in cities with local consumers and the anonymity of cities means that it can be hard, and in most cases unnecessary, to differentiate the visitor from the rest” (Wearing and Foley 2017, p. 99). Consequently, it seems inaccurate to hold on to concepts which understand city tourism and urban everyday life as two spheres isolated from each other.

Second, urban everyday life itself can turn into a matter of tourist interest. Thriving on the rich variety of city life, urban tourism attracts many people for a broad range of reasons (Ashworth and Page 2011, Hayllar et al. 2008). One strong motivation has always been the desire to gain insight into the everyday life of a visited destination (e.g., Maitland and Newman 2009a, Maitland 2013, MacCannell 1976, Frisch 2012)—to experience the ‘real’ Tokyo, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro or Barcelona. This desire builds on the idea that there is a hidden life happening in cities—hidden insofar as it is difficult for short-term visitors to access. This phenomenon has been referred to as ‘off the beaten track tourism’ in scholarly discourse (e.g., Maitland and Newman 2009b, Maitland 2010, Füller and Michel 2014, Matoga and Pawłowska 2018). However, the appeal of the ordinary, of day-to-day rhythms and normality, is not a novelty in urban tourism at all. What is new though, is that “the current quantitative dimension puts the phenomenon on the agenda of urban and tourism geographies again” (Dirksmeier and Helbrecht 2015, p. 276). This new extent of tourism, focusing on urban everyday life, calls for the elaboration of adequate theoretical conceptualisations as well as a solid analytical framework.

Third, living in a city as a resident also involves moments, activities and practices which have a ‘touristic component’ (Cohen 1974, see also Diaz-Soria 2017). Especially after moving to a new city, the period of settling in shows striking similarities to what visitors usually do. In order to explore their neighbourhood and get a feeling for its ‘vibe’, newcomers might consult travel guides for recommendations on bars and restaurants, join a city walking tour, or visit famous sights and attractions. However, this is not only restricted to newcomers. Discovering hang-out spots, lingering at urban beaches, showing friends and family around, visiting ‘exotic’ street food festivals, joining a guided tour—all of these activities are somehow informed by tourism (e.g., Gale 2009, Shani and Uriely 2012, Diaz-Soria 2017, Dimitrovski and Vallbona 2018). Their effects on cities are in no way marginal, and support the production and shaping of places for urban adventure and entertainment. As a result, it is possible to argue that residents themselves occasionally switch to ‘touristic’ mode without even leaving the confines of their own city (see also Richards 2017).

The fourth aspect runs transversely to the three already mentioned, and emphasises the influence of technology on the increasing entanglement of urban tourism with city life. For a long time, urban tourists relied on alternative guidebooks and insider tips from friends, as well as their own spirit of discovery if they wanted to explore remote areas of a city. Nowadays they are empowered by digital technology, nearly ubiquitous internet access and online services. If travellers wish to discover the everyday life of a destination, they can easily gain access to this ‘attraction’ by using travel apps, review websites and hospitality networks (Germann Molz 2012, Jeacle and Carter 2011, Guttentag 2015). However, such services are used by long-term residents as well. Mapping apps, for instance, help residents and visitors alike to navigate their way through less known parts of the city. Online platforms and their networks offer new possibilities for connecting locals and travellers, and thus open up aspects of urban everyday life for tourism. Whether those services help users to find accommodation, arrange to meet for a shared meal or organise a joint activity, they bring together various people who are interested in exploring a city regardless of their status of residence. Importantly, these online arranged encounters “are not just happening in fixed public or commercial spaces, but also popping up in off-the-beaten-path neighbourhoods and in the private realms of people’s homes” (Germann Molz 2014). While this feeds into the desire to experience a city beyond its guidebook recommendations, it also influences the everyday life of residents participating in such online networks.

These observations strikingly demonstrate some of the various layers in which urban tourism and everyday city life are intertwined. They all make the case for a closer examination of this complex relationship, as academic literature has so far dealt with their individual aspects a great deal, but has largely ignored their interrelatedness. In contrast, this volume makes extensive use of the term ‘new urban tourism’ (Roche 1992, Füller and Michel 2014) and adapts it in order to provide a systematic framework for a dynamic research field. This work thus takes steps towards the convergence of two disciplines, urban studies and tourism studies, which have been staring at each other for too long without talking (Ashworth 2003, Ashworth and Page 2011), yet it is necessary to discuss this to address the phenomena surrounding new urban tourism.

This introduction begins by discussing theoretical points of reference which are valuable for developing this emergent research area. Then we propose three key dimensions that characterise new urban tourism and serve as an analytical framework for the chapters of this anthology: the extraordinary mundane, encounters and contact zones, and urban co-production. All of these acknowledge the intimate connection of urban tourism and everyday city life. This is followed by a short description of the chapters included in this volume—each one focusing either theoretically or empirically on phenomena related to the three dimensions. The introduction ends with a critical examination of the anthology’s limitations and an outlook on perspectives for future research on new urban tourism.

Identifying relevant conceptual points of reference

The aforementioned claims not only exemplify how tourism informs urban everydayness, and vice versa, but also indicate how binary distinctions (‘tourist’ and ‘local’, ‘visitor’ and ‘resident’, ‘work’ and ‘leisure’, ‘production’ and ‘consumption’, ‘extraordinary’ and ‘mundane’) oversimplify the urban–tourism nexus by setting urban tourism and urban everyday life in opposition to one another. In the following, we briefly describe some valuable concepts which have informed our reflections on new urban tourism and lay the ground for the three analytical categories we propose later on. These are the ‘de-differentiation’ of the established oppositional categories of tourism and everyday life (e.g., Rojek 1993, Baerenholdt et al. 2004, Uriely 2005, Larsen 2008); the postulated ‘end of tourism’ (Lash and Urry 1994); and the concept of ‘post-tourism’ (Feifer 1985, Urry 1990, Rojek 1993). In addition, we make use of the notion of ‘performance’ (Larsen 2012, Cohen and Cohen 2017) as a conceptual lens to facilitate the integration of an urban studies perspective into our analysis.

Drawing on opposing categories when researching tourism has a long tradition. In the first version of his seminal contribution The Tourist Gaze, John Urry (1990) rendered the binary differentiation between work and leisure as the starting point for his reflections on a ‘sociology of tourism’. According to him, binaries are manifestations of the “separated and regulated spheres of social practice in ‘modern’ societies” (Urry 1990, p. 2). By operating in distinctions, in particular, the separation between tourism and the everyday, he refers to earlier tourism research which characterised tourism as “a temporary reversal of everyday activities” (Cohen 1979, p. 181). Similarly, Louis Turner and Ash (1975) argued that the temporary distance from mundane, familiar environments allowed tourists to relax from the affordances of their social roles and norms as well as the Fordist modes of production. As Larsen (2008) and Edensor (2007) pointed out, this understanding resulted in a differentiation between ‘everydayness’ constituting the sphere of “repetition, habitual practices, obligations and reproduction” (Larsen 2008, p. 22) and ‘extraordinariness’, defining life while being away on vacation.

By critically reflecting on these established notions of tourism in his initial version of The Tourist Gaze, Urry was already pointing towards a new, postmodern paradigm in tourism studies, which would come to be understood in terms of processes of de-differentiation (Urry 1990, pp. 84–87). Several researchers have taken on this paradigmatic shift, recognising that tourism itself does not take place outside of people’s everyday lives (e.g., Rojek 1993, Lash and Urry 1994, Crouch 1999, McCabe 2002, Baerenholdt et al. 2004, Uriely 2005, Hall 2005, White and White 2007, Larsen 2008). They have argued that such a narrow conceptualisation would end up producing “fixed dualisms between the life of tourism and everyday life—extraordinary and ordinary, pleasure and boredom, liminality and rules, exotic others and significant others” (Haldrup and Larsen 2010, p. 20). Larsen (2008) has even prominently called for ‘de-exoticizing theory’ in order to meet the requirements for researching tourism in light of this de-differentiation. Moreover, the various dimensions of the intertwined relationship between urban tourism and a city’s everyday life have already illustrated the limits of operating with theoretical binary categories. Support for the de-differentiation thesis is reflected in the search for more adequate terminologies (Sommer 2018). Attempts to bridge what had previously been considered as antithetical range from the term ‘host-guest-time-space-cultures’ (Sheller and Urry 2004) to ‘city users’ (Martinotti 1993) or Toffler’s idea of the ‘prosumer’ expanded into tourism (Pappalepore et al. 2014). While Sheller and Urry focused on the co-production of places by visitors and residents alike, Martinotti’s notion of ‘city users’ has emphasised that temporary urban populations are constituted of a broad range of visitors (e.g., expats, business travellers, interns and students). This is also reflected in the concept of ‘prosumers’, a term that highlights the role of host–guest interactions and the simultaneity of production and consumption in “prosuming creative urban areas” (Pappalepore et al. 2014, p. 227). As these examples show, the recognition of de-differentiation processes paved the way for an orientation towards postmodern conceptualisations within tourism studies (Cohen and Cohen 2012, 2017).

While the acknowledgement of theoretical de-differentiation provides a powerful initial starting point for analysing new urban tourism, some of its further implications also prove valuable. The paradigm shift from ‘differentiation’ to ‘de-differentiation’ prompted Lash and Urry (1994) to postulate the ‘end of tourism’. With this claim, they referred to the increasing proliferation of mass media and its effect that “people are tourists most of the time, whether they are literally mobile or only experience simulated mobility through the incredible fluidity of multiple signs and electronic images” (Lash and Urry 1994, p. 259). The ‘end of tourism’ also implies that the ‘tourist gaze’ has lost some of its distinctive character as sights, places or landscapes are detached from certain spatialities as well as temporalities and have become increasingly mobile. They travel into people’s living rooms, and thus leaving home is no longer necessary “in order to see many of the typical objects of the tourist gaze” (Urry and Larsen 2011, p. 113, emphasis in the original). As a result, “‘the tourist gaze’ is no longer set apart from everyday life” (Larsen 2008, p. 26). At the same time, increasing globalisation and its worldwide digital networks have facilitated a ‘touristification of everyday life’ (ibid., see also Gale 2009). While the ‘end of tourism’ offers fruitful impulses for studying tourism’s interrelations with everyday activities, it has, of course, not completely occurred—after all, people still travel and continue to leave their home for vacation trips. Nevertheless, the concept is valuable for researching new urban tourism insofar as it has introduced the idea that technological innovations infuse everyday life with tourist images and practices. As such, Lash and Urry’s (1994) conceptual reflections have pointed to one possible direction of how established oppositional categories can be dissolved.

Another concept emerging from the de-differentiation debate is ‘post-tourism’. Closely related to the idea of the ‘end of tourism’, post-tourism also accounts for travel experiences mad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Tourism and everyday life in the contemporary city: An introduction
• 2 Ordinary tourism and extraordinary everyday life: Rethinking tourism and cities
• 3 Inhabiting the city as tourists: Issues for urban and tourism theory
• 4 Tourist valorisation and urban development
• 5 Escaping the global city?: Gentrification, urban wellness industries and the exotic-mundane
• 6 Living with guests: Understanding the reasons for hosting via Airbnb in a mobile society
• 7 Living like a local: Amsterdam Airbnb users and the blurring of boundaries between ‘tourists’ and ‘residents’ in residential neighbourhoods
• 8 Commensality and ‘local’ food: Exploring a city with the help of digital meal-sharing platforms
• 9 Places of Muße as part of new urban tourism in Paris
• 10 Commoning in new tourism areas: Co-performing evening socials at the Admiralbrücke in Berlin-Kreuzberg
• 11 You are a tourist!: Exploring tourism conflicts by means of performative interventions
• Index