Tourism and the Night

Rethinking Nocturnal Destinations

Andrew Smith, Adam Eldridge, Andrew Smith, Adam Eldridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367695132
• eBook ISBN: 9781000390308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Over recent decades, municipal authorities have promoted their cities as places boasting desirable night-time activities. Light festivals, museum lates, nightclubbing, and night markets extend the typical tourist experience into the night and have become a key part of the way some cities are branded. This anthology draws together research addressing the relationship between tourism and the night, facilitating a better understanding of nocturnal city destinations.

Tourism and the Night: Rethinking Nocturnal Destinations covers an array of different tourist activities taking place at night and a range of European cities. The challenges facing late-night workers, the relationship between tourists and residents, and the effects of local policies on the expansion of late-night entertainment are examined in the first part of the book. The latter part focuses on the significance of night-time events, addressing the rising popularity of light art festivals and established religious rituals. Ultimately, this ground-breaking collection of papers examines how the night has become an important setting for city tourism. This trend means there is a need to rethink the management of urban districts and destinations, but there are also important implications for our understanding and experiences of the urban night.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events.

Decoding middle-class protest against low-cost nocturnal tourism in Madrid

Begoña Aramayona

and Rubén García-Sánchez

ABSTRACT

Nightlife scenes in central Madrid have been profoundly affected due to the expansion of tourist-oriented night-time leisure activities during the last three decades. This paper examines a range of tensions that have recently appeared in the La Latina neighbourhood due to the conflictual coexistence between the slow and locally-oriented everyday practices remaining in this territoir and the rapid colonisation of this central quarter of Madrid by neoliberal economies of the ‘Tourist City’. Particularly, we focus on some long-term, middle-class residents who reproduce exclusionary narratives against the rapid expansion of low cost tourist-oriented nightlife, while advocating a civilised and distinctive tourism. We argue this may be seen as a renaissance of a sanitised ‘middle-class culture’ created by the fascist regime in the second half of the twentieth century. Recent middle-class’ protests in Spain’s largest cities hide a new struggle about ‘who is legitimised’ and ‘who not’ to reclaim the re-appropriation of the city centre.

Introduction

In May 2017, The Sun¹ newspaper published a piece describing the expulsion of a group of British tourists from a Ryanair flight to Alicante: ‘WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY. “Vile” boozed-up Brit tourists hauled off Ryanair flight to Alicante by cops after knocking back vodka, swearing and acting like “creatures”’ read the title. The online report was accompanied by a video in which five young women defiantly exited the plane, escorted by company employees, while passengers booed and celebrated their expulsion. Hours later, The Sun published a selfie of the women sunbathing once they reached their destination. ‘Don’t five girls have the right to have a good time on holiday?’ asked one of them on her Twitter. The news did not take long to reach the Spanish press, which harshly criticised the antisocial behaviour of the tourists.

Neither the facts, nor the media narrative about them, are exclusive to the British press or Spanish beach destinations. The discomfort resulting from the increase in tourism in large Southern European cities has been widely publicised both in the press and via protests of various kinds (Colomb & Novy, 2017; Sequera & Nofre, 2018). In addition to the generation of precarious employment (Hernández, 2016; Santana, 2000) or the reduction of long-term housing arising from the emergence of tourist apartments (Arias & Quaglieri, 2016; Cócola, 2016), some residents lament the perceived impossibility of coexistence between residential and tourist leisure practices (Nofre et al., 2017a, 2017b). The development of ‘drinkatainment’ (Bell, 2007), resulting from the growth of the night-time economy (NTE) on a global scale, has triggered some of these protests, in which the visitors’ ‘uncivilised behaviour’ contributes to the residents’ discomfort.

Madrid’s nightlife, the case study examined here, has also been profoundly affected by the expansion of tourist-oriented industries in the city over the last three decades. The inclusion of the central neighbourhood of La Latina in the nocturnal circuit has led to social tensions due to the conflicting coexistence of the slow and locally-oriented everyday practices preserved in this territoir and the rapid colonisation of this central quarter of Madrid by formal and informal neoliberal economies of the ‘Tourist City’ (Colomb & Novy, 2017). However, some of the arguments expressed by long-term residents against the increase in Madrid’s nocturnal tourism seem to rely on class-based stereotypes that demonise the ‘annoying’ revellers and pose serious questions around ‘who has the right’ and ‘who not’, and ‘who can legitimately’ and ‘who cannot’ reclaim the city centre. In this sense, the question of ‘whose emotions, sensations and experiences matter’ (Hadfield, 2014, p. 7) or, as Sharon Zukin (2011) states, who exercises the ‘moral property’ of a place, seems important when considering who has the right (and who does not) to build the narrative of places that accumulate centuries of history. In sum, different levels of access and distribution of the ‘politics of mobility’ (Adey, 2006, Cresswell, 2010, Hall, 2005) in Southern European city centres are at the core of some of the recent and current struggles of the ‘Tourist City’ (Colomb and Novy, 2017).

This study analyses these tensions in light of the critical analysis of certain middle-class protests against the growth of low-cost nocturnal tourism in La Latina. Based on ethno-graphic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2016 – which included direct observation and 40 interviews with neighbours, revellers and business owners, as well as the analysis of social media information shared in different internet blogs created and administered by organised residents opposed to urban changes in the area (in total: 30 posts and associated comments; N =122) – we aim to shed light on how the ‘right to the city’ (Lefrebve, 1968) might be appropriated and contested in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways by different inhabitants. In doing this, we engage with current debates around how Southern European middle-class culture is experiencing a profound economic, symbolic and cultural crisis in the aftermath of a deep recession and, secondly, how the social imaginaries of the night, leisure and tourism have shifted accordingly. In the first section, we analyse the social tensions arising from the increase in nightlife economies resulting from low-cost tourism in large Southern European cities. Second, we explore the changing nature of Madrid’s nightlife scene from an historical perspective, and how a ‘nyctophobic’ culture (Edensor, 2013) or ‘fear of the night’ has been constructed alongside the city’s political and economic changes since the second half of the twentieth century. In the third section, we specifically analyse how the narratives of some current long-term, middle-class residents against the expansion of low-cost tourist-oriented nightlife in La Latina produce and reproduce exclusionary narratives against class-based ‘problematic bodies’, while advocating for a civilised and distinctive tourism. We argue that such exclusionary narratives may be considered as a renaissance of the socially and politically sanitised ‘middle-class culture’ created by the fascist regime in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as the manifestation of the new shapes that the ‘revanchist city’ (MacLeod, 2002) acquires in the age of urban neoliberalism. In parallel, using the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ we aim to shed light on some of the conflicts underlying the current global geographies of tourism (Hall, 2005, Hannam et al., 2006, Sheller and Urry, 2006). Finally, we offer an alternative approach to the analysis of middle-class-led protests against the growth of contemporary low-cost tourism in Southern European urban areas, and propose that the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1968, Harvey, 2008) may need to incorporate a postcolonial and feminist ‘nocturnal citizenship’ (Gwiazdzinski, 2014) to create fully inclusive nocturnal centres.

Nightlife and ‘low-cost ’ tourism: tensions around the ludification of the ‘tourist city ’ in Southern Europe

The impact of globalisation and migration on new types of night-time consumers (Hou, 2010; Pottie-Sherman and Hiebert, 2015) and the changing social representations of night and darkness (see Edensor, 2013) have been gaining attention in urban nightlife studies, although mainly focusing on an Anglo-Saxon context. The role of nightlife in revaluing and gentrifying the post-industrial city has also been extensively addressed (Hae, 2011, Nofre and Martín, 2009; Ocejo, 2014). Similarly, access to and inclusion in night-time centres (Eldridge and Roberts, 2008; Roberts and Eldridge, 2007) and the class-based, gender-based and race-based biases against less privileged potential night-time consumers in post-industrial cities have received critical attention (Eldridge, 2010; Thurnell-Read, 2013; Haydock, 2014). However, as we will argue throughout this paper, we have also witnessed a re-emergence of the ‘moral panics’ associated with ‘alcohol culture’ (Gee, 2014; Spracklen, 2014), as well as new forms of stigmatisation of ‘problematic bodies’ in public space (Eldridge, 2010; Thurnell-Read, 2013), associated with the intensification of internal and transnational low-cost nocturnal tourism in Southern European cities. At the same time, these biases are not new, and they respond to a long historical construction in countries with a past –and often present– colonial, patriarchal and elitist underlying culture.

The ‘new mobility paradigm’ plays a fundamental role in order to understand some of the deeper tensions that underlie the touristification of South European cities (Hall, 2005, Hannam et al., 2006, Sheller and Urry, 2006). Particularly concerning the night, new urban nocturnal enclaves and ‘new mobile subjects’ have appeared, such as a ‘sanitised night’ for Erasmus students (Malet, Nofre and Geraldes, 2016), new transnational nocturnal consumers (Malet, 2017; Nofre et al., 2017a) and nightlife venues for the European middle classes devalued by the crisis, all seeking to satisfy their leisure needs at affordable prices. As a result of the insertion of the global ‘entertainment machine’ (Clark, 2004; Lloyd and Clark, 2001) into Southern European urban centres, diverse ‘constellations of mobilities’ are now interacting in novel, sometimes conflicting, ways. Hence, as explained by Cresswell (2010), physical movements and their associated representations and mobile experiences are all part of a new struggle concerning the contemporary ‘politics of mobility’ on a global scale. Hence, in spite of Western narratives about ‘mobility as progress’ and the EU mantra of ‘free movement’, different mobilities are produced and productive of unequal social relations of power inside the European Union. Many ‘party spaces’ in a vast array of European cities are depicted and imagined as ‘other places’ where transgressive behaviour is permitted or even commodified by turning them into a brand for the visitor’s consumption.² Examples of this complex relationship between commodification and transgression can be found in Thurnell-Read (2011), who discusses an interesting case in Poland, and Colomb (2012) who focuses on Berlin. However, due to the different impacts the recent crisis has had on the ‘two-speed Europe’, as well as its specific historical legacies, it seems that many Southern European cities are recently intensifying their role as ‘ludic places’ for the visitor’s consumption, leading to diverse, contradictory and complex effects on the physical and socio-economical fabric of its cities.

In the Spanish case, some medium-sized cities such as Magaluf on the island of Majorca, but also big cities like Barcelona or Madrid, are beginning to experience an increase in visitors looking for a space to ‘party’ apparently without the rules and restrictions of the modern ‘daily grindstone’ of work and family life (Baptista, 2005). As authors such as Kelly, Hughes and Bellis (2014) have described in relation to Ibizan workers, the concept of ‘work hard and party harder’ has gained considerable currency. Both Spanish and international media have quickly echoed this new reality, with headlines describing the ‘shamelessness’ (Huffington Post, 2015) and ‘ethyl debauchery’ (El País, 2016) represented by the ‘drunk tourism’ phenomenon. The very content of protests by long-term residents in these places also incorporates the discomfort caused by the new low-cost ‘drunk tourism’, which they associate with the absence of ‘civilised behaviour’, an increase in crime, fighting and noise, as well as the serious difficulties of residential and new leisure activities coexisting (Nofre et al., 2017a, 2017b).

Nightlife in Madrid: new forms of commodification in the contemporary tourist city

There is a specific history about of the ways neoliberalisation happened in Madrid’s night-life. Madrid’s nocturnal scene ech...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Tourism and the night: towards a broader understanding of nocturnal city destinations
• 1 Decoding middle-class protest against low-cost nocturnal tourism in Madrid
• 2 Gentrification, tourism and the night-time economy in Budapest’s district VII – the role of regulation in a post-socialist context
• 3 Commuting and the urban night: nocturnal mobilities in tourism and hospitality work
• 4 Strangers in the night: nightlife studies and new urban tourism
• 5 Nocturnal ritual activities in tourist development of pilgrimage cities
• 6 Residents versus visitors at light festivals in cities: the case of Barcelona
• 7 Fairy tale tourism: the architectural projection mapping of magically real and irreal festival lightscapes
• Index