âTourist go homeâ is a slogan that has been written on walls and stickered to lampposts in cities like New York, Coimbra, Lisbon and Berlin (see Figure 1.1). Publicly expressing frustration and anger, residents worldwide fight the surge in tourism to their cities. Protesting against a phenomenon that has become known as New Urban Tourism, local activist groups call attention to many recent changes in their neighbourhoods that reach from clogged pavements and altered retail and gastronomy offers to rising rents and restricted use of public space. Since local politics often seem to be either powerless against or supportive of an increased presence of tourists in cities, more and more residents openly rally against the social and spatial developments they relate to the visitorsâ presence. New Urban Tourism therefore challenges both power relations within cities and established notions and routines of everyday urban life.
This book contributes to contemporary public and academic discourses on urban tourism by investigating the power of New Urban Tourism. With the term âpowerâ, the editors of this volume intend to capture the complex transformations that the enormous quantitative rise and qualitative changes in, as well as the corresponding (re)negotiations of power relations, have brought about in the much-disputed socio-political and economic action field of New Urban Tourism in contemporary cities. The chapters of this book specifically provide new insights into the spatial relations, representations and contestations that this new form of presenting and experiencing cities entails. By this, the editors wish to add to the current research panorama by addressing topical research areas that have only been touched upon so far.
(New) Urban Tourism
Urban tourism appeared as a research field in the late 1980s when the enormous growth rates of tourism in cities attracted scholarly attention (Roche 1992, Judd and Fainstein 1999, Ashworth and Page 2011). At the time, urban tourism was analysed as a major driving force behind a perceived worldwide homogenisation and culturalisation of urban space characterised by a proliferation of âtourist bubblesâ (Judd 1999). The resulting âspatially confined nature of tourist activities in citiesâ (Novy 2010, p. 29), shaped by the purposeful promotion and marketing of urban festivals and sightseeing courses in central urban locations with designated monuments and new signature architectures, was however challenged in the 2000s. In view of increasing market saturation, city tourists, inspired by alternative guidebooks and âinsider tipsâ in digital media, âventure[d] in growing numbers into areas previously not visited, or less frequented by visitorsâ (Novy 2010, p. 29). What has later been coined âNew Urban Tourismâ was first described by Maitland and Newman in 2004 in a paper on the discovery of Islington, a residential neighbourhood in the north of London that did not offer any particular tourist sights, as a ânew tourism areaâ (Maitland and Newman 2004, p. 339).
Since then, the fast-growing social phenomenon of New Urban Tourism has attracted considerable attention in both urban studies and tourism studies (Maitland 2007, 2008, 2010, 2013, Maitland and Newman 2009, Novy 2010, Dirksmeier and Helbrecht 2015). The following four research strands dominated the past 15 years of interdisciplinary New Urban Tourism research: (1) theoretical reflections on New Urban Tourism as a social phenomenon; (2) studies on how New Urban Tourism has impacted on cities and urban quarters, and vice versa; (3) investigations of protests against and the discontents of New Urban Tourism; and (4) analyses of the ways in which cities set out to govern New Urban Tourism.
Theoretical reflections on New Urban Tourism as a new social trend
Publications dwelling on New Urban Tourism as a new social trend seek to relate it to broader social theories, recent analyses of social change and a concomitant rise in global mobilities of all kinds. When Maitland and Newman introduced the term âNew Urban Tourismâ in 2009, they built upon a variety of concepts that had been developed by an impressive body of postmodernity-, leisure- and performance-oriented tourism research. Since the 1990s, prominent tourism scholars, informed by postmodern theories (Urry 1990, Rojek 1993, Lash and Urry 1994), have drawn attention to a pervasive de-differentiation of tourism and everyday life (Crouch 2001, McCabe 2002, 2005, Hall 2005, Uriely 2005, Hannam 2011, White and White 2007). They spotlighted what urban tourists actually do when visiting a city, concluding that the basic binary distinction between tourism and the everyday that had informed tourism research up to then, had to be reconsidered (Coleman and Crang 2002, Larsen 2008). While some researchers showed that touristic travelling builds on a set of mundane habituated norms and routines (Edensor 2001, 2007), others concluded that differences between tourists and (cosmopolitan) city dwellersâ practicesâsuch as visiting a cafĂ© or a museumâcan no longer be sustained (Urry and Larsen 2011, Larsen 2017, 2019, Cohen and Cohen 2019, Stors et al. 2019). In an age of growing leisure-orientation and cultural consumption, some scholars saw the dawning of a new era of post-tourism (Feifer 1985, Urry 1990, Rojek 1993), while others found evidence for an overall end of tourism (Lash and Urry 1994). As a consequence, Martinotti (1993), for example, suggested speaking of âcity usersâ instead of âtourists vs. residentsâ, considering that a growing number of permanent city users set out to joyfully explore and experience their city, whereas temporary city users endeavoured to take part in mundane local life (Maitland and Newman 2009, Richards 2017, Wearing and Foley 2017). Last but not least, the ânew mobilities paradigmâ in tourism (Sheller and Urry 2006) called on tourism research to understand tourism as a complex crossover and intersection of mobilities of people, objects, knowledge, images and information (BĂŠrenholdt et al. 2004, Frank 2016), and to study the multiplicity of human movements and moorings, including temporary mobilities beyond touristic visits and new forms of temporary residence (Frank and Meier 2018, Novy 2018).
Likewise, scholars from urban studies discovered urban tourism as an area of research in the 1990s. Building upon David Harveyâs seminal work on the entrepreneurial city (Harvey 1989) that analysed the contemporary rise of cultural consumption and urban leisure industries, academic publications set out to describe the quantitative rise, qualitative change and overall promotion of (New) Urban Tourism as a driver of economic regeneration and urban development. It was noted that tourism perfectly tied in with the growth-oriented, market-driven and city-marketing-centred politics and policies typical for entrepreneurial cities against the background of globalisation, deindustrialisation and post-Fordist urban restructuring (Hubbard and Hall 1998, Maitland and Newman 2004, Novy 2010), as well as neoliberalisation, financialisation and urban austerity (Peck 2012, FĂŒller and Michel 2014). In this context, urban heritage and culture, drawing on products and atmospheres created by the so-called creative industries (Florida 2003), were discovered as a source of post-industrial consumption aimed to meet the leisure-oriented lifestyles and consumption preferences of the urban middle- and upper-classes (Zukin 1991, 1995, 2011, Novy 2010, Frank 2020). Scholars determined that tourists were more and more lured to previously less visited urban areas, such as former working-class districts characterised by an urban fabric of old streets and buildings, a socially and ethnically diverse population, a mix of functions, open spaces, small shops, cafĂ©s, bars and restaurants visited by locals. As a consequence, urban neighbourhoods were commodified and gentrified
beyond citiesâ cores according to the demands of affluent population groups with sophisticated and cosmopolitan tastes, white collar professionals and workers in the creative industries, transient city users (temporary migrants, business visitors on short term assignment and so on) as well as tourists.
(Novy 2010, p. 31)
Studies on the social and demographic characteristics of New Urban Tourists found that they are interested in a destinationâs qualities of place, including many small places to eat, drink and shop, in everyday culture and local atmosphere, in interacting with the locals, as well as in alternative ânon-touristicâ ways of travelling and consuming. For these tourists, to be different from the broad mass of (urban) tourists by immersing themselves in local life is of high importance (Maitland and Newman 2004, Paulauskaite et al. 2017, FĂŒller and Michel 2014, Mokras-Grabowska 2018).
Studies on the impacts of New Urban Tourism on cities and urban quarters
Another major research strand investigates the impacts of New Urban Tourism on cities and urban quarters (and vice versa) with a specific focus on holiday rentals, gentrification, touristification or overtourism. A lot of research has been conducted on the role of the sharing economy in contemporary tourism (Guttentag 2015, Stabrowski 2017). Specifically, scholars studied how digital platforms such as Airbnb have changed touristic patterns (Dredge and GyimĂłthy 2015, Sans-DomĂnguez and Quaglieri 2016, Stors 2019), the hospitality industry (Aznar et al. 2017, GutiĂ©rrez et al. 2017) and the housing market in the framework of ongoing financialisation and the discovery of short-term rentals of residential space as outstandingly profitable assets (FĂŒller and Michel 2014, Guttentag 2015, Brauckmann 2017, Wachsmuth and Weisler 2018). Moreover, scholars investigated how the rise of New Urban Tourism, often initiating immense socio-spatial transformations of residential neighbourhoods that have been conceptualised as âtouristificationâ (Freytag and Bauder 2018, Sequera and Nofre 2018) or âtourism gentrificationâ (Gotham 2005, Minoia 2017, Mendes 2018, CĂłcola-Gant 2019) is related to gentrification processes (Zukin et al. 2009, CĂłcola Gant 2016, Gravari-Barbas and Guinand 2017). Additionally, studies on overtourism (Dredge 2017, Koens et al. 2018, Dodds and Butler 2019, Seraphin 2019) have been published that deal with urban places exposed to different forms of urban tourism, such as cruise tourism as a fast-growing sector of the tourism industry that adds to the rise of New Urban Tourism in these places. While New Urban Tourism and its hoped-for or unwanted impacts on cities and neighbourhoods has up to now mostly been observed and investigated in Western cities, Novy and Colomb (2019) state that the phenomenon has recently spread into metropolitan areas, particularly in Asia and the Arab world, as many of them have adopted growth-oriented entrepreneurial and neoliberal city politics in an attempt to tap tourism as a source of income and economic development.
New Urban Tourism and its discontents: contestations and protests
[T]ourism has become an object of mobilisation because there is more of it, in a wider range of urban destinations, spreading to previously âuntouchedâ neighbourhoods, taking new forms, and because it is often not governed and regulated enoughâor merely governed in the interest of a narrow range of actors.
(Novy and Colomb 2019, p. 361)
This quote by Novy and Colomb indicates that the various unsettling transformations of urban residential neighbourhoods in recent times have not remained unchallenged (Colomb and Novy 2016). The authors note that changes in the material, economic, spatial and sociocultural fabric of neighbourhoods in areas outvisited by New Urban Tourists are often attributed to the presence of the latter. Generally, Novy and Colomb (2016) identified four sources of conflicts around (new) urban tourism: economic, physical, social and sociocultural as well as psychological conflicts. Principal areas of contention in this line of research are gentrification processes and a proliferation of short-term (holiday) rentals that is perceived to lead to rising rents and subsequent displacement of residents, changes in local retail leading to a loss of daily supplies for permanent dwellers, rising prices in shops and gastronomy, overcrowding of public spaces, land use conflicts, noise from festivals and parties, littering, high crime rates, as well as feelings of alienation and homogenisation due to a loss of social and ethnic diversity in the neighbourhood (Novy 2013, FĂŒller and Michel 2014, Novy and Colomb 2016, Pinkster and Boterman 2017, Gravari-Barbas and Guinand 2017). Novy and Colomb argue that an overall politicisation o...
