EDITORIAL
COHABITATION WITH TOURISM
From tourism-mania to tourism-phobia
Enrico Porfido [PhD Architect and Urban Designer] institute Habitat Tourism Territory UPC Barcelona / Spain and sealine - Ferrara University / Italy
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In the past the word tourism was synonymous with cultural exchange and knowledge transfer, using common EU projects vocabulary. In the Grand Tour era, young aristocratic British students travelled around Europe to reach the classical history destinations, bringing back tales, drawings and, most importantly, impressions of a place. This was decisive in determining the destiny of many touristic destinations, which are still under those ancient labels. The attractiveness of a region was strongly influenced by the marks left by the first travellers who came across such places (Porfido, 2019). Image Goethe writing the Balkans Journey instead of the famous Italian one. What would have happened to contemporary tourism? Would his successors have travelled to the Balkans or would they have drastically changed their influencer’s suggestions to discover new lands? We will never know, but it's not by chance that at the end of the nineteenth century Bram Stoker chose them as the setting for his Dracula (Jimenez, 2016). Diaries, sketches, tales, later guides, moved tourism masses, and today social networks are moving them with a simple post. Not only the communication tools changed, but the meaning of tourism itself is drastically altered, passing from being an elitist cultural activity to a mass activity. In the democratisation of tourism lies the importance of this
phenomenon, which is drastically impacting territories, cities and landscapes with its volume. In which moment of this history tourism gained such a negative connotation? Nowadays, tourism is more similar to football (Canalis, 2019, p. 35), and as for this sport there are several different teams. Pilgrim, merchant, soldier, explorer, missionary, anthropologist, journalist, immigrant, seasonal worker, vacationer, tourist: whatever your status, the guest is a misplaced person. A person who needs to be placed within the community, even If for a short time (Canestrini, 2004, p. 29). And this is the main issue! When a person is travelling to another country, it causes a disbalance in the local community in terms of services, transportation, accommodation, etc. Without even mentioning other problems caused by human behaviour. Obviously when dealing with small numbers, this is not a problem, but when a city like Barcelona receives around 20 million people a year while the local citizens are barely 1.6 million, what happens? If the city is prepared for this volume of arrivals, everything is fine. But in most of the cases, it is not. And this management defiance results in the already famous slogan “Tourists go home!�, which is on the walls of many European capitals. It is a rejection phenomenon of what is perceived as an invasion, and
