COHABITATION WITH TOURISM: From tourism

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 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

the result of wrong tourism policies. This, in fact, generally brings economic benefits to a - not always local - minority, and In doing so it causes hindrance and discomfort to the majority of the local population (Canestrini, 2004). Obviously not all responsibility falls on the administrations. There are many other factors that tourism development triggers. For example, Airbnb, which opened the season of collaborative economy, ended up being also a depredation economy, increasing the speed of gentrification processes (Brossat, 2019). To this extent, the case of Paris is illustrative. When describing the everyday life of local families, the deputy major Ian Brossat observes that “on holiday we don’t behave like the rest of the year and the forced cohabitation between happy tourists and Parisian families does not stop creating great tensions” (Brossat, 2019, p. 69). A list of examples follows, such as groups that check-in every moment of the day and night, annoying noises of trolleys in the hallway, night parties, people who go up and down the common staircases. Tourists are labelled as irritating without distinction, generating a real tourism-phobia. Hence, tourism – especially the one developing in urban contexts – became a source of problems more than an experience, both for locals who hate their temporary fellow

Fig. 1. Tourists in front of La Pedrera, Barcelona / Picture by Cynthia C. Perez

Fig. 2. Tourists in the Akropolis of Athens, Greece / Picture by the author

citizens and for tourists who hate locals’ intolerance. As the Italian sociologist Duccio Canestrini states: the worst enemy of the tourist is the tourist himself, who has matured and internalised a paradoxical contempt for his own activity, which often leads him/her even to deny being a tourist (Canestrini, 2004). The reasons for tourism's negative evolution can be grouped into two main categories: city management – issues mainly related to both public and private services, which cause direct and indirect problems to local communities – and tourists’ behaviour. It is difficult to decide which one is the worst category, but solving both is challenging and can result in a struggle. On the one hand, attempting to summarise in few lines the possible policies to improve the city management is hard. We need to keep in mind three main points: accommodation and housing (e.g. to guarantee residents access to house market at affordable prices, to control the number of touristic apartments and the payment of local taxes of online platforms, to stop the gentrification process through an accurate land use review); local businesses (e.g. to preserve the small corner shops and to avoid their substitution by big franchising, to regulate the opening hours in order to protect the workers’ rights, to boost the diversification of shos typologies in order to avoid the creation of thematic “ghettos”); and transportation (to analyze the tourists’ and residents’ fluxes in order to ensure an efficient mobility system, to differentiate services and fees, to foresee the impact of mega-events and to improve the transportation system through extraordinary measures). On the other hand, it’s important to face also the issue of tourists’ behaviour. But as the Venetian abbot Toaldo said in 1791, “Travelling became a fashion item: an urge or, better said, a mania. […] The young people, kidnapped by a kind of sleepwalking, run from a country to another following each other, and where some go, the others also go, without even knowing the reason why” (Canestrini, 2011, p. 8). The logic of following a trend, the need of being everywhere, the urge of travelling as a basic right in a society which is perfectly capable of visiting the world’s most remote corners from the sofa, is getting out of our hands. As tourists we should not demand special treatment in another community and be ready to lower

our comfort levels in favour of locals’ needs. And as citizens, we should see tourists not as economic resources, but as people who are temporarily escaping their reality to enjoy a different one: ours. We should be happy to host them, as far as they are respectful when visiting us, and vice versa. Both tourism-mania and tourism-phobia represent extreme behaviours which lead to useless but powerful tensions. In the end, we are all tourists in someone else's home.

REFERENCES:

• Canalis, X., 2019. Turisme i turistes: de l'hospitalitat a l'hostilitat. Barcelona: Magma. • Canestrini, D., 2004. Non sparate sul turista. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. • Canestrini, D., 2011. Andare a quel paese. 5th Edition ed. Milano: Feltrinelli. • Brossat, I., 2019. Airbnb: la ciudad uberizada. Iruñea-Pamplona: Katakrak Liburuak. • Jimenez, J. A. R., 2016. Y llego la barbarie. Barcelona: Ariel. • Porfido, E., 2019. From the Grand Tour to Social Media: The metamorphosis of touristic landscapes representation in the case of Albania. In: R. e. a. Pié, ed. Turismo y Paisaje. Valencia: Tirant humanidades, pp. 96-109.

Fig. 3. Tourists in the Akropolis of Athens, Greece / Picture by the author