Conference: “TOURISM MOBILITIES, SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND PLANNING FOR URBAN RESILIENCE” 

Final event of the SMARTDEST project 

Barcelona, 15-16 September 2023 

The SMARTDEST project (H2020 program, ref. 870753, https://smartdest.eu/), coordinated by the Rovira i Virgili University and including other 12 research partners from 8 European countries, engages with the production of social exclusion in tourist cities. Its main ambition is to contribute to the definition of a policy agenda for cities that takes tourism mobilities seriously, at all levels of government, and that brings out the potential of social innovation from citizen engagement for more resilient communities. It has thus produced new evidence on how urban inequalities and exclusion are produced, lived, and coped with in cities that are the hub of tourism and other related mobilities, under the pull of city spaces and assets that reorient progressively towards the affordabilities of a transnational mobile class. It has similarly looked into the uneven negotiations that unfold from the digital to the physical and social space, identifying criticalities in the construction of inclusive smart cities. The results of the project to the current date, including reports, journal publication and other dissemination materials, can be accessed from the SMARTDEST website (https://smartdest.eu/results/).

The final event of the SMARTDEST project will be held in Barcelona on two days, Friday 15 and Saturday 16 September 2023. Barcelona is one of 7 case studies of the project where researchers have engaged with local communities and stakeholders as research participants and in CityLabs where the production of social exclusion in a variety of contexts has been co-diagnosed and solutions co-designed.

The first day will host a scientific seminar with paper presentations, organised in three sessions and bookended by a keynote lecture and a final conversation with consortium partners and invited experts on “Linking local sustainability transitions and global challenges”

The second day is organised as a public event meant to transfer the project insights to communities of concern, involving a policy round table, an exhibition of project outcomes and other informal opportunities of engagement with social and policy entities from the European to the local level. Participants to the scientific seminar are welcome to participate.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS – SCIENTIFIC SEMINAR

The event organisers thus invite contributions by international authors, that could provide conceptual, methodological and empirical advances on either of the three session topics:

1.   Work and housing markets, in contest. Coping with the city’s touristification. This session welcomes contributions engaging with the transformation of the urban economy, of the housing market and of labour around the growth of tourism activity; the effects on dimensions of social cohesion and justice; and the resistances and reorganisations from below that these changes elicit.
2.   Transnational mobilities and place change: enacting cosmopolitisation. This session welcomes contributions engaging with the local-global assemblages which configure new materialities, discursive fronts and power alignments in cities that are hubs of tourism and the related global mobilities.
3.  The ‘real’ smart tourist city: citizen participation, data justice and pro-commons agendas. This session welcomes contributions engaging with the emerging power geometries of ‘smart’ as urban regime and development project for the mobile elites, and with the subversive spaces opened by digitalisation and digital commoning

We expect high-quality contributions presenting research insights (published or in the course of publication) on such topics, by scholars in urban geography and economics, planning, sociology, anthropology or other branches of the social sciences.

The authors of the selected papers will be invited at our expenses to spend up to two nights at a Barcelona hotel and attend the related social events (excluding travel and other subsistence costs). The presented materials will be included in the form of short divulgatory pieces in a conference proceedings book to be edited before the end of September.

Interested contributors should send their abstracts (250 words) and a bio to the event coordinator Antonio Russo (antonio.russo@urv.cat) within April 30, 2023.

The selection of the twelve participating papers will be based on peer review by a committee of lead researchers in the SMARTDEST consortium, ensuring adherence to the topics, gender balance and wide geographical cover.

For any request of information, please contact the SMARTDEST coordination team at this e-mail address: antonio.russo@urv.cat