Posts

MaxR

The travel destinations that want tourists to stay away

/0 Comments/in /by

Foto di Gabriella Grifò da Pixabay

This interesting article from Timeout magazine, shows the example of some tourist destinations trying to reduce the number of visitors.

This article by John Bills presents some travel destination among the worlds most popular ones willing and acting to reduce the number of visitors and thus reduce also the negative impact of over-tourism on local communities and the environment.

The negative impact of over tourism of some of these destinations has been analysed also within our SMARTDEST project and results can be considered in line with our findings.

You can read the whole article at the following link:

https://www.timeout.com/travel/destinations-fighting-overtourism

Alessio Varenna

New Deadline for submitting the abstract for SMARTDEST Call for papers 15th of May

/0 Comments/in /by

The SMARTDEST project team has extended the deadline for the submission of the abstracts of the papers to be presented at SMARTDEST final conference in Barcelona on the 15th of September 2023

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

Barcelona, 15-16 September 2023 

Final event of the SMARTDEST project 

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 May 15, 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

MaxR

SMARTDEST research team is glad to announce the following event and invite for contributions

/0 Comments/in /by

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

MaxR

New SMARTDEST Publication: Smart tourism city governance: exploring the impact on stakeholder networks

/0 Comments/in /by

By Josep Ivars-Baidal, Ana B. Casado-Díaz, Sandra Navarro-Ruiz, Marc Fuster-Uguet (2023).

Building on new trends in tourism and smart city governance, this study aims to examine the degree of interrelation between stakeholder networks involved in tourism governance and smart city development. A model describing the transition towards smart tourism city governance is proposed.
Design/methodology/approach

The proposed model is tested through a multiple case study of seven European cities. This choice of sample makes the study highly representative. Data collection is based on an exhaustive search and analysis of available data on smart city initiatives, destination management organisations and tourism plans. Social network analysis using Gephi software is used to build stakeholder networks.

Analysis of the stakeholder networks that shape tourism governance and smart initiatives in several cities reveals a disconnection between the two types of networks. The results show limited progress towards the expected synergies of true smart tourism city governance.

Theoretically, the study contributes to the debate on new forms of governance for the complex evolution of urban tourism. In practice, the relationship between tourism governance and smart city initiatives needs to be redefined to achieve synergies that increase the inclusiveness and efficiency of urban tourism policies.

This study examines the under-researched topic of the interrelation between tourism governance and smart city initiatives. By comparing the networks of actors resulting from these two processes, it assesses the extent to which this interrelation helps the emergence of new governance models (smart tourism city governance).

The article is accessible at the following link.

MaxR

New SMARTDEST publication: Smart city and smart destination planning: Examining instruments and perceived impacts in Spain

/0 Comments/in /by

By Josep A. Ivars-Baidal, Marco A. Celdrán-Bernabeu, Francisco Femenia-Serra, José F. Perles-Ribes, J. Fernando Vera-Rebollo (2023).

Another paper published in the framework of SMARTDEST in collaboration with another project under development at the University of Alicante. It analyses the tourism planning derived from the adoption of the smart approach in tourism, urban and technology policies in Spain.

The impact of technology on tourist cities and destinations has led to the emergence of renewed management approaches that seek to adapt the planning processes to new challenges and opportunities derived from the smart scenario. The smart city and smart tourist destination approaches are aimed at improving efficiency in management, the quality of life of the residents and the tourist experiences. However, little is known about how these ideas are being translated into real policies and whether they are having a real impact. The objective of this paper is to understand how the smart approach is being deployed in the planning processes of Spanish tourist cities and destinations, and its implications in terms of the governance, sustainability and data-driven public management.
The planning instruments that guide the smart strategies of different Spanish cities are identified and analysed. This is complemented with a questionnaire administered among managers of the smart city and smart destination initiatives. The findings reveal the diversity of smart initiatives, their benefits and limitations. The results contribute to generating a necessary debate on the implications of the smart discourse for urban and tourism planning and enrich the international debate around this approach.

The article is accessible at the following link.

Alessio Varenna

New SMARTDEST publication: The role of the state in the touristification of Lisbon

/0 Comments/in /by

by Ana Estevens, Agustín Cocola-Gant, Antonio Lopés-Gay, Fabiana Pavel

This paper shows how the touristification of Lisbon has been a political project in which the state served the needs of capital and allowed developers to build the most profitable product with no limitations: Airbnbs, hotels, and luxury housing for transnational users. We estimate the weight of tourism in the rehabilitation of the housing stock, showing that > 50% of housing in the historic centre is registered as short-term rentals; that there are > 500 buildings entirely used as Airbnbs; while the population has decreased 25% in 10 years. The political project that we refer, used a neoliberal urban planning narrative, advocating that property markets work better when the state allows developers to behave ‘undisturbed’ by regulations. In reality, the paper shows how this is a perverse process by which taxpayers unwillingly subsidised their own displacement and the production of a city that is not for them.

The publication is accessible at the following https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2023.104275

 

Alessio Varenna

A new SMARTDEST scientific publication: Labour precarity in the visitor economy and decisions to move out

/0 Comments/in /by

The scientific paper Labour precarity in the visitor economy and decisions to move out, by Riccardo Valente, Benito Zaragozí & Antonio Paolo Russo (2023), is now openly accessible at the following link of the Tourism Geographies journal:
https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2023.2172603

The more the tourist economy grows, and makes itself space in the interstices of the social fabric of a city, the more its very workforce results marginalized and ends up expelled from it. The case of Barcelona can be a template to argue that tourism growth must be a means to generate diffused prosperity and not an end in itself, and when those conditions are not given, for instance because the housing market is hijacked by speculators and short-term rentals, it becomes necessary to step back and rethink the fundamentals of economic development strategies. This paper is in open access and aims at contributing to the design of more effective and contextualized inclusion policies.

Claudia Stellini

Are the curtains finally opening on Edinburgh’s festivals and the city?

/0 Comments/in /by

By Pratima Sambajee, Kendra Briken, Donagh Horgan and Tom Baum, University of Strathclyde

Edinburgh is a festival city constantly scrutinised and criticised by mutiple stakeholders in matters of city-planning, social exclusion, community ownership and overtourism. Residents, city officials, workers of all industries associated with festivals as well as the general tourism and hospitality industries, have experienced the city differently. The stage was set for a showdown concerning the value of the tourism economy, between city officials and disgruntled residents. A mounting debate around what is perceived by some as overtourism had reached fever pitch, following growing public opposition to entrepreneurial urban governance prioritising place commodification over citizen ownership. In recent years, a neoliberal backdrop had been revealed, exposing dark labour practices, workplace precarity and displacement in which the citizens of Edinburgh play only supporting roles. Once home to a thriving working class community, the festival city has been hollowed out as a skeleton for spectacle – a meeting point for numerous transient populations and impermanent urban dwellers. Relationships and bonds between stakeholders have weakened, meaning that suspicion often limits the spread of social capital and prosperity. Persistent and polarising poverty in Edinburgh is evidence of spatial and economic planning. The pandemic brought with it a unique opportunity to rebalance the economy of the festival city – an interval from the thundering hooves, and a recognition of the importance of shared space. However this is proving difficult due to the lack of granular data on tourism in Edinburgh.

The need for small cities like Edinburgh to remain competitive on the world stage, come in immediate conflict with more sustainable agendas focused on resilient place-based partnerships. Community ownership is important for placemaking-  and in planning for recovery and resilience – and can be difficult to cultivate in contexts where neoliberal urban governance necessitates a more reticent state. In fact the spatial development in Edinburgh would point to policy-making which cleared the city’s core of undesirable elements – and which continues to present a dramatis personae that masks forms of social exclusion and exploitation. The fallout from Brexit is slowly revealed on labour shortages in logistics and hospitality – the true extent masked by social distancing measures. Even before the formalities of Britain’s exit from the European Union were agreed, tourism bodies and sectoral associations warned of the particular risk to Scotland, whose hospitality industry relies heavily on migration from new accession states.  For those small businesses that have been able to weather the pandemic, resilience is built from the bottom up, and necessitates a wholesale engagement with the wider sector around Edinburgh’s hospitality workers – alongside other low-skilled employees.

For policymakers the picture is fuzzy, given the lack of granular data available on Edinburgh’s tourism workforce, and an absence of any real data on tourism’s impact at the neighbourhood level. Even if it were available, in informing the present circumstances, lots of big data has passed its expiry date – and cannot help us to predict an unknown future, only a complicated present. The period of austerity that followed the 2008 financial crisis, saw a rush to smart strategies to urban governance, many of which rely on the promise of big data to reduce city budgets and expenditure – and other top down approaches to small government. Not confined to the back office, technological innovation has also driven a Fordist reorganisation of the service industry reducing accountability and rights for workers. Previous crises have been the midwife of data-led transformation across all areas of society – the gig economy; the dark web and has set up multiple  barriers to transparent and open dialogue between and among stakeholders in a host of arenas. A reliance on data to guide policy, has reduced the capacity for agile responses to change, and increased the propensity for polarisation and paralysis. Within a constantly shifting context for recovery, some stakeholders are calling for less restrictions around opening up, while unions caution against risk to frontline staff. New questions are being asked around the quality of work, remuneration and on the sustainability of atypical and precarious work practices. Irrespective of a hostile immigration environment, Scotland’s tourism economy stands at a crossroads, where Edinburgh battles for its soul and identity  as a festival city.

Claudia Stellini

Is smart tourism something tourist destinations only talk about, or also really implement?

/0 Comments/in /by

By Dejan Križaj, Miha Bratec, Peter Kopić and Tadej Rogelja, University of Primorska

The focus of the research is on the adoption and implementation of technological innovations to analyse the Smart Tourism projects implemented in Europe according to the stringent technological criteria of contemporary Smart Tourism definitions.

Smart Tourism followed in the footsteps of the earlier concept of sustainable tourism and quickly established itself as the reference adjective when discussing tourism in politics, economics, and academia. In the latter, the debate has been lively, and although there are many different conceptualizations, academics seem to agree that Smart Tourism is based on the use of novel technologies that improve the quality of visitor and local experiences, while enabling destinations to take steps towards achieving their sustainability goals. However, as it happened in the past with the term “sustainable”, the adjective “smart” seems to be heavily misused when describing the various transformations that tourist destinations and cities are currently facing. Mostly, it dominates the marketing discourse, with many destinations trying to use this “smart” concept because it gives them a competitive advantage over other tourist destinations based on uniqueness and differentiation.

Based on our study, the reality of developing smart solutions within these destinations is mostly still in its infancy. More specifically, we, in detail, analyse:

  1. What is the real content of the Smart Tourism projects currently implemented within Europe and supported by substantial EU (European Union) funding?
  2. What are the characteristics of the Smart Projects and what kind of technology solutions are used in them?
  3. Can we really see the rapid technological progress in tourism services that the marketers of Smart Destinations promise?
  4. What do the currently implemented projects tell us about the future of Smart Tourism and Smart Destinations?

Summary of key findings:

Our work differed from most methods used in other studies that rely on the construction of conceptual models, frameworks, or indicator systems based on the evaluation of Smart City or

Smart Tourism goals, statements, strategies, and initiatives. The presented study goes a step further and tries to understand which technological innovations exactly were adopted and how they contribute to projects’ smartness. In order to better distinguish between conventional and advanced, interconnected technology, we have placed a special focus on Smart Actionable attributes of the projects analyzed. From what we could perceive in the selected projects, four smart technology trends can be identified: 1) Connectivity and Big Data, 2) Connectivity and Intelligent Algorithms, 3) Big Data and 4) “smart” projects with mainly well-represented technology that does not exploit the Smart Actionable possibilities.

In our initial online resource search, we encountered the vast majority of projects that were touted as “smart” but did not address any of the newer aspects of ICT infrastructure, such as interconnectivity and interoperability of integrated technologies. They were therefore excluded from our study, leaving only 35 projects, which we analysed in detail and assigned to the four groups mentioned above. This confirms our preliminary findings that there is a lot of hype and little substance (e.g., smart washing) regarding Smart Tourism projects. This problem stems in part from the fact that there are different, everchanging definitions and meanings of the term Smart Tourism. Subsequently, different stakeholders and entities adopt different meanings and set different priorities based on their viewpoints and schools of thought.

See full paper: https://doi.org/10.3390/su131810279

Claudia Stellini

Hindrances to Access to Housing in a Tourist City, pre- and post-COVID19: evidence from Barcelona

/0 Comments/in /by

By Antonio Paolo Russo and Riccardo Valente, University Rovira i Virgili

This piece illustrates some of the early results from the study of Barcelona as an exemplary ‘overtouristed’ city in which access to affordable housing and its relationship with employment is at stake. Our insights seek to influence the debate about policy options for an inclusive port-pandemic recovery.

The SMARTDEST project (H2020 ref. 870753) focuses on forms of social exclusion emerging in the context of urban areas that are the hub of global mobilities, such as tourism.

Barcelona is one of the most celebrated examples of invention of a successful tourist city through urban planning, place marketing, cultural valorisation and innovative governance since the early 1990s; but also one that came to be subject to the highest level of tourism pressure, feeding a wide societal and political debate on social justice in the ‘overtouristed’ city. Besides, as a place increasingly dependent on tourism jobs and businesses (and especially so after the economic downturn of the 2008 financial crisis), Barcelona has been severely exposed to the next systemic crisis, that of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The key focus of the SMARTDEST case study in Barcelona is on housing affordability and its enmeshment with labour conditions in the tourist sector. The key assumption is that tourism growth produces benefits that are unevenly distributed across society and spatial scales, but it also entails social costs that affect long-term residents, for whom access to housing is becoming increasingly difficult, or tourism sector workers, that are more than others subject to precarious employment conditions and a high degree of ‘invisibility’ or informality.

Figure 1. Residential stability in the 73 neighbourhoods of Barcelona (2016-2019)

Our early results from a pre-pandemic analysis show how the progressive penetration of short-term rentals promoted via platforms like Airbnb is subtracting a sizable share of the housing stock from the long-term residential market. In our analysis, the spread of Airbnb accommodations during 2014-2019 period, as well as the levitation of housing prices and rental fees, were found to be associated with a reduction in the share of long-term residents (those who were living in the same neighbourhood for more than 5 years), an effect that is not significant in relation to the spread of the conventional accommodation supply. Discounting for other factors which may explain population change, we observe a high degree of residential instability in tourism-intensive neighbourhoods, with residents displaced to another neighbourhood or out of the city altogether (See Fig. 1).

We also looked at patterns of residential mobility among tourism workers between 2013 and 2019. Our analysis reveals that being employed in tourism-related sectors is associated with lower incomes and higher rates of precariousness compared to employments in non-tourism sectors. Such unfavourable labour conditions have a particular impact on female workers, that are more likely to be displaced out of Barcelona, while maintaining their main occupation in the city.

To conclude, affordable housing is a critical asset to ‘remain citizen’ in a tourist city like Barcelona, as is for many other cities that are studied in SMARTDEST. This seems to be increasingly a hindrance for vulnerable sectors of the population, and it is remarkable that the very model that feeds tourism growth also produces an engrossing share of precarious workers, those more likely to be affected by rising housing costs.

In the light of the above, pursuing the objective of reaching pre-COVID19 levels of tourism activity is likely to reproduce past exclusionary trends. If the global pressure on the housing market has only temporarily subsided (at the end of the summer season of 2021 evidence seems to point at a sharp reprise of the activity of short-term rentals), the situation of tourism workers and other vulnerable sectors has worsened substantially, because of high rates of unemployment. The post-pandemic future of Barcelona thus may a bleak one, in which social gaps are heightened and the very sense of social cohesion is at risk. In this sense, recovery efforts need to be based on a different approach to the planning and regulation of tourism mobilities and their local impacts, aligning with Sustainable Development Objectives like the reduction of social inequalities, which may imply steering away from a growth model which has shown all its limitations both in the pre-pandemic period and in its current developments.