Picture by Chris John
This article focus the attention on that not all councils agree on best way to tackle homelessness caused in part by popularity of short-term rentals such as Airbnb.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/apr/22/nsws-most-popular-holiday-spots-divided-over-limits-on-short-term-holiday-rentals
The autonomous region of Alto Adige, also known as Bolzano – South Tyrol, gateway to the Dolomite mountains in the north of Italy has capped visitor numbers in a bid to prevent overtourism.
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/italy-tourist-restrictions-alto-adige/index.html
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
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:
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
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:
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
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
The event will take place on March 2nd 2023 in Lisbon at the Centro de Informação Urbana de Lisboa CIUL.
The event will be freely accessible to the public, but there will be not the online streaming of the event.
Download the programme
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As part of our dissemination strategy, SMARTDEST partnership invites leading experts and practitioners in the field to present their own experience with participatory methodologies (city labs, urban living labs, etc.).
The specific objective of this event is to present the results of the project’s 7 city labs and to establish a dialogue with researchers, civil society, and stakeholders who have engaged in similar experiences and faced the challenge of scaling up micro level results into local, national, and European scales and their policy dimensions.
At this point, the project team is conducting city labs in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Jerusalem, Lisbon, Ljubljana, Turin, and Venice. In all 7 cities, participatory fora have been created, solutions have been co-designed and concept tested in articulation with affected communities and other stakeholders.
Participatory methods and urban issues
This session brings together researchers with consolidated experience in participatory methods, including urban living labs and other similar fora Our aim is to learn from past or ongoing labs, and to discuss their innovation potential and social impact.
Scaling up challenges and policy interventions
This session brings together practitioners and stakeholders who have faced the challenge of translating results from participatory methodologies into policy at different scales local, national, or European. We are interested in learning from your experiences and discussing the potentials and limitations of policy making and policy implementation resulting from city labs.
Picture by Vita Marija Murenaite in Unsplash
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.
Hosted by:
Polytechnic of Turin
The H2020 SMARTDEST Project is organizing its 2nd Intermediate Scientific Workshop, on 21 October in Turin, hosted by the Polytechnic of Turin.
The workshop, entitled SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY IN THE AGE OF URBAN MOBILITIES, will be an opportunity to present key outputs from the project, especially in the field of housing exclusion, precarious labour and neighbourhood transformation in cities that are hubs of tourism and related transnational mobilities. Key authors external to the consortium will also present their work on these topics, and will engage in a collective debate about the future of urban research in the age of mobilities.
Contributors include:
The workshop will start at 9:30 (CETT) at the Polytechnic of Turn, Castello del Valentino (Sala Vigliano), and can be attended either in person or on line at the Zoom link, entering the room as guest and indicating your full name and affiliation.
Attendants in person are kindly required to send their registration in advance to Monica Postiglione at PoliTo (monica.postiglione@polito.it).
Click here for the full program
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.
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