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The travel destinations that want tourists to stay away

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

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

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.catwithin 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

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

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.catwithin 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

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

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

 

SMARTDEST 2nd Intermediate Workshop-Friday, October 21st 2022

SMARTDEST Project is organizing its 2nd Intermediate Scientific Workshop

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:

  • Loris Servillo, Politecnico di Torino
  • Riccardo Valente, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
  • Mara Ferreri, Politecnico di Torino
  • Franz Buhr, Universidade de Lisboa
  • Filippo Celata, Università di Roma La Sapienza
  • Antonio Paolo Russo, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
  • Zélia Breda, Universidade de Aveiro

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

Barcelona and Covid-19 era: where does virtual mobility win over human (im)mobility?

By Fiammetta Brandajs from Universitat Rovira i Virgili

The current COVID-19 crisis is boosting online activity – everything is increasingly shifting to the digital sphere including mobility.
Which urban areas are most resilient to physical break in mobility?

The latest studies by theorists from different disciplines analyze the bidirectional relationship which links mobilities to digital technology as enabling infrastructure for human mobilities on a large and local scale; as multiplier agent people’s mobile practices; and as an articulating factor of social, physical, mental, and financial relations. Therefore, the ways in which technologies reshape everyday activities and interpersonal relations, as well as connections with others and connections with the wider world, provides a predictive insight into the geographies of the social gap which emerge at territorial level by mapping out “hyper-mobilized” territories rich in technological components that contrast with others “hypo-mobilized” that are poor in functions, and little considered by both public administrations and private investments. This has become increasingly topical with the outbreak of COVID-19, as physical immobility has strongly fostered virtual mobility, revealing a wide disparity among populations in which those with higher income are able to access technology that can ensure work continues digitally during social isolation.

The attempt to analyze the digital disparities within the municipal boundaries of Barcelona is based on the analysis of the synthetic index (Digital Mobility Index), which evaluates both trends in citizens’ usage of technological and digital services and key variables which define the underlying socio-demographic structure of digital development. Finally, a focus on the resulting interdependencies between corporeal and digital mobilities/immobilities based on the study of the mobility of the population during the period of the state of alert.

Key findings

The resulting geographical configuration is illustrated in the two figures below:

 

Figure 1aDigital Mobility Index and Socio-Demographic Digital Propensity, Barcelona city

Figure 1b Physical Mobility during Covid-19 outbreak in March 2020, Barcelona city

 

Figure 1a

  • The neighborhoods of the Ciutat Vella district, the most cosmopolitan areas of the city that attract the most tourists, stand out with high Digital Mobility Index values supported by the general high Socio-Demographic Propensity Index value as expected due to a multiplicity of factors such as strong population renewal thanks to ‘globals’ and the ‘mobile population’, who are skilled, networked, and have purchasing power; a mainly tourist-oriented economy that is currently technology-based (hospitality platforms, etc.).
  • There are some constants throughout the urban territory and neighborhoods that seem to have incorporated more than others the idea of mobility through the digital environment in a transversal way by encompassing all its variables. These include the vast area of the most privileged neighborhoods of the north-west and south-east axis (coastline), which are the best equipped and most active in the network.

Figure 1b

  • The neighborhoods of the old town move from a high ranking from a digital point of view to the first displacement category in physical mobility during Covid-19 outbreak. This has highlighted the economic monoculture linked almost exclusively to tourism which has turned them almost totally physically immobile territories.
  • The north-west the areas and the coastline neighborhoods, other top-ranked digital mobility territories that are almost totally immobilized during Covid-19 outbreak suggesting a labor mobility supported by a technological substitution.

Conclusions

The immobility caused by COVID-19 has underlined that those who used to move the most physically are now those who move the least, replacing most of their activities with virtual ones since their mobile lifestyle never fully connected them with the surrounding territory, placing them on an almost self-sufficient technological island.

See full paper: https://doi.org/10.3390/info12100421

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

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.

Workshop | DISTFest – Friday, October 22nd 2021

Cities and Universities
Socio-spatial dynamics of a complex relations and their implications for urban policies

Organized by:
Loris Servillo and Samantha Cenere (DIST, Politecnico di Torino)

Speakers:
Jean-Paul Addie (Georgia State University)
Louise Kempton (Newcastle University)
Daniel Malet Calvo (Instituto Universitário de Lisboa)
Silvia Mugnano (University of Milano Bicocca)
Nick Revington (Institut national de la recherche scientifique in Montreal)
Antonio Paolo Russo (Universitat Rovira i Virgili)

The phrase “town and gown” once used to describe the relationship between universities and the urban context in which they are located implies an understanding of the two as separate spheres. However, it is increasingly evident that complex, indirect, and hidden entanglements characterised the city-university nexus within the global paradigm of the knowledge economy. Universities may be seen as urban developers whose action impacts substantially on the built environment. Their capacity to implement an attractive and competitive educational offer and research environment triggers the arrival of students and academics from other regions and countries, thus transforming the demographic profile of a city. Through the attraction of highly mobile, cosmopolitan, and skilled populations, universities indirectly contribute to activate new urban economies that span from a new retail offer to the transformation of the housing market. These and other examples of how universities have become one of the most powerful actors of urban transformations will be discussed at the workshop Cities and universities. Socio-spatial dynamics of a complex relationship and their implications for urban policies.
Through the contribution of various international experts, the workshop will offer a wide range of perspectives on the complex university-city nexus, showing how the urban effects of universities activity are not limited to their capacity to function as providers of skilled workforces and as research centres contributing to regional economic development. The massification and commodification of university education, the mantra of global competitiveness, and the imperative for cities of being attractive lay at the core of heterogeneous urban processes that Higher Education institutions participate in activating. These processes encompass the transformation of the housing market, urban renewal interventions at the neighborhood scale, changes in the retailscape of a specific area, and the opening of private student residences.
However, these processes may reveal another side of the coin, constituted by spatial, socio-economic and cultural inequalities, both on an urban scale and within those areas particularly affected by these transformations. These could emerge in multiple forms, such as conflicts over the use of public space between students and residents; the replacement of services of general interest aimed at the resident population with others designed for a highly mobile population; difficult access to affordable accommodation; displacement, etc. To what extent the production of urban spaces linked to the increasing relevance of universities within global knowledge capitalism and interurban competition may be balanced by the pursuit of inclusive, sustainable, and just cities?
These questions and issues resonate with the Sustainable Development Goal 11 and build a bridge between the workshop and a research project on the urban effects and exclusionary dynamics related to university student mobilities, conducted by the DIST team of the Horizon2020 project “SMARTDEST. Cities as mobility hubs. Tackling social exclusion through smart citizen engagement”

For live streaming please register to:
https://distfest7.eventbrite.it

Click here for the full program

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

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.

typology of tourist regions

A typology of EU tourist regions facing social inclusion issues

By Antonio Paolo Russo, from Universitat Rovira i Virgili

As a first stage of the research approach of SMARTDEST, we have constructed a typology of European regions that illustrate different forms and degrees of attractiveness for tourists and related mobilities, and matched with a wide range of social indicators showcasing trends of social exclusion. The spatial patterns devised provide an interesting canvas to further examine how territorial structures, geographical specificities and policy regimes may play a role in explaining these variations, and inform postCOVID recovery towards policy reforms that bring forwards socially resilient tourist cities and regions.

As a first stage of the research approach of SMARTDEST, we have constructed a typology of European regions that illustrate different forms and degrees of attractiveness for tourists and related mobilities. This typology is then matched with a wide range of social indicators showcasing trends of social exclusion. The objective of this piece of research is to identify key inclusion challenges for groups of regions, having similar profiles in terms of their capacity and evolution to attract mobile populations. The spatial patterns devised provide an interesting canvas to further examine how territorial structures, geographical specificities and policy regimes may play a role in explaining these variations. This analysis refers to a context of steady intensification of tourism and international mobility that has characterised the last decades, to come to an abrupt halt with the sanitary emergency of COVID-19 in 2020, with an expected long tail of disruptions in global and local mobility systems. Looking into the near past goes in the way of understanding how tourism mobilities could have become enmeshed with social inequalities; the hindrances provoked by COVID-19 have been opening new relevant avenues of social exclusion, which the recent literature claims to be overlapping and heightening, and not substituting, pre-existing ones. Our analysis should therefore be informing the process of recovery, and underline the key policy challenges that are at stake in the debate as to whether tourism should bounce back to ‘business as usual’ and pre-COVID trends once the emergency is over, or whether this could be an important opportunity for reforms that bring forward social resilience in the face of the transformative and exclusionary power of tourism mobilities on places.

The indicators used to obtain this basic regional typology were selected from a wide range of measures of tourism and related mobilities considered in preliminary tasks of the SMARTDEST project. These include absolute and relative measures of tourism movement in space and in relation to the resident population (intensity and pressure indexes), for international and domestic markets. Whenever possible and relevant, these indicators have been stratified for areas that have different degrees of urbanisation. We also considered net migration rates for age groups, which the literature relates with different motivations for displacement; the mobility of Erasmus students; and a measure of the penetration of Airbnb supply in relation to the total population which is a proxy of the attractiveness of regions for visitors using this kind of platform-mediated  accommodation structures (generally not accounted for in official tourism movement statistics). All these indicators are calculated in stocks, taking 2018 as the most recent year for which there is an almost complete data cover, as well as in change rates, taking 2008 (the period immediately preceding the effects of global financial crisis) and 2013 (marking the start of the post-crisis recovery) as reference years. The technique used for obtaining the final typology has been 4-means clustering on a selection of such indicators after having eliminated redundancies.

The resulting geographical configuration is illustrated in the figure below. The first type, FAST INTERNATIONALISATION, includes only four regions in the European space (Iceland, Northern Ireland, the North-West of England, and the north of Serbia). These are relative newcomers in international tourism that have made a scale jump in the last decade, presenting themselves with an attractive destination profile especially for their rural and small and medium-sized towns. They have been experiencing a strong growth of tourism over the last decade and specifically of the share of international tourists, and are therefore subject to a relatively high tourism pressure (with low growth in cities and towns, high in rural areas). They are relatively unattractive as a site of migration for more senior cohorts but boast high crude migration rates for the younger migration cohorts.

The second class, LOW INTENSITY, includes 92 regions that are characterised as poorly attractive regions for tourism and other migrations but are subject to a rising tourist pressure in cities and towns, have a low and decreasing share of international tourism, and a moderate offer of Airbnb. This is a large set of regions across the core of Europe and stretching to its periphery. These regions are characterised by general low levels of attractiveness for visitors although they have been experiencing recent growth of the tourist intensity in cities and towns. The domestic market is the driving force of tourism development and wherever they have been experiencing some growth this has been mostly accompanied by an expansion of non-traditional forms of hospitality like short-term rentals mediated by digital platforms (as Airbnb). It is noteworthy that in spite of their relatively low tourist dimension, these regions can be moderately attractive for working age adults and senior migrants, maybe precisely on account of the ‘low pressure’ to which they are subject. The context of these regions varies to a great extent, from regions in the European core (as in Germany, France, Belgium and Switzerland as well as Southern Holland) to inland and predominately rural regions of Spain, regions in the Eastern periphery (Poland, Slovakia, Romania), the south of Finland, north of Sweden, the Italian South and Albania.

The third class, STEADY GROWERS, includes 53 regions whose profile is of being attractive and growing regions for tourism, with highest and growing pressure in rural areas, have a high foreign student population in relation to their size, a high and growing share of international tourism. These regions are mostly situated in the Mediterranean coastal and island regions (including almost the whole of Portugal), the Atlantic archipelagos except the Canaries; and extend to regions in Great Britain, the inner part of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, most Scandinavian and Baltic regions, and almost the whole of Greece, plus some ‘capital city regions’ like London, Prague and Bucharest. These are mature destinations for tourism that have not stopped growing and becoming more internationalised in the last decade, registering the highest pressure in non-urban areas, and are poorly attractive for working age younger adults, but moderately attractive for other migrations including under 25 and over-50-year-old workers.

Finally, the fourth class, TOURISM STARS, includes 15 regions that stand out as very attractive for tourism, especially urban, and all migrations, experiencing a moderate growth concentrated in towns and cities; they are subject to a large penetration of Airbnb, and experience a high share of international tourism but seeing a relative growth of the domestic market. These are some of the most visited destinations in Europe and at the same time preferred destinations for migrants of all age groups. Tourist pressure over the last decade has been mostly growing in urban and intermediate areas, and this has been accompanied by a high level of penetration of platform-mediated supply; yet in general the attraction of tourism (the international market in particular) is decelerating, for having possibly met some capacity thresholds. These regions include Catalonia, Madrid, the Balearic and Canary archipelagos, the Algarve region of Portugal, Paris and the South of France, the northeast of Italy, the whole of Croatia and Ireland, and two other capital city regions, North Holland (the region of Amsterdam) and Berlin.

The subsequent step of this analysis has been to calculate the average means of the score of a selection of social indicators in the four classes of regions in this typology, and test that these differences are significant. We have included in this exercise:

  • Health indicators (self-reported perception on health state by participants to the EU-SILC survey)
  • Housing indicators (self-reported perception on quality of housing, financial access to housing and rent values by participants to the EU-SILC survey)
  • Poverty and deprivation indicators (self-reported perception on conditions of dependency, lack of access to basic commodities and consumption, etc.)
  • Labour indicators proceeding from the Labour Force Survey and especially pointing at the dimension of regional employment in the tourism sector and at the characteristics of workers in atypical conditions or earning low salaries

The full discussion of results is available in the SMARTDEST Delverable 2.3, which can be retrieved at https://smartdest.eu/results/#project-reports. Here we only wrap up the most important insights.

A key aspect explored by the literature – but not in a systematic way and using an established metrics – is how positive and negative externalities from tourism development balance out (geographically and socially) and whether population change processes which could be triggered by tourism development may be shadowing an underlying process of social exclusion. In this sense, we have singled out the small group of FAST INTERNATIONALISATION regions as the most problematic to this respect: they present a profile of being places where access to housing represents a burden for women and a heavy burden for non-European foreigners and where a sizable share of the over-65 population lives in overcrowded households, and these hindrances do not balance out through the share of population that derive rents from property, which tend to be the lowest among the four types considered. They present the worst profile in terms of conditions of poverty and deprivation, the female population being particularly affected. They also have the large shares of workers in the tourist with elementary occupations (or others) having atypical work profiles and while they offer good opportunities also in term of salary to foreigners and women, they seem to offer them worse condition in terms of protection. The LOW INTENSITY regions present quite an opposite profile – though they derive much lesser benefits from tourism and other inward flows of migration, they show very little of the hindrances through which tourism growth may sustain pathways of social inequality and exclusion.

The other two categories, STEADY GROWERS and TOURISM STARS, are a mixed bag. The former group of regions have not reached a stage of development in which tourism pressure could be considered excessive (also on account of the relative spread of tourism activity out of urban areas), especially in relation to housing affordability, and they have some the best profile in terms of salaries paid. Their trajectory of development has been more paced, having had the opportunity to become embedded in new structures of institutional and social capital, yet the trends indicate that they may resent from an increasing specialisation in tourism, which makes them particularly vulnerable to systemic crises like the one that we are currently living with COVID-19. Finally, TOURISM STARS are in their majority characterised as places where the intensification of tourism in areas otherwise economically buoyant, of their very strong degree of specialisation in tourism, could have tipped some threshold which challenge social inclusion, for instance nuancing a high level of polarisation (for instance between homeowners and tenants), deprivation, and work conditions. That the already high level of concentration in urban areas has not grown in the last decade in average as much as in other regional types is not preventing the tourism economy to increase its dimension and lead to a structural deflation of employment conditions.

These findings may thus inform on some of the key challenges that should be taken into account in the European urban and regional policy agenda when the ‘tourist dimension’ and pace of evolution of regions is considered as a driver of social change, such as housing affordability, socio-spatial polarization, the casualization and precarious nature of tourism work or the effects that the reconfiguration of space brought about my global mobilities in their anchoring to place has on the most vulnerable segments of resident communities. These areas of concern will be the object of in-deep scrutiny in further stages of the SMARTDEST project both at pan-European and at case study level.