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

Claudia Stellini

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

/0 Comments/in /by

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 1a – Digital 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

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

Opportunities and Concerns in Hosting World University Games: the case of Turin 2025

/0 Comments/in /by

By Samantha Cenere and Loris Servillo from Politecnico di Torino

Big sporting events have been always considered important city branding strategies and opportunities to launch major urban requalification projects. The Universiadi constitutes a peculiar kind of event that merges these objectives with the specific goal to position a city on the global map of university students’ destination.

Big events represent unique occasions for those cities that aim at revitalising their economies and launching important requalification projects. Indeed, these events are considered able to promote the image of a city and attract visitors, trigger regeneration, accelerate the implementation of ongoing projects, and provide the financial support needed to construct new infrastructures. Albeit these events present a great variety in terms of size, typology, and impact, sporting events are usually considered the most fruitful ones for cities aiming to capitalise on both the organisation of the event and its legacies to implement their urban agendas. Olympic Games constitute indeed the prototypical example of mega events.

Despite their relatively small scale if compared to the Olympics, so-called Universiadi are a type of sporting events that cities compete to host. Invented in 1959, the Universiadi are the university students Olympic Games, an event that aims at supporting the encounter between Higher Education and sport.

Turin (one of SMARTDEST cases study) has recently won the bid to host the Winter Universiade 2025, thus replicating the success already obtained in 2007. This news was welcomed with great enthusiasm by a city that during the last 20 years has based a relevant part of its growth strategy on the imaginary of a ‘university city’.

As for other big events, hosting the Universiade will allow to attract high flows of people from abroad (both athletes and visitors) and generate positive impacts both on the local economy and in terms of urban development. According to the plans and the promises made by the institutions that took part in the implementation of the bid – namely, the two main Higher Education institutions of the city, the City, the local agency for university sports (CUS), and the regional agency deputy for the right to university education (EDISU) –, the Winter Universiade will bring to Turin around 3,000 athletes and attract around 10,000 visitors. Indeed, as explained by the President of CUS, local encouragement to the sporting culture and high-level sport facilities in particular represent crucial assets for an urban Higher Education system that aims at becoming increasingly attractive for international students. According to him, the latter have to be considered like tourists by a post-industrial city in search for a new identity.

But the most relevant and lasting effect is represented by the investments made on the construction of student accommodation facilities, in line with the capacity of other big and mega events to act as a means of realising relevant infrastructural change. The event will provide the city with almost 1,800 bed places, thanks to the creation of four athletes villages that, once the event will be closed, will be converted into student residences.

However, as for other big events, the Universiade raises various concerns by those segments of the local population that view as problematic those urban growth strategies that pivot on the attraction of mobile populations rather than on the provision of services to residents. Besides the criticism to the use of public fundings to host the event (40 million euros esteemed, of which 28 from the Government), the main concern regards the locations chosen to become athletes’ villages and then student residences. Indeed, according to some local opposition groups, the opening of these facilities in locations such as the former Maria Adelaide Hospital and a green public area in the neighbourhood Parella would result into the loss of public services for residents.

Claudia Stellini

Can Airbnb be blamed for all housing issues? – The case of Ljubljana

/0 Comments/in /by

By Tadej Rogelja, Miha Bratec, Dejan Križaj from University of Primorska

 

Slovenia is among the EU countries with the highest rate of housing shortage. We have focused on the capital Ljubljana and examined the causes that have led to such a situation. The reason on the one hand is the relatively old and poorly maintained housing stock and, on the other hand, the short-term-rental platform Airbnb. But what did the COVID-19 pandemic reveal?

 

Slovenia is among the EU countries with the highest rate of housing shortage. We have focused on the capital – Ljubljana and examined the causes that have led to such a situation. The reason for such a situation is, on the one hand, the relatively old and poorly maintained housing stock and, on the other hand, the sharing platform Airbnb.

 

The Slovenian capital of Ljubljana, with a population of around 300.000 is one of the smallest capitals in Europe and arguably on Europe’s most sustainable destinations, experiencing tremendous growth in terms of visitor numbers and press recognition within the last 10 years. The city is located in the Osrednjeslovenska Region (Central Slovenia) and it is the strongest area in terms of economic development, and is the administrative, economic, cultural, and scientific centre of the country. On the other hand, Slovenia is also among EU countries with the highest housing deprivation rates. In 2018, more than a fifth of its population lived in poor housing conditions. One of the reasons for the high housing deprivation rate is the relatively old and poorly maintained housing stock (IMAD, 2020). The state also abolished systemic sources of funding, did not develop new supply institutions and hindered the construction of public housing stock. National policies are also reflected in municipal policy, which has neglected the housing topic for the last 30 years since Slovenia’s independence. This played a major role in the housing policy when the socialist real estate market was privatized, and inhabitants had the right to purchase the apartments in which they were living for a price way below the market value. Due to this policy, 80% of Slovenians live in their own properties today and only 8% in rental flats. Consequently, the share of public housing in Ljubljana owned by the municipality fell from 42% (42,000 dwellings) in 1992 to 3% (4200) as of 2019 (IŠSP & FDV 2019). With the stagnation of the housing policy, Ljubljana has reached a point where few people can afford to buy an apartment while renting one equally puts a comparatively high burden on one’s disposable income.

 

Let us now add Airbnb to the whole story. Historically, Ljubljana has not been a prime tourist destination, but between 2014 and 2018, tourist demand increased significantly, leading to a sudden shortage of suitable accommodation. Peer-to-peer accommodation was a perfect solution at this time. The market was flooded with tourists so quickly that the government did not have time to take regulatory measures to prevent externalities. As a result, locals today experience very high prices and cannot afford long-term rentals. According to Milič (2021) from Capital Genetics which focuses on corporate finance, capital growth, valuation of business and real estate in Slovenia and other countries in Southeast Europe, prices have gone crazy. Currently, the average price of a used apartment in Ljubljana is already over € 3100 per square meter. Second-hand housing prices have risen by 50% in the last five years. Official statistics did not capture the additional supply of beds because many locals did not report their short-term rental activities. Figure 1 illustrates the large discrepancy between the number of beds in private accommodation reported by the official statistics of the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia and the number of beds listed on Airbnb according to AirDNA. Thus, in 2018, approximately 2,038 beds were not registered on Airbnb and so failed to pay taxes from their commercial activities (Dolnicar, 2021).

Figure 1: Number of arrivals and overnight stays in Ljubljana (Source: Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia, 2019)

 

In addition to that, many Ljubljana residents reported the lack and high price of parking spaces as negative consequences of tourism. On the other hand, according to Airbnb˙s data, most apartments listed offered parking, which can be quickly combined into a meaningful whole. Moreover, a more detailed investigation revealed that Ljubljana’s accommodation listings on Airbnb often recommend that tourists use the public parking spaces near the property, which puts a significant strain on the public infrastructure and results in locals not finding parking spaces in front of their homes (Dolnicar, 2021).

 

But can Airbnb be so easily blamed for most of the housing issues in Ljubljana? Though the discourse went into such a direction, the pandemics showed a rather different picture. When tourism and especially short-term rentals plummeted in 2020, this only led to short term effects such as more offers on the long-term rental market, yet the prices for both housing rentals and purchase kept growing and reached record numbers by spring of 2021. All these leads to indicate that the housing issues in Ljubljana are much more complex and the growth of tourism within the last decade and Airbnb-related short-term rentals only played a minor role in sky-rocketing real estate prices. The real reasons behind them need to be further explored, but most likely have to deal with failed restructuring of the sector following the abortion of socialism and inefficent state and local housing policy formulation.

Claudia Stellini

Forecasting Tourist Mobility and Overcrowding thanks to Agent Based Models

/0 Comments/in /by

By Itzhak Omer and Amit Birenboim, Tel Aviv University

Overcrowding is a main negative externality that is associated with tourism. However, data on street level crowding is usually not available for studying this phenomenon. Using Agent based modelling, we can generate synthetic data of tourist mobility that forecasts street level tourist congestion.

Agent-based models (ABM) enable reference to various individuals’ travel behaviour attributes and to the simultaneous effect of the street network structure and land uses on movement flows. In the Jerusalem case study, ABM is used to represent the different movement patterns of local residents and tourists, and the exposure / interaction between them at the street level. The ABM simulation is based on the following ‘basic’ attributes of agents’ travel behaviour that were found most relevant in previous studies:

 

(i) The attraction/obstruction level of land uses as a destination or as intermediate paths, with distinction between agent types (local residents versus tourists) in this respect;
(ii) Scale/radius for movement and sensitivity to distance: represents the maximal distance available for movement from origin to destination according to destination types and preferences of nearby destinations within this radius;
(iii) Personal status: represents socio-demographic properties, such as age and gender;(iv) Distance type: three types of agents were defined: metric, topological, and angular. Each agent type (local resident and tourist) chooses the relevant shortest path – in terms of metric, topological (the number of turns or direction changes), or angular (cumulative angular change), respectively – between origin-destination pairs.
The ABM was designed with the NetLogo (ver.5.3.1) environment and is associated to geographical layers within ArcGIS software (i.e., street-segment, land uses). Data model is enriched by quantitative data that was collected at the sub urban level such as socio-demographics at the census tract level.
In later stages of the project, the ABM is intended to be used as a decision supporting tool. Using the ABM we will generate forecasted /simulated movement patterns of local residents and tourists according to various scenarios that are related to tourist behavior and tourist-oriented plans or expected trends. Such use of the ABM may help forecasting the implications of changes in the volume and spatial distribution of hotel/Airbnb rooms on local residents-tourists exposure at the street level. The model will also assist to evaluate the implications of urban and infrastructure changes on car usage and walking behavior of various types of agents (e.g., local population, tourists) under different assumptions of technology adoption levels and pricing. Outputs will include, among other things, indices of inclusion and inequality.

Claudia Stellini

Touristic labour in Europe: how to compare it across different European regions

/0 Comments/in /by

By Niklas Pernhaupt, Lukas Alexander, Yuri Kazepov and Elisabetta Mocca from University of Vienna

As one of 12 research partners we are busy to contribute to the success of the SmartDest project.

The core research team at the University of Vienna consists of four people: Prof. Yuri Kazepov, Elisabetta Mocca PhD, Niklas Pernhaupt MA and Lukas Alexander MA. In SmartDest we are leading the empirical work of WP3 and provide transversal support to the case study leaders in task 3.1, 3.3 and 4.3. Moreover, we participate in various tasks in WP2, WP4, and WP5. We also planned a steering group meeting for September 2020 in Vienna, which had to be called off due to travel restrictions.

The previous few months we spent on refining our output of WP 2. More concretely, we conducted a systematic literature review on tourism typologies, where we analysed over 350 scientific publications. The results are going to be presented at the ATLAS Conference on the 3rd of June 2021 in Rotterdam. In addition to our review, we are trying to find a way to compare the quality of touristic labour across different regions. To do so, we first attempt to find a comparable approximation of tourism work. Different destinations come with different forms of tourism work. We are trying to find occupations that are likely common to most regional destinations throughout Europe. After we find our approximation of tourism work, we will look at different dimensions of job quality in the tourism sector. Which regions are characterised by contractual insecurity? Which regions show job insecurity in the sense of persons having to work multiple jobs, persons wishing to work more hours, and persons who are looking for another job? Which regions exhibit relatively bad working conditions? These three dimensions will then be summed up to an index of formal touristic labour quality and weighted by the socio-political context in which they are embedded. Here, we will explore which regions offer ‘flexicurity’ – e.g., a safety net to protect workers against the negative aspects of flexible labour.