Anti-tourism activism and the inconvenient truths about mass tourism, touristification and overtourism

Over the last decade, the debate on tourism has become remarkably polarised. For some, tourism represents the stalwart of neoliberal capitalism, nested in strongly skewed power relations, characterized by exclusionary and resource-degrading agency, which need taming. For others, it remains genuinely...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Milano, Claudio; Novelli, Marina; Russo, Antonio Paolo
Tipo de documento: Artigo
Estado:Accepted version
Data de publicação:2024
País:España
Recursos:Universidad de Barcelona
Repositório:Dipòsit Digital de la UB
OAI Identifier:oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/228183
Acesso em linha:https://hdl.handle.net/2445/228183
Nível de acesso:Acesso aberto
Palavra-chave:Moviments de protesta
Sobreturisme
Protest movements
Overtourism
Descrição
Resumo:Over the last decade, the debate on tourism has become remarkably polarised. For some, tourism represents the stalwart of neoliberal capitalism, nested in strongly skewed power relations, characterized by exclusionary and resource-degrading agency, which need taming. For others, it remains genuinely coherent with its original promise to be a ‘force for good’. This dichotomy is per se an eye-opener for critical reflections. Drawing on anthropology and critical geography literature and informed by longitudinal qualitative ethnographical research conducted in Barcelona between 2017 and 2024, this paper provides a set of critical reflections on the inconvenient truths about mass tourism, touristification and overtourism in the context of the current rising of anti-tourism activism in Southern European destinations. By offering a bird’s eye view on the well traversed debate, the purpose of this state of the art paper is to stimulate further critical considerations on the uneven dynamics of tourism capital accumulation, the deep-rooted inequalities associated with it and the effects of tourism excesses, with mass tourism being investigated as a phenomenon, touristification as a process and overtourism as a regime.