Protest and Resistance in the Tourist City

Tourism has become one of the main economic development resources and way of mobilizing the cultural, social and physical capital present in a city in many cities globally. The expansion and prioritization of the tourism sector in urban development strategies, and the material impacts of the growing tourism sector on urban space and on the life of urban residents, have generated new contestations of, and conflicts over, tourism development and the visitors’ economy in cities such as the negative effects which tourism is having on neighbourhoods, local communities and the urban environment.

This book for the first time looks at urban tourism as a source of contention and dispute and analyses what type of conflicts and contestations have emerged around urban tourism in cities of the Global North and South, and explores the various ways in which community groups, residents and other people and organizations have responded to – and challenged – tourism development in an international, comparative perspective. The title links the largely discrete yet interconnected disciplines of ‘urban studies’ and ‘tourism studies’ and adopts an international, comparative perspective to begin to account for the multiple and variegated struggles that have emerged in recent years. Drawing on two sets of literatures - one pertaining to urban social movements and contestations to neoliberal urbanism, the second to urban tourism and its connection with urban transformation and restructuring processes - the book develops a coherent and in depth discussion of developments in more than a dozen cities across Europe, North and South America and Asia.

This ground breaking volume offers new insight into the dark side of urban tourism and will be of interest to students, researchers and academics from the fields of tourism, geography, urban studies, development studies, anthropology and sociology.

Claire Colomb is Reader (Associate Professor) in Planning and Urban Sociology at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (UK), and holds a first degree in Politics and Sociology (Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, France) and a PhD in Planning (University College London). Her research interests cover urban and regional governance; planning and urban regeneration in European cities; urban social movements; European spatial planning and territorial cooperation; comparative planning. She is the author of Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention (Routledge 2011).

Johannes Novy is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Spatial Planning in the School of Planning and Geography at Cardiff University (UK). He studied urban planning and urban studies in Germany, Italy and the United States and holds a PhD in Urban Planning from Columbia University, New York. His research interests cover urban and planning theory, urban (development) politics, urban tourism and leisure consumption. He co-edited Searching for the Just City (Routledge 2009).