Special Issue "Neoliberal Cities: The Touristification Phenomenon under Analysis" (original) (raw)

The huge growth in international and domestic tourism exemplifies neoliberal politics, as it reflects the global deregulation of land, property, financial, and labour markets; yet, despite the fact that politics touches every aspect of tourism, there is very little work that has been done exploring the nature of this relationship. As a property-based sector, tourism depends upon financialisation to support large-scale investment in transport, accommodation, attractions, and in general urban facilities. In both poor and rich countries, it has developed through land grabs together with extensive liberalisation and privatisation, so that foreign capital may own assets, repatriate profits, uproot existing inhabitants, import labour, and employ it flexibly. At the same time, neoliberal politics has transformed social and political structures in order to create or extend spaces for urban tourism-spaces that are sometimes those colonised by the transnational elite. The process of touristification is particularly intense in the cities of advanced capitalism, especially in the postcrisis period of austerity, affirming tourism as a means of absorbing the huge quantities of capital thrown up by quantitative easing, much of which is directed towards property. Many ex-industrial cities that have taken to tourism have been subsequently opened to gentrification, which has become the ubiquitous solution to economic stagnation; yet, this hides a dark side in its reproduction of socio-spatial inequalities, particularly in the formation of the precariat.