Contagious Cities: Facing and Understanding the Pandemic (Webinar)

Image credit: CC BY Dale Crosby Close (https://dribbble.com/Dales)

The Covid-19 pandemic has and will continue to transform all aspects of our lives. Tourism and mobilities are among the areas which will be affected tremendously. On Thursday, April 30, the Cultural Research Network offers a very interesting global webinar on this issue. Contagious Cities: Facing and Understanding the Pandemic will tackle questions like:

Are we ready to face the global challenge of Covid-19 pandemic outbreak?

Do we know how microbes, migration and metropolises cohabitate or relate to each other?

Can we tap into the artistic and cultural creativity to better understand the global infectious diseases or even investigate how they travel across urban and human borders?

The webinar will raise and discuss these questions in a live conversation with artists, curators, researchers and cultural producers of the Contagious Cities, an international cultural project developed by Wellcome Trust in 2018 to mark the centenary of the 1918 flu pandemic.

The webinar will share important insights from the Contagious Cities project, that brought together international curators, artists and scientists through residences across New York, Hong Kong and Geneva to explore how epidemics spread in urban environments.

The webinar will be available via zoom. To register please visit here: https://contagious-cities.eventbrite.com

Date & Time: April 30, 2020 2:30 PM (Berlin time)

Panelists:
Ken Arnold – Creative Director at Wellcome (London, UK)
Sarah Henry – Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the Museum of the City of New York (New York, USA)
Ying Kwok  – Curator of Contagious Cities: Far Away, Too Close at Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, China)
Matt Adams – Co-founder of Blast Theory (London, UK)
James Doeser – Freelance cultural researcher (London, UK)

Moderator: Natalia Grincheva

Updated blog

Our blog is updated – we edited the research group’s self-description and added the section “literature” where you can browse relevant publications addressing various aspects of new urban tourism.
Have fun going through new and modified sections!

Call for Book Chapters

The Power of New Urban Tourism: Markets, Representations and Contestations

Sybille Frank, Claudia Jürgens, Claus Müller, Anna Laura Raschke, Kristin Wellner

Topic and Objective of the Book

Since urban space is represented as an assemblage of important sights, buzzing atmospheres, distinctive local cultures and (imagined) ways of life attached to it, tourists are visiting cities in growing numbers. Recently, advertising slogans such as “live like a local” and the notion of staying in “homes” rather than in hotel rooms or holiday apartments have increasingly shifted the attention of urban tourists from sightseeing to life-seeing and life-sharing. The marketing campaigns transport the idea of embedding oneself in a residential neighborhood in order to at least temporarily attain the status of a local while traveling.

This New Urban Tourism (Maitland 2007) – a new variant of tourism that turns residential neighborhoods into tourist destinations – furthers the need of inhabitants to deal with these ever new, transient neighbors and raises questions of how to integrate them into their own notions of locals, non-locals and tourists. It also challenges the everyday life in urban neighborhoods as the routines of locals and tourists and their respective usage of public and private spaces might differ, if not clash. Touristification of everyday life, evolving usage practices of urban spaces, changing lifestyles and altering inhabitants may blur the line between distinguishable groups of users of certain spaces and expedite changes in neighborhoods and cities.

This book seeks to bring together theoretical and empirical research from different disciplines on how (and which) representations of people and places attract tourists to residential neighborhoods. How do local communities contest both these powerful representations, as well as the impact of New Urban Tourism on their neighborhoods? How is the housing market and the use of space influenced by new tourist demands?

We hope to advance the discussion on power relations, discourse and market power in housing and tourism, contested meaning-making, urban and touristic practices, and the politics of representation in the internationally rising research field of New Urban Tourism. We look for contributions that address but are not limited to one of the following themes:

Theories of New Urban Tourism

• Theoretic reflections and discourses on New Urban Tourism
• Relations between New Urban Tourism and other forms of mobilities
• Postcolonial perspectives on New Urban Tourism

New Urban Tourism and Housing Market

• Effects on rental and real estate markets and business models
• Economic impact of peer-to-peer platforms such as Airbnb
• Effects on traditional tourism markets and tourism infrastructures
• Quality of life and quality of housing in urban tourist destinations
• Its impact on work and service industries

New Urban Tourism and Contestations

• Power relations that New Urban Tourism challenges or entails
• Conflicts between tourists and residents in residential neighborhoods
• ‘Touristification’ of everyday life in cities and tourist practices
• Xenophobia and protests against tourists

Representations of New Urban Tourism

• New Urban Tourists, their lifestyles and their travel preferences
• Media representations of residential neighborhoods for and by travelers
• Representations of tourists and the construction of the local
• Identity constructions and mechanisms of (in)- and (ex)clusion
• Representations of New Urban Tourism as vehicle for cosmopolitanism

 

Target Audience

The book will be of interest to academic audiences seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the social, economic, political and cultural effects of New Urban Tourism on cities and on urban quality of life in different regions of the world. It will also be useful to professionals involved in governing, planning, designing and transforming (new) urban tourism. The book will also be relevant for undergraduate, Masters and PhD students engaging in analyses of contemporary tourism.

 

Type of Contributions and Submission Procedure

As we aim for an interdisciplinary understanding of complex developments around New Urban Tourism, we welcome chapter proposals from different disciplines. These may be urban studies, architecture, urban planning, ethnology, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, human geography, economics, history, political sciences, and others. We look both for empirical and theoretical chapters and especially seek for contributions those reflecting on cases of New Urban Tourism in cities of South America, Arabia, Africa, Asia and Australia. We nonetheless welcome chapters on New Urban Tourism in European and North American cities.

Please send your abstract of no more than 300 words to Anna Laura Raschke (raschke@ifs.tu-darmstadt.de) by December 1, 2019.

 

Submission deadlines

1 December 2019
An abstract of up to 300 words is to be submitted to raschke@ifs.tu-darmstadt.de.

1 January 2020
Editors will select chapters based on the following criteria: relevance to the theme and goal of the book, originality of the contribution, theoretical rigour and quality of the empirical material. Authors of all submitted abstracts will be informed about the editorial decision via email.

29 February 2020
First draft of individual chapters to be submitted to the editors by email. Chapters need to be 6-8,000 words in length and written in English. Authors of chapters are responsible for the language editing.

30 June 2020
Feedback on the first review of chapters.

31 August 2020
Second draft of individual chapters to be submitted to the editors by email.

31 October 2020
Feedback on the second review of chapters.

30 November 2020
Final editing of chapters and book submission.

June 2021
Book publication.

 

Editors’ Details

Professor Dr. Sybille Frank, TU Darmstadt, Institute for Sociology, frank@ifs.tu-darmstadt.de

Claudia Jürgens, TU Berlin, Institute of Architecture, juergens.claudia@tu-berlin.de

Claus Müller, TU Berlin, Institute of Architecture, claus.mueller@tu-berlin.de

Dr. Anna Laura Raschke, TU Darmstadt, Institute for Sociology, raschke@ifs.tu-darmstadt.de

Professor Dr. Kristin Wellner, TU Berlin, Institute of Architecture, kristin.wellner@tu-berlin.de

 

Reference

Maitland, Robert (2007): Tourists, the creative class and distinctive areas in major cities. The roles of visitors and residents in developing new tourism areas. In: Greg Richards, Julie Wilson (Eds.): Tourism, creativity and development. London: Routledge (Contemporary geographies of leisure, tourism, and mobility), pp. 73–86.

Conference proceeding published

We are proud to announce the recent publication of the conference proceeding “Touristifizierung urbaner Räume?” edited by Tim Freytag and Andreas Kagermeier.

The joint conference organized by AK Tourismusforschung and AK Stadtzukünfte took place May, 22^nd till 24^th 2019 in Freiburg, Germany and dealt with urban transformations caused by tourism. The resulting conference proceeding contains selected talks that investigate the interrelatedness of tourism and urban change from various research perspectives, as the table of contents illustrates:

Entwicklungslinien und Perspektiven der New Urban Tourism-Forschung
Christoph Sommer, Luise Stoltenberg, Thomas Frisch & Natalie Stors

Ist der New Urban Tourist ein Choraster?
Anja Saretzki

Städtische Quartiere in der Tourismusfalle? Zur Wahrnehmung von Tourismus und Airbnb in Berlin – Ein Werkstattbericht
Claus Müller, Anna Laura Raschke, Stefan Brandt, Sybille Frank & Kristin Wellner

Touristifizierung „stadtverträglich“ machen. Neue Ansätze in der Berliner Tourismuspolitik
Nils Grube

Coworking im Kontext urbaner Räume. Problemzentrierte Einblicke aus diversitätsspezifischer, destinationsspezifischer und stadtplanerischer Perspektive
Nicolai Scherle & Markus Pillmayer

Der tourismuspolitische Handlungsrahmen urbaner Transformationsprozesse
Franziska Thiele & Nina Martha Dembowski

Tourismusberatung als Transformationsgenerator städtischer Räume – zu einer Geographie des Wissens
Karlheinz Wöhler

For more information please have a look at:
https://www.ak-tourismusforschung.org/de/category/sft/

Urban Political Episodes on “Reclaiming the Tourist City”

Reclaiming the Tourist City at world-famous Checkpoint Charlie? Two episodes of the new Urban Political Podcast (on Urban Theory, Research and Action) are dealing with this very question. Amongst an architect, politicians and a building historian, Christoph Sommer from our Urban Research Group contributed his point of view.

Part 1 is about Heritage Preservation and Urban Development at Checkpoint Charlie. Much-visited by tourists and generally avoided by Berliners, the site has faced growing conflict over plans to develop a hotel, Hard Rock Cafe and museum. This first part details the historical importance of the empty plots at the former Cold War border crossing and reflects on wider debates about heritage, tourism and urban development.Find out why urban emptiness can have heritage value.

Part 2 is about Regaining Democratic Control in the course of the redevelopment of this must see. This episode examines the extent to which democratic control has been exerted in the Checkpoint Charlie case and how development plans have been modified under increased pressure from societal groups. Listen to hear about the possibilities of contesting tourist-centred developments in inner cities and why activists should never automatically trust a leftwing government.

 

CfP: THE POWER OF TOURISM: CONTESTED REPRESENTATIONS OF PEOPLE AND PLACES

The Research Committee on International Tourism (RC50) of the International Sociological Association is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for RC50 interim Conference 2020.

The conference will carry on the recent traditions of multi-, trans-, and postdisciplinary avenues to national and international tourism.
The committee would like to extend a welcome to all researchers working in any area of the sociology of tourism, regardless of whether you are a current member of the ISA. Themes of the sessions are outlined below but there is also an open session to presentations not related to these issues.

Abstract Submission
An abstract between 300 to 500 words (excluding references) should be submitted to be presented at one of the sessions below. The abstract should include, session number and name, an indication of the research aim, the (inter)disciplinary approach taken, the methods used and the key (expected) findings. The abstract should be submitted as a MS Word document to both Erdinç Çakmak Cakmak.e@buas.nl and Rami K. Isaac Isaac.r@buas.nl.

Key Dates
Deadline for abstract submission:
Monday 1st September 2019
Notification of acceptance: until Monday 16th September 2019
Early Bird Registration Deadline: Sunday 1st December 2019

The sessions will cover the following topics:
…

7. “The Power of New Urban Tourism: Representations and Contestations” chaired by Sybille Frank & Anna Laura Raschke

…

 

There will also be also open sessions (for interesting papers submitted but not under one of the themes above).

Full details of the conference sessions are available at the RC50 website https://www.rc50tourism.org/services

 

 

New edited volume: Tourism and Everyday Life in the Contemporary City

For several years, urban research has been pointing out the tense relationship between urban everyday life and tourism. “Overtourism”, “tourismphobia”, and “sustainable urban tourism” are some of the keywords which characterize the on-going debate. Since 2015, the Urban Research Group: New Urban Tourism, which is based at the Georg-Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies, focuses not only on potential risks of urban tourism but aims at stimulating a fundamental discussion about city tourism per se.

In order to pursue this goal, the group has organized an international conference which took place in May 2017 at the GSZ. Four members of the young research group have edited the volume Tourism and Everyday Life in the Contemporary City which will be published in February by Routledge.

Throughout eleven chapters, the volume studies the manifold dimensions of the complex entanglement of city tourism and urban everyday life. It gathers the diverse phenomena of city tourism under the term new urban tourism. This kind of tourism is characterised by three dimensions: the extraordinary mundane which recognizes the recent appeal of ordinary life in urban tourism; encounters and contact zones which takes into account the new possibilities of connecting different city users with each other; and urban co-production which stands for the heterogeneous actors who jointly shape urban everyday life.
Each chapter focuses on distinct aspects of these three dimensions and the volume includes different academic disciplines. Covered subjects vary from the discussion of consequences of ‘touristified’ neighbourhoods to a critical study of the phenomenological concept of dwelling; from the influence of short-term accommodation rental services on urban everyday life to the production of hangout commons in Berlin.

For more information and pre-order please visit Routledge.

CfP: Hopes and Troubles of New Urban Tourism

RGS-IBG Conference 2019, London, UK, 28-30th August 2019

Session convenors: Sybille Frank (TU Darmstadt); Kristin Wellner (TU Berlin); Anna Laura Raschke (TU Darmstadt); Stefan Brandt (TU Berlin); Claus Müller (TU Berlin)

Cities have been tourism destinations for a long time, but tourists’ use of the urban space has changed in recent years. More often than before, the classic sights and “tourist traps” are avoided by urban travellers in favour of a more “local” and “authentic” mode of travel. Thus, the (imagined) way of life in cities and certain neighbourhoods (e.g. Williamsburg, Kreuzberg, Camden, Gangnam) has become a tourist destination in itself. “New urban tourists” are seeking to be embedded in urban day-to-day-living. They want to “live like a local”, as a successful apartment-sharing platform advertises. To live locally, new urban tourists rent residential apartments offered for short breaks, rather than hotel rooms, and thus compete with residents for the use of urban spaces, such as flats, cafés, restaurants, parks and sidewalks. At the same time, they do not only bring revenue to often disenfranchised parts of the city but also increase the opportunity for contact and inter-cultural encounters. City tourism is even lauded as an important “driver of global economic growth and development” by the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO, 2012).

In light of these hopes and troubles that are connected with such trends in touristic use of urban spaces we welcome theoretical or empirical papers that deal with, but are not limited to, questions such as:

• What are the impacts of new urban tourism on cities and neighbourhoods?
• What are the hopes and fears that are connected with new urban tourism, and whose hopes and fears are they?
• Do urban spaces in residential neighbourhoods become contested by potential or factual conflicts of interest between residents and urban tourists, and what interests do these conflicts uncover?
• How can tourism marketing and regulatory bodies manage travel routes, informal holiday rentals and tourists’ use of urban spaces?
• How do disenfranchised neighbourhoods change due to new investments in tourist hotspots?
• How do digital representations, social media and peer-to-peer instead of business-to-consumer models of travel planning change urban landscapes?
• How can new urban tourism be conceptualized theoretically, to which general social trends can it be linked?
• Considering that the traditional differentiation between residents and tourists gets blurred in times of growing mobilities, how can we address different forms of mobilities in a more adequate way?

Please send your abstracts of no more than 250 words to Claus Müller (claus.mueller@tu-berlin) by 10th February 2019 and include your affiliation and contact details.

We look forward hearing from you.

CfP: Touristifizierung urbaner Räume

Der AK Tourismusforschung und der AK Stadtzukünfte laden zu einer gemeinsamen Tagung vom 22. bis 24. Mai 2019 zum Thema “Touristifizierung urbaner Räume” in Freiburg ein.

Hier der Call for Papers:

Eine zunehmende Bedeutung des Tourismus erfasst seit einigen Jahren zahlreiche Großstädte und wird dort in Zusammenhang mit der Transformation urbaner Räume wirksam. Während zunächst vorwiegend die innerstädtischen Bereiche von dieser Entwicklung betroffen waren, richtet sich die fortschreitende Touristifizierung nunmehr verstärkt auch auf Wohnquartiere abseits der klassischen touristischen Sehenswürdigkeiten. Dies führt zu vielfältigen neuen Erscheinungsformen des Tourismus, die in ihrer Summe als New Urban Tourism bezeichnet werden können. Ein infolge des ansteigenden Tourismusaufkommens erhöhter Nutzungsdruck wird indessen mit dem Schlagwort des Overtourism in Verbindung gebracht. Für die lokale Bevölkerung und die Reisenden kann eine derart starke Touristifizierung mit erheblichen Belastungen verbunden sein. Die Frage, wie mit dem Tourismusaufkommen umzugehen ist, zählt zu den aktuellen Herausforderungen angesichts von urbanen Transformationsprozessen.

Vor diesem Hintergrund laden der AK Tourismusforschung und der AK Stadtzukünfte zu einer gemeinsamen Tagung ein. Die Veranstaltung dient der Präsentation und Diskussion von ca. 15-minütigen Beiträgen aus der Stadt- und Tourismusforschung. Sie soll den wechselseitigen Austausch aus dem Blickwinkel unterschiedlicher fachwissenschaftlicher Perspektiven anregen und wendet sich zugleich an interessierte Expertinnen und Experten aus der Praxis. Die Tagung wird am 22. Mai 2019 mit einem frühabendlichen Festvortrag in Freiburg beginnen und wird voraussichtlich am 24. Mai 2019 in der Mittagszeit enden.

Bitte senden Sie uns Ihre Vortragsangebote bis zum 10. Januar 2019 in Form eines kurzen Abstracts (max. 1 Seite) samt Ihrer Kontaktdaten per E-Mail an:

tagung-touristifizierung-2019@web.de

 

Organisation vor Ort:
Prof. Dr. Tim Freytag (E-Mail: tim.freytag@geographie.uni-freiburg.de)

AK Tourismusforschung:
Prof. Dr. Hans Hopfinger (E-Mail: hans.hopfinger@gmx.de)

AK Stadtzukünfte:
Prof. Dr. Claus-C. Wiegandt (E-Mail: wiegandt@uni-bonn.de);
Prof. Dr. Ludger Basten (E-Mail: ludger.basten@tu-dortmund.de);
Prof. Dr. Uta Hohn (E-Mail: uta.hohn@rub.de)

CfP: Short-term rentals as a new urban frontier

Call for papers for session proposal: Short-term rentals as a new urban frontier
AAG 2019: American Association of Geographers’ Annual Meeting
3-7 April 2019
Washington, USA 

Convenors:
Angela Hof, University of Salzburg, Austria
Ismael Yrigoy, Uppsala University, Sweden

 

Short-term rentals as a new urban frontier

The disruptive powers of platform economy and short term rentals have drawn research attention on the changes and challenges to urban planning, urban everyday life and practices and urban political economy in cities. Short-term rentals are said to be contributing, amongst other aspects, to tourism commodification of cities; resident displacement, gentrification, and shifts in urban tourism patterns (Cócola Gant, 2016; Wachsmuth and Weisler, 2018; Spangler, 2018).

Even if emerging literature in critical geography has firmly grounded its claims in Neil Smith´s rent gap and gentrification theories, there are still aspects that so far have received relatively little systematic attention and analysis. We are missing approaches that conceptually relate short term rental platforms (such as Airbnb) to host professionalization, urban financialization, and to new forms of rent-extracting practices in housing. Moreover, innovative and different methods and data sources to approach short-term rentals deserve more attention. Engaging with different quantitative and qualitative techniques may reveal new dimensions of STRs phenomenon and further contribute to connect STRs socio-spatial patterns with multi-scalar urban dynamics and urban political economy.

We invite papers that critically examine how short-term rentals are impacting on housing, tourism, urban planning practices, local communities, or labor markets in different city contexts. We especially encourage submissions that shed light on broader conceptual discussions about finance and land rents and on empirical methods to assess the impacts of STRs. This paper session aims therefore to gather conceptually and/or empirically informed papers that contribute to fill those research gaps and to better theorize about the aforementioned emerging topics.

PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACT (250 words) to Angela Hof (angela.hof@sbg.ac.at) or Ismael Yrigoy (ismael.yrigoy@kultgeog.uu.se) BY 31 OCTOBER 2018 so that we can include your abstract in our session organization.