New Urban Tourism – Short Trips 2021

The Urban Research Group New Urban Tourism is back! 
As the COVID-19 pandemic restricts physical travel, we invite you to join us for our digital Short Trips, a series of online talks at our imaginary pool bar. Changing guests will present their perspectives on urban tourism phenomena and current research findings. The first talk
“Touristification, social movements and creative professionals: Findings from Athens”
will be held by
Dr. Dimitris Pettas (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, TU Berlin) on
March 15, 2021, 6–7PM.

Join us for the discussion via zoom, please register at https://bit.ly/37IbIJx

Abstract: During the last few years, Athens has experienced a substantial increase in tourist inflows, while transforming from a one-day stop destination during summer to a year-round, city-break destination. This overall shift in the city’s touristic identity was driven by a series of trends and events that increased Athens’ popularity. The presentation explores the role of the aforementioned developments in the emergence of Athens as a city-break destination, along with processes of touristification, focusing on the central district of Exarcheia, where grassroots political activity and creativity co-exist in high densities. Due to the increased touristic traffic in the area, specific, often interrelated problematic conditions emerge concerning housing, residents’ everyday life and local businesses’ activity. At the same time, political groups and precarious creative professionals are facing substantial threats due to touristification.

Cheers, your Urban Research Group New Urban Tourism

Travel, Tourism & COVID-19

TRINET (Tourism Research Information Network) collects all relevant information for tourism science research that addresses the challenges and opportunities of the pandemic. Their website features a constantly updated collection of calls for papers, conference announcements, publications, relevant surveys, and funding opportunities. The challenges and opportunities of COVID-19 for new urban tourism also require further discussion and research.

You can find this collection here.

Annual John Urry Lecture 2020: Covid-19, Mobilities and Futures

This year’s annual John Urry Lecture will focus on the many impacts of Covid-19 on (im)mobilities:

What does a Mobilities lens have to offer to illuminate our current Covid-19 predicament? What issues, usually overlooked or neglected, does it bring to the fore, whether explanatory or normative? And what futures does it enable us to see or envision, for better or worse?

Institute for Social Futures

The panel discussion is organized as an online event hosted by Lancaster University’s Institute for Social Futures, Centre for Mobilities Research and Sociology Department. The three key speakers are:

• Professor Tim Cresswell (Edinburgh): How do we, might we, value mobility post COVID-19?
• Professor Mimi Sheller (Drexel): Contested visions of im/mobilities
• Professor Noel Salazar (KU Leuven): Essential vs. Existential Mobilities?

Questions of control, facilitation and restriction of (im)mobility affect tourism in general, and therefore also provide important insights into the future dynamics and development of new urban tourism.
You can find all info on this panel discussion here.

CfP Conceptualizing and decoding short-term rentals in times of digital capitalism

Call for Papers: RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, Cardiff (UK), 28-31 August 2018

Short-term rentals (STR) spark media attention, public debate and diverse reactions from city governments in response to what is often labelled as sharing economy, disruptive business model or new urban tourism. These categorizations hardly capture the dynamic phenomenon that is driven by and responds to urban tourists and other transient visitors and affects and transgresses different urban material and social sub-systems: housing market, public and private space and infrastructure. And while there is a pervasive sense that STR challenge everyday urban realities, urban planning and urban policies, broader theoretical explanations are still scarce.

This session seeks to find new conceptualizations that link STR with broader processes of urban transformation and restructuring. In particular, we are interested in theoretical as well as empirical papers that combine micro- and macro-level perspectives and provide a critical analysis of different dimensions of STR (e.g. policy agendas, gentrification, urban infrastructure, financialization) in different urban settings.

We invite contributions that discuss and address (although not limited to) the following broader topics:

• Uncovering STR and linking it to broader trends in urban political economy
• Exploring the driving actors (actor relations, actor coalitions) behind STR in European cities
• Research on urban contestations in relation to STR
• Single case and comparative studies that tackle the impact of STR on local housing markets of European cities and beyond
• Impact on urban infrastructure and public spaces
• Commodification of housing
• Interlacing with other forms of digital capitalism (wework etc.)

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words, along with a title, author(s), affiliation and contact details, both to Angela Hof (angela.hof@sbg.ac.at) and Christian Smigiel (christian.smigiel@sbg.ac.at) by Friday 9th February 2018.

The CfP can be found here.

CfP SHORT-TERM TOURISM RENTALS: OBSERVATION, REGULATIONS and LABOR RECONFIGURATIONS

EIREST, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University
Thursday March 15th 2018, 9:30 –17:30

The « digitalization » of a growing part of human activities is a major cause of change in the contemporary world. In particular, the power of digital technologies has radically changed the sector of intermediation activities, allowing international digital companies to match a demand and a supply scattered all over the world. The tourism sector, and particularly tourist accommodation industry, is at the forefront of this powerful movement of digitalization of intermediation activities, especially due to the expansion of companies such as Airbnb over the last decade. Indeed, the boom of digital economy, tightly bound to the one of the so-called sharing economy and of the peer-to-peer economic model, henceforth makes it very easy to connect individual people who have an underutilized property (whether it is a room or an entire home, whether it is temporary or not) with a highly spatially scattered tourism demand, through the use of digital platforms.

This workshop aims to explore the breadth of the changes induced by the development of these short- term rental digital platforms from an interdisciplinary perspective. It intends to go beyond the debate regarding the competition between this new form of tourist accommodation and more traditional types of stakeholders (hotels, hostels, guesthouses, etc.) which has already been covered by numerous papers. Beyond this issue, we aim to shed some light on the changes triggered by both the digital nature of this accommodation and its unseen flexibility and volatility, which challenge the definition of the “economic” sphere, the current regulation of economic activity and work, but also the methods used to measure it. Therefore, the workshop aims to analyse the breadth of these changes through (although not limited to) three entry points.

The full CfP can be found here.

Submissions: Please e-mail abstracts of up to 500 words to Anne-Cécile Mermet (anne- cecile.mermet@univ-paris1.fr) and Maria Gravari-Barbas (maria.gravari-barbas@univ-paris1.fr) by January 5th. Successful applicants will be contacted no later than January 31st.

Conference program and registration

Program and registration

Tourism and other forms of mobility have a stronger influence on the urban everyday life than ever before. Current debates indicate that this development inevitably entails conflicts between the various city users. The diverse discussions basically evolve around the intermingling of two categories traditionally treated as opposing in scientific research: ‘the everyday’ and ‘tourism’.
The international conference Touristified everyday life – mundane tourism: Current perspectives on urban tourism addresses the complex and changing entanglement of the city, the everyday and tourism. It is organized by the Urban Research Group ‘New Urban Tourism’ and will be held at the Georg Simmel-Center for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin.

May 11, 2017, 4:15 – 5:00pm
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, 10117 Berlin, Room 007
KEYNOTE – Prof. Dr. Jonas Larsen (Roskilde University): ‘Tourism and the Everyday Practices’ (KOSMOS-dialog series, entrance is free).

May 12, 2017, 9:00am – 6:00pm
Mohrenstraße 41, 10117 Berlin, Room 408 and 418c
PANELS – The Extraordinary Mundane, Encounters & Contact Zones, Urban (Tourism) Development (registration required).

See full conference programm HERE (pdf)

REGISTRATION

If you are interested in the panels you need to register. An attendance fee of 40 € will be charged to cover the expenses for the event. For students, trainees, unemployed, and the handicapped there is a reduced fee of 20 €.

For registration please fill out the Registration form (pdf) and send it back until April 20, 2017 to:

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Georg-Simmel-Zentrum für Metropolenforschung

Urban Research Group ’New Urban Tourism’

Natalie Stors & Christoph Sommer

Unter den Linden 6

10099 Berlin

You can also send us the form by email.

News: Conference Keynote and Panels

Our Call for Papers has received international attention and we got a large number of great submissions. We would like to thank everyone who has sent us their papers and drafts. Unfortunately we were not able to include all submissions. Nevertheless the selection process and the conference preparations have been finally completed; our conference will be held in English.

We are happy to announce that Prof. Dr. Jonas Larsen (Roskilde University, Denmark) will open the conference with a public lecture entitled Tourism and the Everyday Practices.
Moreover, we clustered the accepted submissions around three panels. Each of them is dealing with different aspects of the relationship between the everyday and tourism in regard to urban development. The Extraordinary Mundane examines different places, scenes and representations of the urban everyday. It explores their construction processes and their appeal for tourists and residents likewise. The rise of new urban tourism also requires a detailed analysis of related spaces and temporalities. In the panel Encounters & Contact Zones contributions discuss moments and spaces where tourists and locals meet such as the urban night or around a flat rented out on Airbnb. The third panel Urban (Tourism) Development puts the political dimension of the described dynamics and developments in the focus of attention. It discusses their consequences for urban development, particularly its connection to gentrification, and its influence on tourism and urban policy making.

An update with more information about the conference, its contributors and its location details will be posted in the next days.

Buchpräsentation: “Slumming It”

Am 02.02.2017 findet von 18-20:00 Uhr die Präsentation von Fabian Frenzels aktueller Monographie Slumming It – The Tourist Valorisation of Urban Poverty an der TU Berlin, HBS-1, Raum 6.06 (Hardenbergstraße 16-18) statt.

Hier der Link zum Flyer.

 

CfP AAG 2017

The complex geographies of inequality in contemporary slum tourism

CfP Association of American Geographers

Boston 5th to 9th April 2017

The visitation of areas of urban poverty is a growing phenomenon in global tourism (Burgold & Rolfes, 2013; Dürr & Jaffe, 2012; Freire-Medeiros, 2013; Frenzel, Koens, Steinbrink, & Rogerson, 2015). While it can be considered a standard tourism practise in some destinations, it remains a deeply controversial form of tourism that is greeted with much suspicion and scepticism (Freire-Medeiros, 2009). In the emerging research field of slum tourism, the practices are no longer only seen as a specific niche of tourism, but as empirical phenomena that bridge a number of interdisciplinary concerns, ranging from international development, political activism, mobility studies to urban regeneration (Frenzel, 2016).

In this session we aim to bring together research that casts the recent developments in slum tourism research. We aim specifically in advancing geographical research while retaining a broad interdisciplinary outlook.

Please sent your abstract or expressions of interest of now more than 300 words to Tore E.H.M Holst (tehh (at) ruc.dk) and Thomas Frisch (Thomas.Frisch (at) wiso.uni-hamburg.de) by October 15^th 2016.

For more information see: http://slumtourism.net/conference/cfp-aag-2017-the-complex-geographies-of-inequality-in-contemporary-slum-tourism/

 

A great variety of tourism related calls for papers are also avaialbe on the AAG Recreation,Tourism and Sport Specialty Group’s blog. See here for more details: https://aagrts.wordpress.com/call-for-papers/

Touristifizierter Alltag – Alltäglicher Tourismus: Neue Perspektiven auf das Stadttouristische

Call for Papers

Die Urban Research Group New Urban Tourism veranstaltet am 11. & 12. Mai 2017 eine Konferenz am Georg-Simmel-Zentrum für Metropolenforschung der HU Berlin zum Thema: Touristifizierter Alltag – Alltäglicher Tourismus: Neue Perspektiven auf das Stadttouristische. Dazu laden wir an dieser Stelle interessierte (Nachwuchs-)WissenschaftlerInnen zur Beitragseinreichung ein.

In Kürze finden Sie an dieser Stelle ebenfalls aktuelle Hinweise zur Konferenz!

Call for Papers (Deutsch)
Call for Papers (English)