Social Justice and the City

Purpose Although networked hospitality businesses as Airbnb are a recent phenomenon, a rapid growth has made them a serious competitor for the hospitality industry with important consequences for tourism and for tourist destinations. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the nature of the phenomenon, its potential further development in the next five years and the impact this developments will have on tourism, on hotels and on city destinations. Design/methodology/approach A literature study, combined with scenario workshops and a Delphi panel, were used to map current trends and uncertainties. With this input, future scenarios were elaborated using the Global Business Network (“scenario cross”) method. Findings Network platforms as Airbnb are often classified under something called the “Sharing Economy”, a denomination that obscures their true nature. Airbnb is a challenging innovation to which traditional hospitality will have to respond. Its impact has at the same time led to a call for regulatory po...

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Airbnb: the future of networked hospitality businesses

In this paper, I explore the impacts of holiday rentals in the historic centre of Barcelona. The intention is to contribute towards a conceptualisation of this unexplored phenomenon with the aim of...

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Holiday rentals: the new gentrification battlefront

Historic city centres of European cities are one of the most important elements of the European cultural heritage. They are places that attract many visitors due to their relevance in terms of heritage, but the recent growth of tourist flows constitutes a threat to the conservation of their values. In some European cities, such as Venice or Barcelona, the debate has taken to the streets, and there is significant social mobilization taking place, with very belligerent positions against tourism (anti-tourism, tourismphobia). The mass media also generates discourse on the topic and places the debate on urban tourism sustainability at the forefront of the public debate. In this context, this article reviews the state of the art on tourism impact and identifies, describes and evaluates the different dimensions of tourist pressure based on a case study: the historic centre of the city of Donostia-San Sebastian (Basque Country, Spain). The main goal of the research is to help determine how tourist pressure affects the safeguarding of “historic urban landscapes” and the desirable or desired models of city and tourist destination.

Cultural Heritage and Urban Tourism: Historic City Centres under Pressure

City of Quartz

Berlin is witnessing a massive tourism boom, and parts of it can be described as 'new urban tourism', which shows a preference for off the beaten track areas and 'authentic' experiences of the city. This form of tourism seems especially salient in Kreuzberg. It is here that an openly articulated critique of tourism attracted national attention in 2011 and has not ceased to do so since. This article aims to better understand the conflictive potential of (new urban) tourism in Kreuzberg. We argue that the readily expressed negative attitudes against tourists and the easily accepted link between tourism and gentrification have to be explained against the backdrop of certain housing-market dynamics. Rising rents and a diminution in the number of flats available for rent are fuelling fears of gentrification in Kreuzberg, while the interest shown in new urban tourism and the comparatively low-priced real-estate market in Berlin result in a growing number of holiday flats. Although adding only slightly to the tightening of the housing market, holiday flats render complex processes of neighborhood change visible and further sustain an already prevalent tourism critique.

‘Stop Being a Tourist!’ New Dynamics of Urban Tourism in Berlin-Kreuzberg

Our paper addresses the complex role of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in current processes of inner-city restructuring and the function of BIDs in the implementation of new forms of social ...

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Spillover of the private city: BIDs as a pivot of social control in downtown Los Angeles

Inner-city living is a hot topic in Germany. Policy-makers long for new middle- and upper-class residents; evidence of urban in-flight has been documented by scholars, and debates on reurbanisation are in full swing. This trend has also led to the emergence of a new housing product in German metropolises: high-priced, centrally located and newly built apartment and townhouse developments. In this paper, these luxury developments are analysed as part of a general process of urban restructuring and a focus is on the contradictions inherent to the idea of urbanity taking shape here. Guided by Foucault’s governmentality approach, new luxury developments are understood as a powerful reworking of how the city, its uses and users are imagined and governed. In doing so, the paper aims to show that the concept of governmentality enables a critique of current processes of urban restructuring that may enrich the on-going debates on gentrification.

Shaping the Urban Renaissance: New-build Luxury Developments in Berlin:

Die Sicherstellung von Urbanität : innerstädtische Restrukturierung und soziale Kontrolle in Downtown Los Angeles

Contemporary infectious disease surveillance systems aim to employ the speed and scope of big data in an attempt to provide global health security. Both shifts - the perception of health problems through the framework of global health security and the corresponding technological approaches - imply epistemological changes, methodological ambivalences as well as manifold societal effects. Bringing current findings from social sciences and public health praxis into a dialogue, this conversation style contribution points out several broader implications of changing disease surveillance. The conversation covers epidemiological issues such as the shift from expert knowledge to algorithmic knowledge, the securitization of global health, and the construction of new kinds of threats. Those developments are detailed and discussed in their impacts for health provision in a broader sense.

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Henning Füller

Papers

‘Stop Being a Tourist!’ New Dynamics of Urban Tourism in Berlin-Kreuzberg

Spillover of the private city: BIDs as a pivot of social control in downtown Los Angeles

Shaping the Urban Renaissance: New-build Luxury Developments in Berlin:

Die Sicherstellung von Urbanität : innerstädtische Restrukturierung und soziale Kontrolle in Downtown Los Angeles

Digital epidemiology and global health security; an interdisciplinary conversation