Last month, the municipal government of Florence announced a series of measures to mitigate the effects of tourism on the quality of life of local residents. The measures included bans on lockboxes outside apartment buildings in the city center, loudspeakers used by tour guides, and irregular vehicles like rickshaws and golf carts. It was just the latest in a continent-wide backlash against “overtourism.” Over the summer, anti-tourism protests took place in Greece, the Netherlands, and Spain. Various locales have responded with tourism taxes, crackdowns on short-term rentals, and proposed caps on the number of visitors.
The problem with such measures, and with the surging anti-tourism movement, is that they treat tourism as a mere inconvenience, and thus fail to recognize it for what it is: an industry.
As the popularity of the term “overtourism” makes clear, we underestimate the tourism sector. We don’t speak of “overchemistry,” even though the chemical industry has far more harmful effects. That is because we imagine tourism can be done without, while chemicals cannot. But without tourism, hotels, restaurants, and other industries tied to hospitality would collapse, airlines would also vanish, the automotive industry would be decimated, the building of cruise ships would disappear, and construction would take a massive blow. These declines would have knock-on effects on the production of steel, cement, and electronics.
We think we can cheaply disregard tourism because of an error in perspective. We conflate tourism with tourists, who are hard to take seriously for their silly, out-of-place appearance. We regard them as a mere nuisance and blame them for the damages brought about by tourism—roughly equivalent to blaming industrial workers for air and water pollution.
“We are all tourists who despise tourists.”
The paradox is that we are all tourists who despise tourists. When we go somewhere, we believe that we are mere travelers. For travelers to become tourists, they must become a mass of traveling people, and no one wants to admit to being part of the crowd. Our contempt for tourists—even though we also are all tourists—reveals our refusal to see ourselves as part of the masses. This paradox points to an unresolved conflict in our relationship to tourism.
The birth of tourism depended on technological revolutions in transportation and communication, which made traveling fast and affordable, but also on a social revolution. As I’ve written in my book The World in a Selfie, this social revolution didn’t fall from the sky. It was the result of two centuries of struggle for paid time off from work. Free time alone is not enough to make a human being a tourist: The unemployed have plenty of it, but lack the financial means to become tourists. Never in history before Bismarck in Germany, the New Deal in the United States, and the Popular Front in France, had large numbers of people earned any income during their time off, which is to say that few people of working age enjoyed vacations or a pension. Today, at least 95 percent of adults we see on tourist trips are either on paid vacation or are making use of retirement income.
These revolutions have transformed our lives but our mental categories. They have made the ability to travel fundamental to our concept of what it means to be free. Before the pandemic, we didn’t realize this, but to take away citizens’ right to be tourists is to deprive them of a fundamental freedom.
Here we fall into a second contradiction. While tourism is an indispensable component of our freedom, it is also a doubly polluting industry. As an industry upon which so many others depend, tourism contributes heavily to the pollution generated by other sectors, including automotive, aviation, construction, and steel production. At the same time, it produces “human pollution”: the transformation of urban centers into uninhabitable spaces, the “Disneyland-ification” of the world, the disfigurement of ecosystems.
Our conception of freedom, in other words, is devouring the world. This is why it feels impossible for us to do without tourism, but also difficult to coexist with it.
The drastic limitation of tourism would require drastic measures.
The first possible measure would involve curtailing the freedom of movement—in effect, freedom tout court. This is what occurred during the Covid lockdowns of 2020, and was also once common in the countries of “really existing socialism.” But who among us, if given the choice, would accept this?
The second method would involve making travel much more expensive. The result would be to make tourism a luxury good affordable only to the wealthy, taking us back to the era of grand tours, when only aristocrats were tourists. In this regressive scenario, tourism would become what the right to vote once was: something available only to citizens above a certain income.
The third option would be the elimination of paid leisure time. In fact, this seems to be the direction in which many Western societies are already headed, as they generate more and more jobs with minimal or no benefits. The disappearance of pensions and paid vacations would kill off tourism, reverting it to a privilege for the affluent. In addition to the gradual decline of wages relative to inflation and the stagnation (if not reduction) of middle-class purchasing power, we may well see a significant shift in economic regimes, from mass consumption to luxury consumption.
Clearly, severe restrictions on tourism would be highly painful. So why does “overtourism” arouse the strongest hostility in places that have made concerted efforts to attract tourists, and for which tourism is an indispensable source of revenue? The explanation is that tourism generates asymmetric profits, mainly enriching those who live outside of tourist destinations while adversely affecting their residents. When places become tourist destinations, essential services for residents are supplanted by those catering to visitors: Hardware and shoe-repair stores shut down, while sandwich and souvenir shops open in their place. Moreover, heavily touristed areas witness surges in real estate prices and consequently in rents.
Tourism is what keeps many Greek islands from being abandoned to the goats. And yet the wages of elementary-school teachers aren’t enough to cover rent for decent housing on heavily touristed islands. For the same reason, many city centers are also emptying out, with families in need of more spacious—and thus unaffordable—housing being the first to go, resulting in school closures, which increase the scale of the exodus.
Between the abolition of tourism and the passive acceptance of its destructive, polluting effects lies a “reformist”—although even more revolutionary—path. If tourism is indeed an industry, then “tourism policy” is necessary, just as is industrial policy for other industries. Until now, departments of tourism on the regional and municipal levels and ministries of tourism on the national level have functioned primarily as tourism promotion agencies, with the sole aim of attracting as many tourists as possible without attempting to govern the influx.
Measures have been proposed to rationalize tourism, to make it less unsustainable (“sustainable tourism” is as much an oxymoron as “sustainable chemistry”). But there is still no “politics of tourism”; better put, tourism has never been confronted as a political problem. It is no accident that tourism has metastasized in the neoliberal era, during which a range of economic questions were placed outside the realm of democratic deliberation.
The problem with tourist destinations isn’t that they are touristy, but that they are only touristy. It is monotourism that kills cities and buries entire regions. Some anti-tourism measures risk exacerbating this problem. For instance, requiring an entrance ticket to a city like Venice does nothing more than cement its status as a theme park or open-air museum. Conversely, the regulation of AirBnB in cities like Amsterdam and Berlin, or similar measures to reserve housing for local residents on Greek islands, at least attempts, however inadequate, to prevent the consolidation of a tourism monoculture.
Such policies are not enough. A true tourism policy would need to foster the growth of other economic activities to dilute the impact of tourism, to ensure it doesn’t destroy the resources on which it depends. But such a politics of tourism would be revolutionary in itself, because it would need to reverse the depoliticization brought about by decades of neoliberalism.
Translated from the Italian by Stephen G. Adubato.