Call for Book Chapters: The Power of New Urban Tourism: Markets, Representations and Contestations (deadline: 1 december 2019)

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

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?

The editors hope to advance the discussion on power relations, discourse and market domination 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.

The themes that might be of interest can be found in the extended call for book chapters.

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

Pascal Fort

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