Contribution short abstract

The interconnected struggles and the organisation of numerous meetings to discuss the impacts of touristification in Barcelona have consolidated an ecosystem of actors and recentred the debate from tourism to city issues, transcending tourism and amplifying spaces of hope and transformation.

Contribution long abstract

Barcelona has been for the last decade a paradigmatic example of resistance to tourism, as well as of attempts from the local administration to manage its impacts. These grassroots movements have, over time, woven networks that transcend tourism itself. In this way, the boundaries between struggles against touristification, the fight for housing, and the defence of air quality or public resources have become increasingly blurred, with these synergies paradoxically facilitated by local authorities in their attempts to manage tourism. Numerous meetings, and even the creation of participatory bodies such as Consell Turisme i Ciutat, have gradually consolidated an ecosystem of actors somehow connected to tourism in Barcelona. Despite divergences, the normalized rapprochement between various actors nurtures an opportunity for hope, which can be understood as “a way of processing new emotional ecologies that constitute the possibility of living in other worlds” (Scribano, 2023:15). We propose slightly shifting the debate on the necessary management of tourism mobilities and practices—on which disagreements may sometimes seem insurmountable—towards domains that go beyond tourism itself: the city as the commonplace. This slight deviation, within a context where a network of organized movements exists, provides a renewed framework for understanding the city's issues, in which tourism plays a part, while amplifying spaces of hope and transformation (Fletcher et al.,2021) both in and beyond tourism.

Fletcher, Robert, et al. (2021). Pathways to post-capitalist tourism. Tourism Geographies, 25(2–3), 707–728. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2021.1965202

Scribano, Adrián (2023). Hacia una geometría teórica de la sociología de la esperanza. Boletín Onteaiken, (36), 1–17.