Tourism and Everyday Life in the Contemporary City

Citation

Lever, M.W. (2024), "Tourism and Everyday Life in the Contemporary City", International Journal of Tourism Cities, Vol. 10 No. 3, pp. 1175-1178. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJTC-08-2024-303

The line between tourists and locals continues to blur as those visiting a place seek more meaningful and authentic experiences, and those who live there want new opportunities to explore their home from a unique lens. Tourism and Everyday Life in the Contemporary City examines this entangling by adapting Roche’s (1992) new urban tourism as its analytical framework within the unique context of urban tourism and city life. Edited by Thomas Frisch, Christoph Sommer, Luise Stoltenberg and Natalie Stors, this book provides answers to many important questions regarding key dimensions of urban tourism research, including observations on the mundane yet extraordinary urban everyday situations, encounters and contact zones that connect locals and tourists, and the role of urban co-production that witnesses the evolution of tourists from passive consumers to active producers.

Exploring everyday urban life from a tourism perspective allows academics interested in this field to see how it has been empirically and theoretically conceptualized. This book is particularly suitable for tourism researchers seeking a foundational knowledge of contemporary city life, given its inclusion of seminal works by highly cited tourism authors, including Urry, Ashworth, Cohen, Edensor, Larsen and many others. Furthermore, this book would be a valuable resource for instructors at the undergraduate and graduate level in a tourism management program who want to bring a timely discussion to their classrooms on the fundamental changes regarding key concepts regarding a changing tourism landscape.

The reviewer found the book’s organization highly effective and easy to follow throughout. The book opens with a solid introduction to the topic, including its overall aim, objectives, conceptual development, limitations and assumptions. For instance, the authors discuss four interrelated aspects that connect urban tourism to city life, including the subtle yet pervasive way urban tourism affects cities, the interchangeability between everyday urban life and tourist interest, the touristic components of living in a city as a resident and the influence of technology on these interrelationships. In this introductory chapter, the authors also provide an excellent summary of the contents of each chapter which they curated from various authors to include in this book.

Beyond the Introduction, the remaining ten chapters of the book provide multiple interdisciplinary approaches across various methods, findings and implications as supplied by each chapter’s author. Chapter 2 is titled Ordinary tourism and extraordinary everyday life: Rethinking tourism and cities by Jonas Larsen, who provides three vignettes to highlight the amusing contradiction that often, tourism can be strikingly ordinary, while daily life can often feel extraordinary. In Chapter 3, written by Mathis Stock and titled Inhabiting the city as tourists, the author considers the relationship between touristic and urbanized places by exploring the conflicting ways tourists inhabit cities. For instance, the author points to the paradox of tourists escaping densely populated cities but only ending up in densely populated coastal resorts instead. His conclusions support the development of a framework that integrates urban and tourism theory, allowing for new concepts such as touristic urbanity and urban values of tourism.

The fourth chapter, titled Tourist valorization and urban development and written by Fabian Frenzel, discusses the gentrification of urban spaces as a direct result of increased leisure activities and how that has impacted residents. Examples include the increase in real estate costs caused by the increasing popularity of short-term rental services, as well as an increase in noise levels. Each of these issues can be connected to a city’s attractiveness to potential visitors, with the author reaffirming that tourists are not passively consuming a place but actively co-creating and co-producing it. As tourists seek more authentic and culturally significant travel experiences, they become intertwined with that community’s urban commons. This view of tourists impacting previously uninhabited spaces continues into Chapter 5, Escaping the global city? by Jessica Parish. Drawing from one of the book’s central themes of de-differentiation, the author coins the term ‘new wellness tourism,’ a process of gentrification focusing on new and re-emergent forms of health and self-care like Pilates or acupuncture. The reviewer was intrigued by the author’s approach to examining how these increasing alternative medicine trends have impacted a hip and primarily white neighbourhood in Toronto, Canada. Specifically, a combination of interviews, archival research and discourse analysis was used to explore these establishments’ impact on the Roncesvalles neighbourhood. The writing in this chapter was so descriptive that one could imagine walking down Queen Street and recognizing the stark juxtaposition of a typical grocery store next to a neo-Oriental wellness spa, creating a sense of pseudo-escape from the city despite still being physically there.

In Chapter 6 by Natalie Stors, titled Living with guests: Understanding the reasons for hosting via Airbnb in a mobile society, the reviewer felt that the thread woven throughout the book’s first few chapters was not quite as salient. Although the chapter’s content was compelling, which provided the host’s perspective regarding their motivations for offering short-term accommodation rentals, one could not help but feel that this chapter was not well placed, as there seemed to be a steady build from the first few chapters related to the entanglement of residents and visitors as co-producers of urban spaces. However, with this minor criticism aside, other common threads carried forward, particularly off-the-beaten-track tourism. Chapter 7, Living like a local: Amsterdam Airbnb users and the blurring of boundaries between ‘tourists’ and ‘residents’ in residential neighbourhoods by Bianca Wildish and Bas Spierings builds directly from the preceding chapter, but from the perspectives of both tourists and residents within residential neighbourhoods in Amsterdam, with the core idea being that as tourists (i.e. outsiders) seek to become more integrated with the local culture, residents (i.e. insiders) seek ways to feel more like tourists in their cities, thus blurring the line between the two roles.

Chapter 8, Commensality and ‘local’ food: Exploring a city with the help of digital meal-sharing platforms by Luise Stoltenberg and Thomas Frisch, brings a refreshing perspective to the new urban tourism topic as it relates to the book’s theme of de-differentiation. Here, the authors identify theoretical concepts from the sociology field regarding meal-sharing platforms, particularly Eatwith, which allows tourists to dine with a local in their home while on vacation. It is argued in this chapter that the concept of commensality, or the act of sharing a meal in a social context, drives the popularity of these meal-sharing platforms, given their ability to define and maintain one’s social identity. The reviewer was particularly impressed with these authors’ interpretations of the results from their interviews, such as the host from San Francisco, who provided a vivid description of the culinary tour that guests could expect by selecting him as their host. Here, the authors point to the translation of expressive adjectives into multi-sensuous experiences. Finally, this chapter further extends the broad theme throughout the book regarding the extraordinary mundane. In this case, eating a meal becomes an outstanding event worth experiencing.

Chapter 9, Places of Muβe as part of new urban tourism in Paris, by Clara Sofie Kramer, Nora Winsky and Tim Freytag, capture the growing need for tourism at a different pace, slower and providing a reprieve from the hurriedness of everyday life. Through their qualitative content analysis, which examined various destinations featured in travel guidebooks, the authors identified four types of places of Muβe in Paris: cultural, extensive, green and culinary sites, which are then characterized and linked to the authenticity and fragility of places. Building from the introduction of communing in Chapter 4, Chapter 10 is titled Commoning in new tourism areas and is written by Christoph Sommer and Markus Kip. Here, the authors extend our understanding of communing through a case study of an evening social event in Germany called the Admiralbrücke, which has been a source of tension between residents and visitors, but, as the authors have identified in this chapter, also acts as an intersection of objects and mobilities, and as a place to co-perform socio-material gatherings.

If, by this point in the book, the reader has any remaining stereotypes of tourists as camera-carrying, map-holding, luggage-toting fools, Nils Grube does well to dispel them in Chapter 11, titled You are a tourist! Exploring tourism conflicts by means of performative interventions. The study used a field experimental design in which participants portrayed tourists in various stereotypical settings (e.g. blocking a bike path, leaving their rolling suitcases inconveniently placed on a sidewalk, talking loudly in front of local establishments). Although many of the conflicts they had hoped for did not occur, the participants gained a deeper appreciation of the role of tourism and social interactions within a city environment.

One of the most exciting themes within the book was the role of digital communications and technology as it relates to the topic of new urban tourism. As a researcher excited by contemporary technologies, from eye-tracking glasses to emerging social media platforms, the reviewer was keen to learn more about how technology has influenced this changing urban tourism landscape. Examples of these changes are frequent throughout the book, such as the discussion around the “end of tourism” in the Introduction, where the authors discuss the evolution from tourists needing to be physically at a place to a more fluid definition which may include virtual or simulated mobility based on electronic imagery. In addition, in almost every chapter, the spirit of digital advances is present, such as the chapters exploring the latest developments in sharing economy platforms like Airbnb and Eatwith, the growing presence of Wi-Fi-enabled destinations and user-generated content as shared through tourists’ social networks to help co-create their travel experiences with others.

Overall, this book is rigorous and comprehensive regarding contemporary urban tourism and everyday life. The editors have curated the works of 15 original authors to emphasize the growing importance of understanding how travellers are becoming increasingly interested in the ‘extraordinary mundane’ and experiencing destinations like a local by going off the beaten path. Of course, there will always be a demand for a destination’s main attractions, whether the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Colosseum in Rome. Still, the de-differentiated experiences of dining with a local in their home, staying at an Airbnb in a densely populated urban community, or visiting a Muβe-inspired green space, tourism and leisure activities are undergoing a significant change that this book has done well to capture. Despite these strengths, the reviewer did feel that the book could be further improved by finding a way to unify the chapters more meaningfully, which did not always seem to flow from one to the next and required some effort to link it back to the chapter before it. This could have been improved by dividing the chapters into sub-themes, such as one that focuses on tourism’s negative consequences and its impact on locals (Chapters 4 and 11, for instance) and another that examines Airbnb and Eatwith sharing platforms (Chapters 6, 7 and 8). At a minimum, the book would have benefited from creating a unified paragraph to be included at the end of each chapter, requiring the authors to connect their chapters to the book’s central themes explicitly. Although those connections are present in each chapter, the reader must search to find them.

The book is currently available in paperback, hardback and Vitalsource eBook formats. The paperback and eBook cost US$54.95, whereas the hardback sells for US$70.00. There is also an option to rent the eBook for six and 12 months at a reduced price. Although the hardback format price point is steep given the book’s length (272 pages), there is incredible value for both the paperback and eBook. Researchers hoping to understand new urban tourism’s influence on contemporary travel will receive tremendous value from purchasing this book. As such, the reviewer recommends this book for purchase by those interested in the blurred line between tourists and their hosts.