Speaker
Description
Tourism-led regeneration is emerging as a widespread strategy to bring some economic resources to left-behind places. While many cities across the world are dealing with the consequences of over-tourism and increased rates of short-term lettings (e.g., increased house prices, inflation of consumer costs and wider clashes between residents and visitors or the seasonal population of these touristic hotspots), tourism is seen as the potential “healing therapy” solution for many declining regions and towns. However, is betting on another extractive economic activity, such as tourism, really a sustainable path for regeneration in left-behind places?
In the UK, seaside resort towns have served as a landmark example of how tourism can create economic lock-ins and as such they have been defined as a British “Salt Fringe”, in analogy with the American “Rust Belt”.
In many cases, branding strategies to attract tourism in these areas are anchored on the very same industrial past of these locations or the landscape opportunities offered by their liminal geographies (e.g., mountain and rural areas or even coastal ones). But is this a positive way of incorporating the past legacy or just another way of fuelling feelings of nostalgia and discontent? This paper explores a selection of left-behind places where tourism has been used as the main strategy to revive the local economy and the connected spatial imaginaries evoked to establish whether signs of healing have appeared or whether this was rather an end-of-life care measure.
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
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