“Tourists go home” slogans were recently painted on the walls of Barcelona; they follow policies passed earlier this year at local level limiting the number of beds offered and the construction of new hotels in the city. Yet not so long before, Barcelona was a prime example of a city that had strategically embraced “city branding” aiming to transform a second-class national city into an international destination; within that framework tourism played an instrumental part.

How does global tourism impact on the sustainability of local communities? What is the role of the new ‘sharing economy’ of tourism in a redefined relationship between tourism and the city? Have cities become “overbooked”? How relevant are frameworks such as “carrying capacity” and “limits of acceptable change” today? Is there a difference between a tourist and a traveller? Are there forms of tourism that are more or less sustainable than others? Can the city balance the needs of tourists and locals in a mutually beneficial way?

Caught between a wider societal tension between the local and the global, is tourism a driver of sustainable urban development or a self-serving process that exhausts local resources to serve non-local interests?

The journal is calling for submissions that explore the relationship between tourism and the city and bring insightful new perspectives into focus.

Deadline for submissions: 31 October 2017

Beyond the traditional text-based article format we publish work in a variety of formats and media, bringing together theory and practice in a creative, analytical, and critical discourse on the city: Short Articles, Long Articles, Urban Design Projects and Proposals, Urban Interventions, Mapping and Urban Visualisations, Drawing, Photography, Short Film.

Guidelines for submissions:
https://journal.urbantranscripts.org/submissions/
 
 
 
 
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Image credits: “Tourist go home or die”, Park Güel, Barcelona 2012, by Marco Hernández.

Volume 1, no. 2 Summer 2017