The reality of the Journal as an independent voluntary initiative means there are periods when the team’s work and life commitments take a toll on our operation. After a difficult 12 months we are delighted to be able to move on to a second year of publishing. The Journal is back and keeps evolving supported by the energy of new team members and a freshly set-up industry-standard manuscript management system. This ‘relaunch’ issue focuses on tourism and the city and is the first of many to address key themes structured around an annual editorial agenda.

Back in 2017 Urban Transcripts ran Overbooking the City: an urban laboratory in Dubrovnik on the city’s tense relationship with tourism. It was in that same laboratory that the call for this issue was launched, in the midst of an incessant flow of tourists coming and going through the city’s historic streets. The contents of this issue explore a diversity of local manifestations and impacts of tourism in Iceland, Barcelona, Venice, Berlin, and Athens. They bring into focus questions around sustainability, gentrification, the heterogeneity of tourism itself, and document practices of resilience, local activism, and alternative ways forward including emerging community-powered tourism models.

Submissions in response to all previous calls are now moving through our editing cycle, being scheduled for the next 3 issues. While our next call for submissions is planned for late summer, we are always on the lookout for stories that document the lived experience of urban change in our Letters from the City section. We are equally open to suggestions for interviews and book reviews for our forthcoming issue.

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Cover image: Crowd of bathers in Lake Michigan beach, US Department of Treasury, circa 1925. Image in the public domain.

Volume 2, no. 1 Spring 2019