I’ve been seeing some chatter on here about “overtourism,” a phenomenon that’s viscerally obvious in a city like Florence. And while I’m not above grumbling about the crowds myself, every time the discourse veers into a quasi-actionable register (that proverbial “what is to be done”), I flinch. What is there to be done, really? Because the grumbles never come from people who have not stepped foot on whatever sacred ground is in question; it’s always people who want to be there just as badly as everyone else.
And while my heart always goes out to the people who actually live there, I guess I’m too Lebanese to be fully heartbroken when the world scrambles to throw money at them in ways that countries like mine have been trapped into desiring too. Tourism is one of those strange industries that everyone seems to agree is somehow beneath them, until their own economy depends on it.
What is there to be done that won’t be weaponized to stratify the world even further? The obvious solutions always boil down to making travel more exclusive and it’s hard not to notice who those measures would inconvenience least. The rich would keep trotting the globe while everyone else would simply be reminded that mobility, like everything else, is unevenly distributed.
I’m also too much of a Jacobin to be comfortable with gated gardens. The desire to preserve what is beautiful is understandable, but so is desiring that encounter. x
It’s much easier to resent the stranger in front of the Duomo than to ask why so many cities have become unlivable. The first impulse wants to manage demand; the second urges us to confront power.
Long before the first tourist appears on the scene, the landlords, developers, investors, and municipalities are writing the script about what kind of city should exist and what for. By the time the players arrive, the plot’s already unfolding, and though we tourists wear the face of the problem, we are far from its authors. x
I’ve been thinking about this while reading Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. One of his recurring arguments is that we have a habit of directing our attention toward the thing we can see while missing the system of incentives and motivations that’s actually shaping it. Our public discourse is obsessed with AI itself — its intelligence, its capabilities, its supposed inevitability — but a refrain he keeps repeating is that the important thing to understand about technology is not just for what it does, but who it does it to and who it does it for.
Doctorow’s point is that this fixation obscures the more interesting question: who benefits from deploying it this way, and what economic incentives are driving its adoption? AI isn’t the primary actor in his story. Capital is.
In some ways, “overtourism” functions similarly. Tourists are the most conspicuous people in the city, so they become the object of critique. That doesn’t make the crowds any less real, or residents’ frustrations any less justified. We debate quotas, but the more fundamental question is why so many cities have become economically dependent on maximizing tourism while simultaneously becoming unaffordable for the people who live in them. x