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The Rise of “Tourist Phobia”

On Tourists and Tourism

Text José Antonio Donaire Professor at the Faculty of Tourism at Girona University

Photo: Enrique Marco

Tourism has always been approached from one of two Manichean viewpoints: the paranoid one, for which tourism is the culmination of the process by which society and culture are massified, commercialised and trivialised, and the utilitarian one, which sees tourism as a means to universal access to culture and as a form of enrichment for the host communities.

Let's face it. Tourism hasn't got a very good reputation, so much so that tourist companies even present themselves as anti-tourist: "Go where the tourists don't go' is the suggestion in the travel agents' new brochures. That's why when Duane Hanson caricatures the image of Western culture with his hyperrealist sculptures, along with the coloured cleaning woman, the overweight supermarket client and the museum guard with his face disfigured by vacuousness, we also find tourists. His 1988 work Tourists II portrays the tourist stereotype complete with flowered shirt, sandals and socks and a gaze lost somewhere over the horizon. The couple, deformed by mediocrity, look on indifferently at something, anything, perhaps a cathedral, perhaps a town square. This parody of tourism, this simplistic simulation of the average consumer, is the opposite to the elevated image of cultural experience. That's why tourism and culture are often thought to be irreconcilable: when one arrives, the other leaves.

            Of course, there are also people who defend tourism. Traditionally, interpretations of tourism (in Barcelona, Florence or Malta, all over the world) have traced a Maginot line between the paranoid and the utilitarians, according to García Canclini's definition (2006). It's the tourist version of the debate between the apocalyptics and the integrated put forward by Eco (2004), in his classic study of mass culture, the intellectual battle between those who decry the growing commercialisation of culture and those who celebrate the democratisation of access to culture (never mind whether it's a Superman comic or digital art), between the pessimism of Walter Benjamin and the indifference of Warhol's pop art. Tourism has always been approached from one of the Manichean viewpoints: the paranoid one, for which tourism (and especially cultural tourism) is the culmination of the process by which society and culture are massified, commercialised and trivialised, and the utilitarian one, which sees tourism as a means to universal access to culture and as a form of enrichment for the host communities.

            Curiously, in a context in which the paranoid interpretation predominates in the media, in social critique and even in political agendas, tourism has become an essential part of the strategies of towns, regions, nations and even continents (as in the case of Europe and America). It's difficult to find a strategic plan drawn up since the eighties that doesn't more or less directly consider the tourist option as a basic regional strategy. From the Guggenheim in Bilbao to the Paths of Sepharad, from Lorca's Taller del Tiempo to the conversion of the Zöllverein industrial complex as a museum, from the Silk Routes to the recreation of a nineteenth-century atmosphere in Brighton, in one form or another places today are playing the game of tourism.

The city as a stage

The tourists' city isn't the real city. This is the theory of the ideologists of anti-tourism. If we follow this thread, sooner or later we get to the concept of theatrical authenticity put forward by Dean McCannell (2006). Briefly, McCannell considers that tourist spots tend to create a front area for relations between visitors and residents, leaving an area at the back (the wings). The creation of a stage for tourism serves two complementary functions. First of all, it means that places can be made to fit the images that have been projected of them. Tourists arrive at their destination drawn by an idealised image of the place they are visiting and places try to adapt to this image. That's why tourist spots are like the pictures of them rather than the other way round. Secondly, the existence of a place to centre visitors' attention and the relations between guests and hosts means that some space can be kept free from the gaze of peeping-tom visitors. The backstage areas are those in which residents don't feel obliged to put on an act, because the eyes of the tourists don't reach there. In this way, tourists are permanently exposed to adulteration in a wide variety of forms: distortion, fossilisation, stage decoration, pessebrisme, etc.

            It's true that the tourists' city isn't the real city; but then no city is a real city. Tourists have built urban itineraries that they follow ritualistically, despite their sense of freedom. It's true that tourists consume a bit of the city and take it for the whole. The tourists who travel Barcelona only really travel a few of the city's streets. But the people of Barcelona have also created their own particular urban geography, and if we follow their steps we'll see large gaps, areas that are unknown to the residents themselves. Cities as they are experienced are always a tiny part of the real city, which doesn't really exist. It isn't even the sum of its bits.

            But criticism of the make-believe city has another variant. Some people say that tourism has created a virtual reality out of it, that it's moved away from Barcelona's identity. They would say that cultural tourism overlooks the city's true identity and creates a "light" version, one that's simplified, immediate and false. But what is Barcelona's identity? And then again, what chronicler has the credentials to unveil this identity? The anthropologist Delgado sees the "truth" in social conflict and therefore finds more life outside the MACBA than inside. I don't think the Barcelona of squatters, call centres and whisky bars is necessarily the real city. Neither is the working-class city, the bourgeois city or the student city.

            The basic mistake in criticising tourism is to think that there's a real, genuine city, separate from the tourist flow. The city's identity is in fact a social construct. Tourism is one more agent, an important one, in the construction of this identity, just like films, literature, personal experience or evocation can be. Tourism isn't an agent acting against Barcelona's identity, so much as one more element of this identity. First, because it helps to create it and make it known, and second, because tourists are part of the urban landscape, another piece of the reality. That's why when Woody Allen makes a film in Barcelona he doesn't hide the tourists, but includes them in his field of vision, because it's impossible today to imagine Barcelona without tourists, in the same way that no picture of the city at the turn of the century would be complete without the factories on the other side of La Ciutadella.

The banal city

In February 2007 Barcelona City Council's Ciutat Vella district began a promotional campaign called Viatja a la teva Ciutat Vella (Travel to your "Ciutat Vella"). For a moderate price, the campaign offered a night at a hotel, lunch and dinner at a restaurant in the urban area and various cultural events: a guided tour of the old quarter, admission to the monument to Columbus or admission to the Museu d'Història de la Ciutat. The campaign wasn't aimed at a Scandinavian public, at visitors from the Basque Country or at the emerging Oriental market. Viatje a la teva Ciutat Vella was an initiative for residents of the old quarter, so that the adjective "your" in this case is used in its literal sense.

            Can one be a tourist in one's own city? As Xavier Antich reminds us (2006), the writer Vázquez Montalbán didn't think it was possible: "by the fourth whisky my foreignness is almost total, a peeping-tom in my own city from the balcony of a hotel in which I've got a room I don't intend to set foot in. I imagine if I ever went into a hotel room in my city I'd never go home again".¹ The tourist view can probably only be an extroverted view, from outside. There's therefore a tourist way of looking at places and subsequently a tourist way of looking at culture. So if it were possible to follow the steps of the residents of Ciutat Vella who play at being tourists in their own city and to decipher their gestures, their itineraries, their perspectives and even their silences and compare them with the behaviour of the tourists who really are tourists, we would be able to draw the imaginary limits to tourism.

            We have to consider tourist relations as a particular form of social relations. Like all social constructs, it has its own logic and its own internal mechanisms. Summing up, we can look on tourism as a transgression in search of re-cognised elements. Above all, tourism is a transgressive activity driven by similar mechanisms to Carnival: transgression, inversion of values, different behaviour. The tourist projects all his personal utopias, desires and expectations onto the place he visits; tourist cities are a negative of conventional cities because they are the receptacles for the dreams and evocations projected from the beginning. It's true that some tourists (not many) walk along La Rambla dressed in grotesque Mexican hats. But it's absurd to think that these tourists are engaged in an ethnological exercise; they're simply dressing up, the same as we all dress up for Carnival. Reading the tourist's attitude without taking into account the liminality of his behaviour is an error of perspective.

            In addition, tourists often go in search of recognisable places, those they've seen from their place of origin, so that tourism often gives a sense of déjà vu. Most tourist centres are conditioned by the long shadows of their associations. It's not possible to imagine the tourist's Dublin without thinking of Trinity College, Saint Patrick's cathedral, Kilmainham Gaol, Temple Bar or Christ Church Cathedral, the Guinness Storehouse or Hugh Lane. Florence is first and foremost Santa Croce, the Duomo, the Uffizi, the Ponte Vecchio, the Palazzo Pitti and Santa Maria Novella. Tourist centres seem to be formed from the sum of landmarks or sights that guide visitors' itineraries and tame their eyes.

            Landmarks play a capital role in the tourist's experience, as they condition the choice of destination, mark the flow of visitors and direct the behaviour of tourists on the ground. The sights have a powerful influence in the complex process of choosing a destination. The visitor selects the tourist spot not on the basis of its effective attributes, but according to the prior image he's formed of it. In composing an image of a cultural destination, landmarks exert a powerful attraction, a key factor in discriminating anonymous places and imagined places. When it comes to choosing between one destination and another, the choice between one set of landmarks and another also comes into play. When a tourist wavers between Barcelona and Venice, he's in fact wavering between the two cities' most representative landmarks. So it's not surprising that the projected image of the destinations is often broken up into a series of evocative landmarks, like a collage of tourist pieces, like postcards joined together to form an accordion.

            Landmarks carry so much weight in the construction of the images, in the pre-travel process, that we can only expect they'll also have a decisive influence on the itineraries taken by tourists when they get there. A lot of tourist itineraries are really a way of efficiently connecting the chief landmarks making up the destination. In fact, travel guides devote considerable space to plotting the optimum paths allowing quick access from one point to another. This explains the importance of the sightseeing buses in the chief European tourist cities: a transport system forming a network parallel to the residents' network and providing instant access to the main landmarks at the destination. That's why, viewed from a certain perspective, tourist itineraries seem to follow a sort of collective script, a geographical pattern that marks the gaps and solids, travel areas and forgotten areas.

            Finally, landmarks also condition the behaviour of tourists at their destination. If the prior image of the landmark is very powerful, visitors tend to reproduce the a priori view. They find the exact angle, the right perspective to put the reality in the same place as the image captured by the tourist or general press. With a large dose of irony, the English graffiti artist Banksy wrote "This is not a photo opportunity" on Westminster Bridge where there's a view of the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. It's a form of protest against the repetition of the view, like an invitation to look for unusual new angles. And for the same reason on http://www.flickr.com/, one of the most popular photo sharing sites on the web, you can find more than 100,000 "Sagrada Famílias". Anyway, we could say there's a tourist way of approaching landmarks that conditions the way cultural objects and visitors relate.

            But over and above liminality and capturing tourist landmarks, there's no such thing as "tourists" and there's no such thing as "residents". There's a difference between an English teenager arriving in the city on an end-of-term outing and the occupants of Leo Bassi's BassiBus in search of the "real Barcelona". That's why residents versus tourists is a false opposition, like most. It's easy to imagine groups of tourists with similar interests and expectations to groups of residents and probably counter to the interests and expectations of other residents and other tourists. The ephemeral nature of the tourist experience is all that prevents some tourists and some residents from forming an alliance in defence of common interests.

The empty city

"Tourism empties the city of residents and turns it into a museum room, a theme park for tourist consumption", writes Delgado. I think there's a mistaken causal attribution here. The city's historical centres during the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth were the receptacles for hardship, the underground areas of Europe's capitals, because the urban machinery seemed more efficient in the new urban areas than in the old abandoned city. As the city grew in the new metropolitan areas, the centre became a marginal, run-down part of the city. It's well-known that since the fifties, European town-planning has concentrated on recovering historic town centres as a strategy for the overall improvement of the city, and to some extent also as a way of recovering the collective identity. This is something worth remembering. All the special plans for internal reform (including Barcelona's) are a modern-day attempt to restore the old town centre's lost dignity. If we look again at those plans from the eighties, we'll hardly see any reference to tourism or tourists.

            The effects of the restauratio vary from one city to another and depend on a number of factors: the price of land, active housing policies, commercial policies, road management and the location of the CBD and of the administrative centres. However, we can find a common denominator in all of them, which is the rising cost of housing. The residents haven't been replaced by tourists, but by new residents.

            The desertification of many European city centres has come about through a process of gentrification and not of touristification. The Barri Gòtic hasn't been emptied by the presence of tourists or by competition for land on the part of tourist establishments. The map of hotels in the city of Barcelona shows considerable scatter. Unlike other European cities, Barcelona hasn't created a tourist district where most of the hotels are located. Hotels form part of the urban landscape, in the same way as the markets, estate agents or cafeteria franchises.

            The empty city can be interpreted from another angle: the tourist city as opposed to the other possible cities. In keeping with this interpretation, tourism is a kind of red swamp crayfish that takes over all the city's living options, like a Russian roulette: all or nothing. If the city is a tourist resort, all that remains for it to do is to accept its exhibitionist nature and expel the other economic activities that no longer have a place there. Except for the Mexican hat factories, of course. In fact, metropolitan tourism is never hegemonic, because the tourist's gaze falls precisely on the diversity of the city's activities and is incompatible with a tourist monoculture. What's more, I ought to add that there is no one single tourism. Barcelona attracts many kinds of tourism, with widely varying intensities and effects. We mustn't overlook the importance of cruise tourism, medical tourism or business tourism and its effects in other subsectors.

Managing tourism

"Tourist phobia" is one of the mechanisms inherent to tourism. One North-American author put forward a theory ("Irridex") according to which the relationship between guests and hosts inevitably goes through four stages: euphoria, apathy, irritation and antagonism. According to G. Doxey, "tourist phobia" is part of the DNA of the tourist process that inevitably ends in antagonism. And so, we return once more to García Canclini's debate between the utilitarians and the paranoid: "Tourism is a factor of urban and cultural deformation" versus "Tourism is a source of income and of urban rehabilitation". It's a debate without bridges. A dialogue of the deaf.

            Tourism doesn't need existential debates, so much as management tools. Tourism can have devastating effects on the host area, just as it can further economic relaunching or urban redevelopment. It all depends on the management mechanisms. That's why action has to be taken in five spheres simultaneously: accommodation capacity studies, especially in private premises, fixing maximum numbers and directly or indirectly restricting access; efficient information management, directed at increasing the visitable metropolitan area; increasing visitable landmarks, preferably in new urban areas, that can break down the border between stage and wings; limits to tourist activity in the most crowded parts of the city (like the tourist apartments in Ciutat Vella); and know-how in managing the mobility of tourist flows.

Notes

1. Xavier Antich, "On són les ferides? Post-imatges i ficcions de la rosa de foc", in Tour-ismes. La derrota de la dissensió. Itineraris crítics. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies and Fòrum Barcelona, 2004.

Bibliography

Donaire, José Antonio. Turisme cultural. Entre l'experiència i el ritual. Bellcaire: Vitel·la, 2007.




Summer (June – September 2008)