Tourism gentrification as an extractive and colonial device

The contribution will address touristification and tourism gentrification processes as a particular urban manifestation of a broader transformation of contemporary capitalism towards a financialised extractive model. In the context of “planetary urbanization” and “urban society” (Lefebvre 1970, Brenner 2015), touristification is a key driver in the production of space (Lefebvre 1974) – realising a spatial division of labour through the identification of leisure territories on which it enacts its extractive operations (Mezzadra & Neilson 2019). In relation to urban contexts, an important role is played by heritagisation (Gravari-Barbas & Guinand 2017), which contributes to the realisation of perceived “enclaves of the past” (Toffler 1970) where dynamics of “enrichment” (Boltanski & Esquerre 2017) take place in order to valorise and appropriate a common social value in the so called “extractive zone” (Gómez-Barris 2017). Favoured by heritagisation processes, touristification then proves to act not only as an extractive but also as a colonial device, objectifying cities and territories into aesthetic commodities through the establishment of an Orientalist discourse (Said 1978) and gaze, and developing an economic model that makes of the conspicuous consumption of resources accumulated over the centuries its distinctive feature (Crick 1989). The entanglement between tourism and extracitivism, highlighted by Garcés (2018), has direct relation with processes of expulsion and displacement (Semi 2019), as it relates to wider phenomena of transnational gentrification (Sigler & Wachsmuth 2015) in which local and global elites extensively use touristified cities as “safe deposit box” (Aalbers 2019) to store their excess capital. This process, similarly to the land grabbing operations in the Global South, produces a sort of “flat grabbing” whose effects are broadly studied in relation to the touristic use of housing and the rise of platform economy (Wachsmuth & Weisler, 2018; Cocola-Gant & Gago, 2019; López-Gay et al. 2020), realising what has been called a “neoliberal dystopia” (Gil et al. 2023) in the rental market and foreseeing the emergence of the short-term city (Salerno & Russo 2022), intended as on an urban form that is not anymore anchored to - and dependent on – a resident population but reoriented to the transits and dwelling practices of a transient population like short term-visitors and tourists.