Context

A surge of anti-tourism sentiment has been sweeping across European cities from Venice to Barcelona and Lisbon, with protests there receiving worldwide media coverage. The slogan sprayed on Barcelona’s tour buses, “El turisme mata els barris” (Tourism Kills Neighbourhoods), during the July 2017 protests came to be the representative war cry of this movement inasmuch as it encapsulates what appears to be the common core of the discontent: the perceived demise of touristified neighbourhoods as a liveable space for city residents.

The history of the perception that tourism spoils places is apparently as old as the word tourist itself. French writer Stendhal is credited with coining the term tourist, and as early as 1817 he regretted how his adored Florence was ‘nothing better than a vast museum full of foreign tourists.’ (Colomb and Novy, 2016). In 2016, Dutch author Nina van der Weiden wrote “How to Avoid the Other Tourists,” a guide to places from a local perspective guiding visitors away from Amsterdam’s tourist crowds. Interestingly, the title implicitly acknowledges the significant and somewhat ironic statement contained in the “we are all tourists” adage.

A very recent publication by Colomb and Novy (2016) that for the first time collects case studies around this issue, traces the first contemporary wave of mass anti-touristification reactions to Berlin between 2010 and 2011 and the appearance of graffiti slogans such as ‘No more rolling suitcases’ and ‘Tourists f*** off’, anonymous posters citing Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s famous words ‘The tourist destroys what he seeks by finding it’, and ‘Berlin does not love you’ stickers.

By 2014, residents of La Barceloneta neighborhood were demonstrating on a regular basis to plead for a change in the city’s urban development model under the motto ‘Barcelona is not for sale’. In 2014, Ada Colau, then a well-known local activist and now the Mayor of Barcelona, wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian entitled, “Mass tourism can kill a city – just ask Barcelona’s residents.” The ‘Save Florence’ campaign and Lisbon residents’ campaign, “Aqui mora gent” (People live here), call for the protection of heritage and target the growing ‘party tourism’ phenomenon respectively.

In the period 2015-2017, Amsterdam joined this group of overwhelmed cities, as evidenced by press reports and the emergence of citizens’ groups and demonstrations. This appears to have been motivated by an unprecedented growth in mass tourism as well as by the manner in which contemporary global tourism is being performed, for example, in the boom of home rental-based accommodation, and of the short stay (e.g. the city break) as facilitated by increased mobility and digital booking platforms. As per popular media reports and a preliminary, cursory surveying of actors, Amsterdammers’ concerns are also underpinned by the touristification-induced erosion of the liveability of the city centre, in particular of the canal district. Voiced discontent ranges from physical / material nuisance (overcrowding, noise, hygiene) to the out-pricing of residents and small non-tourist businesses which are leading to an overall sense of alienation and displacement caused by both the sheer number of tourists and by how the growth in services catering to them is reshaping the cityscape in ways that render it unrecognizable by residents as a place to live or to frequent as a non-tourist.