Tourism mobilities and the contemporary city: a resilience planning framework

Keywords: urban resilience, resilience planning, mobilities, temporary dwelling, negotiations, biopolitics
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This conceptual paper proposes a broad framework on which to situate fundamental revisions in urban planning for resilience, an ambiguous concept itself, which a mobilities approach challenges in its ontological and normative dimensions. It is also instrumental to framing the various contributions that will be presented at the 2023 AAG Annual meeting’ special track “Planning for urban resilience in the age of mobilities – the challenges ahead”
Place resilience as system property is then re-envisioned as planning objective from a normative perspective: resilient cities are proposed as socioecological systems founded on citizenship, which assume – ontologically – the ‘right to the city’ as system property.
We will explore the moral implications of this assumption and then introduce four dimensions of agency of temporary dwelling or short-term urbanism city that challenge so-defined resilience. To characterise that, we draw examples from the results of the SMARTDEST project:
- Population change through tourismification of housing, hinting at issues of constituency shifts, retention and fixation of human and social capital, fiscal capacity
- Tourism and public space occupation, evoking hindrances to social reproduction, health and welfare
- Tourism and labour precarisation, tackling issues of social mobility, economic activity and representation
- Tourist accessibility and environmental justice, extending to health and climate challenges.
Having posited these domains of biopoliticization of the tourist city, we suggest new ‘subversive’ avenues of resilience planning for cities, breaking away from traditional sedentary population frameworks and mobilising the potential for inclusive, resilient Smart Cities.