Convivial encounters in the city: On welcoming the other
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Keywords: Tourism, Amsterdam, conviviality, living labs, encounter
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Edward Huijbens, Wageningen University
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Abstract
The social infrastructure of the urban is a site of diversity, multiplicity and conviviality under threat from commercialisation, not least through tourism. The dominant socio-spatial logic of capitalism has urbanized its extractive practices capturing value from the urban and social fabric and its affective and communicative values. This monetizing of everyday life through all manners of platform capitalism embedded in ubiquitous connectivity will erode urban cultural diversity. As a counter measure the paper discusses the theoretical contours of urban conviviality. The paper will conceptually explore how to re-story urban social infrastructure fostering such conviviality, engage with the development of tourism policy in the city of Amsterdam through their living lab approach and recount engagements with tourism stakeholders and municipal planners under the banner of ‘reinventing the city’ beyond interlaced crisis of housing, overtourism and climate change. The paper argues that conviviality mediated through a vibrant urban fabric can make for spaces of alterity and reinstate use-value as central to social infrastructures. Countering thereby capitalist monoculture of urbanity, urban design animated by care and responsiveness can foster multiplicity and conviviality which can progressively reinvent the city. Applied to the tourism encounter and a reoriented understanding of hospitality allows for tourism animated by autonomy and creativity, personal interdependence and redistributive justice, contributing to the momentum needed to overturn the deadening urban frontier of capital accumulation.
Convivial encounters in the city: On welcoming the other
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Paper Abstract