Stuck in the crowds: Older residents’ active mobility in tourist hotspots

Keywords: Tourism, mobility, ageing, active travel, walking, cycling
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Cities are constantly remade following mobility-related trends, such as working and shopping from home and interventions that intend to make cities greener, safer or less pollutant. While improving liveability, not everyone is equally able to adapt to these interventions. People of older age, for instance, rely more on often on continuity of community life and local familiarity. Changes to their surroundings may put them, among other groups, at risk of exclusion. In tourist cities, these questions are even more pertinent, given the concentrations of mobilities and activities that cater to the visitor economy, thus depleting the local community, social networks, and compromising residents’ movements. To study the extent of these impacts on residents’ lived mobility experiences, this study undertakes go-along interviews with 23 residents of Barcelona aged over 60 in areas characterised as tourist hotspots. It engages with active mobility experiences in areas subject to mass visitation and other physical transformations. The findings highlight how older people are concurrently affected by the corporeal presence of tourism and by derivates from tourism that changes the neighbourhood fabric. The go-alongs offer space for qualitative reflection about everyday mobilities, capturing the meticulous ways in which older people negotiate tourism effects (by rationalisation, resignation, or modification) and draw on (finite) social and physical resources. The paper concludes that, to maintain access to active mobility and urban functions and promote their equitable uses, tourism and tourist cities should pay attention to the limiting effects of tourism mobilities on vulnerable populations, including older people.