A coalition of leftist political groups, civic movements, and grassroots organizations led by social activist Ada Colau has won the Barcelona municipal elections of 2015, and is now governing the Catalan capital. The key to this success may well have been its critical positioning in relation to its tourism. Until recently considered a best practice in urban regeneration and a successful global destination, Barcelona has lived in the last two years a radical change in the public perception on tourism: from 'manna from heaven' to serious issue which is affecting the quality of life of its citizens. This paper looks into the factors which may have determined this political change. These go from the growth of tourism beyond what could be considered a critical threshold for an urban system, to the development of a critical discourse on tourism by the new coalition -attributed to its peculiar constituency and working methods -and the role of the media in airing this discursive shift. The paper follows the thread of the 'growth machine' theorizations and questions whether the increasing dimension of tourism in urban societies could be a driver for regime changes.
The paper introduces the concept of territorial assets and discusses their role for regional development. Focusing on European societies and taking into account different strands of the literature on place and territorial capital, we argue that the endowment with – and mobilization of – such territorial assets could be seen as a key aspect of regional policy, producing changes in the attraction (and/or retention) of specific segments of population and, in a longer-term perspective, influencing sustainable development strategies. In this light, ‘territorial attractiveness’ – characterized in this paper in both conceptual and operational terms – is presented as a powerful element in European spatial policy, allowing regional development strategies to be more systematically integrated under an overall objective of territorial cohesion, while taking into account their implications in terms of human mobility.
Tourism global value chains connect strategically to local operations; in the case of cruise lines, where most part of the experience happens in a 'placeless' environment, cruise ports embody this singular but fundamental connection. However, a third stakeholder should be taken into account in cruise product design, and it is the destination region. This article introduces an analytic framework that connects the global structure of cruise value chains to the regional articulation of land-based cruise services, and reflects upon strategies by which local agents can enhance the generation of value at the local level. After discussing the possible strategies of port regionalization, we present a general framework to assess the competitive position of a cruise destination. A case study of Catalonia and its three main ports is used as an illustration.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.