Building tourism-resilient communities by incorporating residents’ perceptions? A photo-elicitation study of tourism development in Bruges

Abstract

<jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Purpose</jats:title> <jats:p>In a current trend of a growing amount of short city trips, it becomes crucial to understand how local residents perceive the presence of tourists and tourism in their cities and how their socio-cultural context influences those perceptions. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this understanding which will enable the city planners to take actions to create the well-balanced and resilient communities in which the needs of residents and tourists are equally met.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title> <jats:p>To understand residents’ perceptions’ about tourism in Bruges, this research applied photo-elicitation interviews with 28 residents who lived in various locations in the historical center to understand socio-cultural background of residents, their tourism-related concerns and whether they are in line with what is commonly perceived as problematic in Bruges.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Findings</jats:title> <jats:p>Results show that as long as residents can benefit from tourism and tourism-related infrastructure, they support tourism. On the other hand, tourism decreases the liveability of the historical center due to supersession of infrastructure serving the residents by tourist-oriented amenities.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Practical implications</jats:title> <jats:p>To build a sustainable and resilient city in the future, the authorities of Bruges should cease further “museumification” of the historical city by breaking the hegemony of tourism industry, providing affordable housing and rethinking the concentration model of tourism.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Originality/value</jats:title> <jats:p>The photo-elicitation method proved to produce rich content and good-quality data by stimulating respondents’ memories and evoking experiences and emotions. Thus, this paper recommends that future research about residents’ attitudes is developed around visual methods as they give voice to the residents and are able to uncover issues which are difficult to capture with other methods.</jats:p> </jats:sec>

Residents’ Opinions and Perceptions of Tourism Development in the Historic City of Toledo, Spain

“…The opinions and perceptions of tourism impacts on a local scale are logically variable and heterogeneous. Nevertheless, it is key to understand how local residents perceive tourism development and how their demographic characteristics and their socioeconomic context influence their opinions [16]. The opinions of Toledo's residents regarding the impacts of tourism in their city are analyzed in this section, and the experimental results of the research are displayed in two subheadings.…”

“…In Toledo, the residents remark the benefits of tourism development over their costs. Just like Burges [16], the limits of overtourism have not been overstepped.…”

“…This way, researchers of the residents' perceptions of tourism have taken on heritage areas, as Chand does for the Indian town of Pragpur [82], in the same way as the cultural cities [83]. In this way, studies in European cities, such as Bruges [16], Canterbury [84], Oxford, in this case contrasting it with the opinions of visitors [25], or York [23] are carried out.…”

“…They play an important role in successful tourism development [15]. Incorporating the touristic destination inhabitants' perceptions, tourism-resilient communities can be built [16]. Besides, understanding the attitudes and perceptions of the residents towards tourism can mitigate present-and foremost-potential future conflict between the host community and the visitors [10], and hostility towards tourists [17].…”

Golden hordes or mere barbarians? Discourses on tourism, touristification, and tourismophobia in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighborhood

“…Indeed, the intensification of urban tourism in the context of the entrepreneurial city (Blanco-Romero et al, 2018), the strengthening of the neoliberal urban agenda (Novy & Colomb, 2017) and conflicts around the socio-economic transformation of cities (Janusz et al, 2017) have led to the appearance of "critical voices [that] began to disturb and challenge the hitherto almost exclusively boosterist narratives surrounding tourism" (Novy, 2017, p. 60). While in no case can it be concluded that a global revolt against urban tourism is at play (Novy & Colomb, 2017) and although significant studies of very touristic cities have shown that tourist activity still enjoys far greater support than critiques (Janusz et al, 2017;UNWTO et al, 2018), there are indeed works that argue to the contrary, such as that of Blanco-Romero et al (2018) regarding Barcelona. Thus the idea becomes that the prior consensus around urban tourism can no longer be sustained, given that some (many?…”