Temporary populations and sociospatial polarisation in the short-term city

Abstract

Temporary populations – tourists, temporary stayers, non-resident students – constitute a substantial share of many cities’ inhabitants. Their implications are normally the object of separate research, about over tourism, studentification, transnational gentrification. When viewed from the perspective of the sociospatial relations those populations have in and with the city, many similarities emerge in their urban practices, socio economic characteristics, locational and housing preferences. The paper aims to contribute to recent attempts to avoid traditional categorisations and investigate jointly how the inflow of temporary inhabitants produces effects at the urban and sub-urban scales. The COVID-19 pandemic will then be used as a natural experiment to estimate how they distribute in the city of Rome, Italy, which is crucial to a better understanding of their impact. Temporary populations, we argue, are a very visible source of both hard and soft urban changes, and a major driver of not only neighbourhood change but sociospatial polarisation at the whole city scale. The pandemic also offers an occasion to see how dependent cities are on temporary inhabitants and to reflect upon the ambivalence in how they see those populations as either a gain or a burden, something they struggle to attract or as a source of tensions and opposition.

Chased from Heaven or Escaping Tourist Hell? Venice's Graduate Students in Focus

“…Sequera & Nofre 2018), heated before the COVID-19 crisis, and surfacing again in the wake of an incipient recovery of tourism activity (Gössling et al 2020;Walmsley et al 2021). The impacts of high tourist pressure on the residential displacement of the most vulnerable strata of residents are widely covered in research (see Valente et al 2022, also review of the literature), recent works also highlight the rising incapacity of overtouristed cities to offer secure life perspectives to young adults entering labour (Brollo & Celata 2023;Jover & Díaz-Parra 2022). In other words, it could be argued that the attractiveness of cities for graduates facing 'stay or go' decisions at the end of their study career is to some extent relationally and materially constructed over the course of their study period, and that rising pressure from tourism as an agent of transformation of the housing and labour markets could be an intervening factor determining a progressive loss of retentiveness for this population segment.…”