The expression that tourism is a heavy industry is not just a metaphor. It is the exact description of a sector of the economy that produces more than 10% of the world’s GDP and that in countries with developed tourism activity is often the largest economic activity. At the same time, it is one of the most characteristic aspects, in one way or another, of modern culture, of the way we construct identities and markings. From the way we define the concept of ‘authenticity’ to the spatial planning of cities and the relationship with the historical past, tourism has played a decisive role.
Investigating the era of mass tourism
Marco D’Eramo deals with all this in his book “The World in a Selfie. An Inquiry into the Tourist Age”. A journalist for many years at the newspaper il manifesto, but also an important theoretician, D’Eramo combines erudition and analytical insight, offering an impressive overview of the subject, which escapes stereotypes.
For D’Eramo, the development of mass tourism has to do with the revolution of leisure, which begins in the 19th century and culminates in the 20th, and which gave wider strata the possibility of travel. He even notes that the same aristocratic strata that previously enjoyed privileges such as the Grand Tour were very early quick to speak of “hordes” when they saw other social classes traveling on a massive scale. Of course, the development of tourism also meant the development of attractions. In the 19th century, not only the sewers of Paris but also the morgue, were popular places to visit, while the colonial era coincided with the heinous practice of using natives from the colonies as exhibits.
Tourism is also a cultural industry. This is best seen in the way its development leads to the construction of the concept of ‘authentic’, but also to the production of the very concept of ‘sightseeing’, the ‘must-go’ place, in various ways, by tourist guides. (and especially those that are considered to be prestigious and offer a “rating”) up to the millions of user reviews on the various tourist applications
The cities that change
D’Eramo is particular about how tourism is changing cities, from Airbnb to the realization (as only an Italian would) that there are now places in Rome or Florence where you don’t eat well. He points out at the same time that this is not such a new fact: Venice began to become a tourist city already in the 18th century, when, to the delight of visitors, the Carnival was extended in time.
In fact we are dealing, in various ways, with what Hobsbawm called the ‘invention of tradition’, and D’Eramo gives numerous examples of how ‘traditions’ have been reinvented in relatively recent times to contribute to the appeal of cities and areas as “historical” and “authentic”, in a process which – inverting Schumpeter’s well-known phrase – he calls “catastrophic creation”. The culmination of this process is the way in which the designation of a city as a UNESCO World Heritage Site results in the peculiar death of a city, or at least important aspects of it, a kind of “urbicide”.
The example of Las Vegas is for D’Eramo the characteristic visualization of the fact that tourism is indeed an industry, as the city is imagined as a set of facilities that mass-produce not cars as in Detroit, but leisure and entertainment for tourists, constituting the prime example of the tourist town. He is quick to point out, however, that to a large extent the urban planning concepts of the “modern movement”, with its emphasis on distinct zones of activity, paved the way for the development of such versions of “tourist cities”.
Although D’Eramo is highly critical of the destructive aspects of modern tourism, he does not adopt a facile leveling critique that would see only the alienation, commodification and loss of authenticity in tourism. After all, any form of concentration on an activity entails a degree of alienation, and the question is whether this is a choice, like that of the artist, or a compulsion like that which binds a worker to a repetitive activity.
Precisely for this reason, an easy and largely moralistic criticism of the mass definition, which at certain moments seems like a denial of people’s right to have a free time, does not make sense. Ultimately, D’Eramo points out that what we often describe as “tourism” is nothing more than the way modern societies see the world.
The global tourism industry is in a transition phase: the post-pandemic restart is compounded by the clouds not only of an energy crisis, but also of confronting climate change and air travel’s contribution to it, as digital communication and telecommuting push for a new “staticity”. Does this mean that the magic of travel will be lost at some point?
