Tourism is one of the most important elements of urbanization. It goes through two revolutions that are not sufficiently emphasized by urban studies.
The first corresponds to the emergence of tourist resorts between 1800 and 1914. The second one is about the transformation of the urbanity of cities since the second half of the 20th century.
This is a double urban tourism revolution fueling the urbanization process of societies. This proposal is an element of the tourism phenomenon, not a simple functional activity stuck in the support of urban organization. Taking it as a vector of affirmation, it is part of an attempt to renew the analysis of the urban world through the prism of the tourist phenomenon.
Tourism not only has the same essence as the definition of the contemporary city. At the same time, different associations between tourism and urbanity create urban places of different quality.
What is at issue here is to take an additional step by establishing a processual reflection from the tourist base to the city.
The urban world as we know it is something new. Its establishment was so rapid that some authors have evoked an urban revolution.
This can be described, for example, as this expression of the urban revolution, the sudden emergence of the city, the dominant and almost privileged mode of spatial organization of societies.
Multiple analyzes often emphasize the solid industrial origins of this urban revolution. For example, it is the third urban revolution that marked this emergence of the modern industrial metropolis by presenting the analysis as an urban-industrial capitalism.
In general, urban research has considered both a cause (industry) and a consequence (urban sprawl) of urbanization. However, the reality is more complex than that.
The perspective we want to develop here is tourism’s dominance in what we call the double urban revolution, and it splits into two levels:
– From a quantitative (the emergence of a significant number of new urban places) and qualitative (with other cities) perspectives, tourism takes place as a historical element of the urbanization of the world, with the emergence of urban places outside the cities.
– Tourism as a contemporary element of the existing urbanity of places that are cities: cities will be built around logics based specifically on the field of recreation.
Observing the Urban Revolution
It is necessary to grasp the different contributions of tourism in the production of urban spaces and to understand these successive urban revolutions produced by tourism. Here we propose an enriched definition of urbanity on the one hand, and a complex reflection of urbanity on the other.
Urban Diversity
We can reconstruct the definition of the city, this is how this new concept takes shape. The word urban should be distinguished from the city.
The city differs from the city precisely because it emerged and manifested itself during the city’s boom. But it makes it possible to rethink and even understand some aspects of it that have not been noticed for a long time.
Therefore, it is important to take as a starting point the idea that the city no longer expresses the urban phenomenon in isolation.
What can be called urbanity has certainly emerged in cities. But it’s essential features have become widespread and can now be described elsewhere.
The city should be taken as one of the specific features of today’s space, among many other genres. The concept of urbanity, then, enables us to appreciate the urban dimension of a place, that is, the organization of social objects within a given situation.
First of all, it can be argued that urbanism arises from the confluence of the density and diversity of social objects in space.
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These first two elements seem essential to determine the urban character of a place. However, this is not enough.
In fact, the capacity for polarization and centrality, defined as extreme importance, have gained importance. In particular, the location of services also plays a role in the fabric of urbanity through accessibility and symbolic centrality.
Finally, it is the quality of the public space that is defined as a place of anonymity. At the same time, the place of surveillance and confrontation is one of the elements that distinguishes big cities from small towns, tourist resorts from urban planning for the beautification of residential areas.
Since the connection between density, diversity, centrality and public space is at the heart of the definition of urbanity, we can formulate the thesis of the existence of a series of multiple combinations of these four basic elements.
The term urbanity constructed in this way makes it possible to distinguish both between the centre, the suburbs, and the periphery of cities.
It also makes it possible to distinguish degrees of urbanity between different types of cities. Every place, regardless of scale, can be evaluated according to its urban quality.
Based on these four attributes, this approach allows a systematic reading of the urban dimension of a place. However, it is not entirely satisfactory to understand all its complexity. Because one of the dimensions is missing.
In fact, urbanity is not simply a matter of the density and diversity of social realities present in one place.
More fundamentally, it is a matter of how individuals deal with these elements, how they structure them, how they organize infrastructures and make them effective.
Dr. Ya?am Ayavefe
Click the below links to view Dr. Yasam Ayavefe’s projects:
https://greenclimate.io/
