OVERVIEW

The course explores the selective geography the advent of a globalized tourism industry has imposed, focusing in particular on the main social, cultural and economic effects triggered by the competition between sites and locations in their attempt to offer an “attractive” image on a global market.

AIMS AND CONTENT

LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course will provide students with theoretical and descriptive tools to critically assessing the main processes of social, cultural and political transformation affecting local territories. Focusing on the transition from industrial production into a renewed, essentially symbolic and touristic economy, students will be confronted with the main strategies adopted in order to make a place ‘attractive’, as well as with the possible disruptions, erasures and elisions triggered in the process, thus improving their consciousness of the complex and stratified nature defining the historicity of every place.

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

Working on specific cases, students will acquire a series of conceptual tools and critical skills to evaluate the different social, economic, political, and cultural impacts of the transition to a tourism-based economy. Particularly, they will be able to read the new social and territorial hierarchies that this transition has imposed, by recognizing the selective effects of the territorial marketing processes and the interplay of lights and shadows these processes in turn determine.

TEACHING METHODS

The course  is organized on two distinct moments: a first one, more theoretical, where to outline the main transformations imposed by the tourist reconversion of three kinds of environments (urban, coastal and rural); a second one, shorter and in seminar form, organized on the basis of reading groups on texts provided by the teacher and aimed at carrying out individual or group research, through the research tools and the methodological approach of social ethnography.

Due to the Covid-19 emergency, the lessons will be in remote, trhough the Teams platform

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

Professor Lagomarsino, having only a few hours of lessons in this course, will follow the program proposed by prof. Federico Rahola focusing on some laboratory activities planned in the second part of the course

The course focuses on the progressive centrality of the tourism industry in Western  postindustrial economies. Retracing the recent history of tourism, from the original elitist dimension to the current global and mass declination, it will reconstruct the overall entity of the phenomenon, its capacity to move capital, impose logistical infrastructures, redesign architecture and modify the physiognomy of overall territories. Dealing in particular with three macro-environments or areas (urban, rural and the coast) it will critically focus on the main transformations the tourist reconversion triggers in terms of commercialization, privatization of spaces, and the imposition of an attractive image, thus exploring its potential  contradictions and social and ecological costs.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aa. Vv. 2017, The Devices of Tourism/I dispositivi del turismo, Lo Squaderno 45/2107

 (http://www.losquaderno.professionaldreamers.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/losquaderno45.pdf)

M. D'Eramo,2018, Il selfie del mondo. Indagine sull'età del turismo, Feltrinelli, Milano

L. Osborne, 2006,  The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall, London: North Point Press 

L. Tozzi, Dopo il turismo, nottetempo, Roma 2020

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD

Exam Board

FEDERICO RAHOLA (President)

GUIDO FRANCO AMORETTI

LESSONS

LESSONS START

October, 5th, 2020

Class schedule

The timetable for this course is available here: Portale EasyAcademy

EXAMS

EXAM DESCRIPTION

Attending students have to participate to reading groups and, at the end of the course, to make an individual or collective presentation where to discuss a research autonomously realized whose argument will be established together with the teacher; as an alternative, they may have an oral test concerning the arguments of the course and the  recommended books . Non-attending students will have to make an oral exam concerning recommended books.

ASSESSMENT METHODS

Both in case of an individual or collective presentation of specific researches, and in case of a speech, the exam will verify student’s appropriate knowledge and understanding of the social and spatial dynamics involved in the processes of touristic conversion, verifying his/her ability to critically read the transformation that affect the concerned territories.

Exam schedule