OVERVIEW

The course explores the selective geography imposed by the advent of a globalized touris's industry, particularly focusing 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.

The course will be held face to face in the classroom, except for any resurgence of the pandemic emergency that will require the return to the DAD on the Teams platform. Attending students will in any case be provided with reading texts and supplementary material through aulaweb.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

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. Focusing on the distiction between the different experiences of visiting and inhabitig/dwelling, it wil problematically conceptualize the notion of sustainability,  by assessing the main transformations tourist reconversion triggers in terms of commercialization, privatization of spaces, and the imposition of an attractive image on territories.

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

G. Salerno, Per una critica dell'economia turistica, Quodlibet, Macerata 2020.

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

L- Tozzi, L'invenzione di Milano. Culto della comunicazione e politiche urbane, Cronopio, Venezia 2023

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD

Exam Board

FEDERICO RAHOLA (President)

NICOLETTA VARANI

LESSONS

LESSONS START

October 16th  2023

Class schedule

TOURISM AND TERRITORIAL RESTRUCTURING PROCESSES

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