Conclusion: Returning to Peripherality: The Social Experience of Urban Crisis

Abstract

This chapter examines how in Bulgaria and Spain, vast amounts of new and unfinished tourist housing and hotels became a point of European Union (EU) criticism after the 2008 financial crisis. It shows the reevaluation of coastal spaces amidst the crisis and considers how this relationship is indicative of a new sense of core and periphery, sometimes provoked by the tourism economy and its apparent failings after the economic crisis of 2008. Ecologically damaged coastal areas became public metaphors of dissatisfaction with the EU and painful reminders of a return to a peripheral or a hyphenated sense of European citizenship. This final section will connect failed urban spaces with the EU project as a whole and will consider if anti-corruption movements seek to activate stronger EU regulatory enforcement or to erode the EU’s fiscal and regulatory power.