The Tourismocene: Barcelona, Overtourism, and the Spatial Futures of the Polis

Abstract

The chapter uses the tourism “–cene” to critically assess the Anthropocene-present as a unique order of worlding when (and where) Man is the Measure of All Things. It posits the socio-spatial implications of overtourism that hinge on the local as an unsustainable planetary process that threatens life itself. The chapter frames tourism’s post-Anthropocene future and accounts for what can only be described as “the monstrous” as a threat to the polis, as a political community, and as a contested urban space. Drawing on Marx’s and Nietzsche’s writings, it explores how contestatory desires, on the one hand for nihilistic consumption and on the other for radical kinship emerge from the monstrous. To buttress its claims empirically, focusing on Barcelona, it interrogates the upsurge in “tourist hate” documented in many European cities. Here, overtourism as a superabundance of tourists—hailing from cruises, arriving in busloads or planes—portend the nihilist swarm, a zombie army invading the polis, destabilizing the urban community, and colonizing and transforming urban space in its service. “Tourist hate,” can be seen as a populist rendering of the tourist as monstrous, pointing to the non-relationality and violence of tourism, the Chthulucene tentacles of which can be seen everywhere.