Cities, Tourism and Sustainability (presentation)

Although beaches and mountains may often come to mind when thinking of tourism, the world’s cities are among its most important tourism attractions. There are many reasons for this which will be outlined briefly in the presentation. Furthermore, places that are good to live in are also places that are good to visit for both residents and visitors are looking for similar things: a safe and healthy environment, efficient transportation, lively cultural expressions, good shopping and so on. Thus, at first sight there is compatibility between the interests of residents and tourists and they can reinforce each other. However, tourism can also be regarded as an agent of urbanization for tourists need a place to live, if only temporarily, and are users of scarce resources such as water and energy, and generate more waste per capita than residents. Thus, they place increased stress on infrastructure of all kinds. Tourism is a major form of global change and is also impacted by other forces of global change. Many of these forces are concentrated in cities where they are superimposed upon one another: population growth, migration, globalization, environmental change, including climate change etc., creating pressing multi-dimensional problems that are focused on cities. Sustainable development has been proposed, particularly since the publication of “Our Common Future” in 1987, as an enlightened approach to the future and it has been enshrined in much legislation at a wide variety of scales but it has proven to be a difficult concept to work with and operationalize. Single sector approaches, such as sustainable tourism, are focused too narrowly to guide the move towards sustainability adequately. The promotion of sustainable livelihoods is an important refinement but, to date, it has been applied mostly in small poor communities in the developing world and its wider applicability remains to be explored and justified. Fortunately, urban tourism has some attributes that make it potentially more sustainable than many other forms of tourism: it is less seasonal, many activities are undertaken indoors, it is supported by substantial business and VFR markets, and residents from the broader region and further afield are needed to support many of the high-order functions that are concentrated in cities. At the same time, many cities are located in coastal locations and are, therefore, likely to be exposed to a full range of problems associated with climate change, such as more and more extreme events (such as storms and heat waves), coastal erosion, floods and droughts, and so on. These will be all the more challenging in that the infrastructure available to deal with these situations is often antiquated and designed for an earlier age. Leaving aside questions of costs and benefits, technical and financial feasibility, political will and so on, at and at the risk of oversimplification, I suggest that questions of urban sustainability, of which tourism is a part, can be subsumed under two major headings: infrastructure and governance. Much infrastructure is out of sight (since it is often under the ground) and often out of mind until it fails, but questions of water and energy supply, waste disposal, drainage, as well as transportation, are fundamental to the operation of urban areas, including tourism. Innovations in governance will be need to deal with the complex multi-sectoral problems that will occur.

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