Tourism and Marginalisation

Abstract The social (as opposed to environmental) harms of tourism are not yet much discussed in the philosophical literature. Nonetheless, residents in hyper-touristed areas commonly express sentiments of marginalisation and estrangement from the social practices present in their place of dwelling. In this paper, we argue that indeed, as common pre-theoretical ideas suggest, residents in a touristic neighbourhood can be marginalised in their relationship with tourists in a morally objectionable way, similarly to how longstanding residents may be marginalised with respect to gentrifiers in a gentrifying neighbourhood. An important difference, however, between the gentrification and tourism cases, is that while in the former residents and gentrifiers have a more-or-less stable relationship with each other, residents and tourists typically interact only in quite fleeting ways. This might seem to suggest that residents and tourists do not have the right kind of ongoing relationship that would make marginalisation possible in the first place. Here we contend that this is not the case, and in doing so we make two contributions to the literature. First, we present a refined conception of marginalisation, differentiate it from other relational wrongs, and explain how, though marginalisation does depend on an ongoing relationship, a relationship of the right kind is possible in spite of the transience of some of its members. Second, we explain how excessive tourism in particular might generate marginalisation in the spatially defined relationship among fellow users of a shared physical space. Thereby, we contribute to the assessment of the harms of overtourism, identifying a specific moral wrong that residents are likely to experience in certain touristic cities.