The Cultural Ecology of Tourism: Life-Capital Conflict in Post-2008 Spain

• Autores: Luis Iñaki Prádanos
• Localización: The Routledge Hispanic studies companion to twentieth and twenty-first century Spain: ideas, practices, imaginings / coord. por Eduardo Ledesma, Luisa Elena Delgado, 2025, ISBN 978-1-032-96468-3, págs. 63-76
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 1 Cita
• Resumen

  • Several cultural historians have remarked on the importance of tourism in shaping discourses and ideologies about Spanish regional and national identities. These contributions have inserted a critical angle into tourism studies, an academic field with a problematic history. However, these interventions by cultural scholars tend to overlook the metabolism of tourism, namely the social and ecological consequences of the massive flows of materials and energy it mobilizes. For this reason, a convergence of cultural studies and urban political ecology is fundamental to understand the complexity of tourism and its key role in promoting the culture of global capitalism and its neoliberal rationality in the Euro-Mediterranean region. This chapter combines cultural studies and urban political ecology to show how the dominant framings around tourism in Spain conceal the pathological sociospatial dynamics set into motion by their infrastructures. Today, the celebration of tourism is only possible if we ignore its toxic metabolism and can only be maintained through a constant dissemination of outdated stories and metaphors propagated by misguided or blindly inaccurate assumptions that completely diminish or hide its social and environmental costs. A growing number of counterhegemonic cultural manifestations are currently focused on the metabolism and operational landscapes of tourism to not only contest the dominant narratives but also create new frames and metaphors. If these critical cultural manifestations continue to proliferate, they could potentially erode the dominant frames of the industry and, with it, dismantle the overarching dominant imaginary of economic growth.