Tourism, Urban Governance and Public Space

This paper considers the relationship between tourism development, urban governance and urban public space. It focuses on the way that ‘new urban governance’ mediates the activities and interests of mobile capital and consumption on the one hand, and the spaces of everyday life on the other which are increasingly subject to ‘urban renaissance’ strategies and spectacularizations as tourist attractions. By drawing on research undertaken in York, England, the paper illustrates the socio-spatial issues at stake for urban centres that have used tourism and culture as major drivers of economic development. Finally, it challenges the axiomatic status of the local/tourist dualism in various tourism management discourses as being inadequate for understanding how tourism articulates with socio-spatial mobility generally, and how this raises difficult issues in relation to urban citizenship and the governance of urban public space.