Vol 2 - Issue 1

City and Tourism

List of Articles

Events in the city: between attractiveness and negative externalities. Through events, it is the staging, storytelling and production of a renewed tourist offer that is in question. The commercial, cultural and sports city questions in more ways than one. What are the lasting effects of the ephemeral in urban areas and for whom? Citizens, consumers, elected officials and national and international tourists show and think differently about the mega-event according to their interests and practices. The instrumentalization of events also involves pre and post-event assessments and support processes for infrastructures (convention and fair grounds or Olympic village) and public spaces bequeathed (seafront urban leisure facilities ) .The renewed attractiveness to attract more and more tourists comes up against the Sustainable Development Goals. The negative externalities mentioned in the various articles in this special issue of City & Tourism show that it is necessary to reflect upstream on the meaning that the actors wish to give to their event, its societal repercussions, and the limits, beliefs conveyed to this subject.

By adapting the creative city model to the local context, Saint-Etienne has been implementing an urban policy since the mid-1990s with the aim of renewing its urban tissue and producing a dynamic urban image. With design as a marker, local public and private actors have had recourse to events, emblematic architectural or urban achievements, a heritage policy of labelling and to the development of a creative tourism offer. By combining analyses of discourses and documents, observations of individual and collective practices during events or in transformed places with the analysis of the spaces themselves, this analytical and exploratory study discusses the articulations, transformations and tensions between the event-based and the creative in the thinking, the making and the practice of the urban.

Sporting mega-events, such as the Football World Cup and the Olympic Games, are among the major marketing tools for territories. However, they can generate innumerable problems when they are organized by developing or emerging countries. Indeed, in these countries, the impacts are greater because the supply of services and infrastructure is not yet sufficiently supported and only a limited range of the local population benefits from the investments made. The general objective of this article is to understand the perception of part of the local population of Rio de Janeiro of the sports mega-events in Brazil, from a socio-territorial point of view and in terms of tourism. From an ethnographic approach, we show that the most vulnerable groups suffer the negative effects of such mega-events (expropriations and evictions of the population residing in priority investment areas). The creation of a real state of exception in the territory of the city of Rio de Janeiro, combining gentrification and social sanitation, has caused conflicts between a city designed for inhabitants and a city designed for sports tourists. However, the planning and organization of these sporting events could have taken place according to other logics.

The Olympic and Paralympic Games generate expectations in terms of tourist attraction, but the ex post literature relativizes them due to crowding out effects. In order to understand these possible effects in 2020 in Tokyo and those likely to take place in Paris in 2024, two surveys were carried out with 305 international tourists in Tokyo and 1,265 international and French tourists in Paris respectively. If the pandemic has called into question the interest of research for Tokyo, since the JOP, postponed to 2021, took place without spectators, these surveys nevertheless make it possible to draw a certain number of lessons on the type of tourists likely to divert from Paris in 2024.

Through a case study, we will analyze the creation of an innovative attractiveness agency for Toulouse, taking action on a national scale as a first in terms of territorial governance for business tourism, events and leisure activities integrated into the same structure. The Toulouse Métropole Attractiveness Agency, created in January 2017 by the merger of three pre-existing entities, makes it possible to identify the current debates that arise for the major French cities and the objectives to be achieved. We produce a general reflection on urban tourism and the various devices to lead to a more efficient touristic system and above all to bring our country up to standard regarding the use of digital data (data). As for the part of the event for this metropolis of southwestern Europe, it is important through the identity construction of an aeronautics capital but also the creation of modern infrastructures such as La Halle de La Machine. The role of the metropolises is that of real gateways for the tourist territory, in this sense the metropolises can develop the attractiveness of the territories by establishing new consultations and development tools through the different forms of tourism and with events as a brand creator in the context of urban marketing.