Urban landscapes in the post-tourist age. Towards an analytic framework.

Abstract

The basic distinction between urban populations on which the analysis of the "tourist function" of the contemporary city is based, that is among residents and not-resident, is getting blurred, both for what regards its correspondence with alternative landscapes, and in the discourse on the ‘urban’ and the ‘touristic’. In fact, new "interstitial" emerge within the context of the multiplication of the ways of living the contemporary city, differing both from traditional tourists and from residents, on account of the duration or "liquidity" of their stays, and the type of relationships that they web –and interventions they perform– in the urban landscape. A new analytic framework is thus proposed, that allows identifying and mapping the "new urban users" –isolating the figures already known from the most indeterminate, that are the target of an original research based on the ethnographic method. The case of Barcelona and of its 'neo-Bohemians' is extremely relevant in the understanding of how the practices of this almost unknown group of urban users - because not formally settled as resident or counted in tourist statistics - and their capacity of weaving relationships with other groups, can represent an opportunity of detaching the tourist landscape from the elements of immobility, segregation and emulation, that condemn them to be foreign bodies in the social fabric of the city.