The
Revolt Against Tourism
By ELIZABETH BECKER
JULY 17, 2015 /
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/opinion/sunday/the-revolt-against-tourism.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
COPENHAGEN — AS we
glide under a bridge on the city canal tour, our guide announces that
we have entered a quiet zone. “This is a residential area,” she
says, nodding toward balconies where Danes are enjoying coffee — or
maybe wine. “I’ll resume talking in five minutes.”
Denmark is one of
the world’s top destinations for conferences and a mainstay of
trans-Atlantic cruise ships. Attracted by noir detective series and
fashionable cuisine, nine million tourists last year visited this
city, a record for Denmark, which has fewer than six million people.
The “quiet zones”
are emblematic of the Danish philosophy toward tourists: They should
blend in with the Danish way of life, not the other way around. The
Danes have prohibited foreigners from buying vacation cottages on
their seacoasts; devised their famous bicycle-friendly transportation
system to include tourists; and strictly limited bars and restaurants
from taking over Copenhagen.
The question, says
Henrik Thierlein, a spokesman for the city’s tourism office, is:
“How do you take advantage of the growth in tourism and not be
taken over by mass tourism?”
Outraged by
tourists’ boorish and disrespectful behavior, and responding to the
complaints of their constituents, local officials around the world
have begun to crack down on tourism, and the tourism industry, even
in the face of opposition from their national governments, which want
the tax revenue from tourists.
Barcelona, a city of
1.6 million that receives over seven million people a year,
represents the turn toward regulation. Taxis and tour buses have
taken over entire neighborhoods, while souvenir shops and bars have
displaced pharmacies and greengrocers.
The city’s mayor,
Ada Colau, 41, who was elected in May, announced a one-year ban on
new tourist accommodation citing the swarms of students who have all
but taken over the Ciutat Vella, or Old City, of Barcelona. Last
August, hundreds of residents erupted in spontaneous protest after
images of three Italian tourists wandering naked in the neighborhood
of La Barceloneta were circulated online. Her greatest worry, Ms.
Colau says, is Barcelona’s turning into Venice.
In Asia, alarm has
centered on Chinese tourists; there are more of them than from any
other nation. China began loosening severe travel restrictions only
about 25 years ago, and the rapid rise of the middle class has sent
curious — but often naïve, rude or even destructive — visitors
throughout Southeast Asia.
In Thailand a
Chinese tourist was recently caught on video ringing and kicking
sacred bells at a Buddhist temple as if he was in a game arcade.
There have been
reports of Chinese tourists littering beaches and even defecating in
public. One tourist even opened the door of an airplane, as it
prepared for takeoff, reportedly to get fresh air. The Chinese
government responded by promising to set up a tourist black list to
ban notorious known offenders from traveling overseas for up to two
years.
Of course, the
Chinese aren’t the only culprits. In Cambodia, half a dozen
foreigners, including three Frenchmen and two American sisters, were
deported in February for posing nude in the temples at Angkor. I was
in Cambodia when the scandal broke, leading a discussion near the
temples about protecting cultural sites visited by tourists. The
authorities are now considering a code of conduct that would ban not
only nudity, but also the touching of ruins.
Bhutan, wary of
uncontrolled tourism, is going further — it has restricted the
number of tourism visas, curbed hotel construction and imposed a high
tariff on tourism, all part of a strategy of “low-volume and
high-value tourism.”
Battles like these
have even reached the tourism-friendly United States.
A decade after
Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, city officials have eyed
tourism as the best path for a revival. But homeowners in the French
Quarter complain that the city fails to properly enforce zoning and
noise regulations, inviting the party crowd into their streets. Last
year, residents of Charleston unsuccessfully sued to block the South
Carolina ports authority from opening up the port to more and larger
cruise ships.
Tensions are bound
to get worse. Notwithstanding worry about carbon emissions, more of
the world’s peoples are crossing borders for leisure than ever
before. Now tourism accounts for one in 11 jobs worldwide.
In 2012 the global
tourism industry counted a record one billion trips abroad, and many
more tourists travel within their home countries. Travel contributes
$7.6 trillion to the global economy, nearly half the entire economic
output of the United States.
One reason tourism
is hard to regulate is its positive associations, not only with
pastime and leisure but also with cultural prestige. People are proud
of the vistas, landmarks and monuments that their homelands are best
known for. So efforts to regulate tourism aren’t always popular.
France is an
exception, which is remarkable given that it is also the most-visited
country in the world. In the 1950s, with American aid from the
Marshall Plan, the French government used tourism to help rebuild the
country. They discovered that tourism, when done properly, could
underwrite the protection and nurturing of France’s culture,
landscape and way of life.
In practical terms,
that means tourism is promoted and subsidized, but also regulated, at
all levels of government, in all matters of policy.
Tourism is
considered, for example, in plans for preserving and protecting the
countryside, the vineyards, forests, small villages and small farms,
the coastline, the bicycling routes and the ski slopes. (France is
the world’s top skiing destination.) French officials debate
whether Bordeaux needs another five-star hotel; which ski resort in
the French Alps needs another lift; whether Provence needs more
vacation rental homes.
The rules are
enforced with impartiality. The special favors and corruption that
mar tourism in other countries are mostly absent in France.
Patrimony and
tourism feed each other. France invented the first Ministry of
Culture and then spread festivals around the country to send visitors
far from Paris: music in Aix-en-Provence, film and advertising in
Cannes; photography in Perpignan and dance in Montpelier. Bordeaux
undertook a mammoth 15-year restoration of its 18th-century historic
center — a project as complicated as Boston’s Big Dig — with
tourism in mind, as Alain Juppé, the mayor (and a former prime
minister of France), told me.
Like Copenhagen,
Paris uses noise and zoning laws to keep tourism from getting out of
control. And it handles the flow of tourists with the seriousness of
a military operation.
The Eiffel Tower,
with seven million visitors each year, is the world’s most heavily
visited paid attraction. Tickets are limited and timed to the
half-hour. Visitors move up and down under the watch of discreet
guards. The gardens surrounding the tower are kept manicured by a
full-time crew of 38 workers. Loitering is forbidden; street vendors
are strictly regulated. Similar restrictions apply for other tourist
spots, like the gardens of Claude Monet in nearby Giverny. Paris is,
first of all, for Parisians.
That was illustrated
last month in a rare standoff between tourists and locals. For
several years, tourists had disfigured the Pont des Arts by hanging
padlocks on the pedestrian span as a sign of love. Parisians despised
these “love locks.” After several compromises failed, the city
government removed them.
The United Nations
World Tourism Organization projects that by 2030, global tourism will
reach 1.8 billion trips a year. It is now so big that it will
inevitably be part of conversations about climate change, pollution
and migration. Without serious government attention, many beloved
places will be at risk of being trammeled and damaged — what those
in the tourism industry call being loved to death.
A former New York
Times reporter and the author of “Overbooked: The Exploding
Business of Travel and Tourism.”
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