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There's a great article by Hans Magnus Enzensberger called A Theory Of Tourism which goes into this: https://mestrantroponova.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/hans-m

There's a great article by Hans Magnus Enzensberger called A Theory Of Tourism which goes into this: https://mestrantroponova.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/hans-magnus-enzensberger.pdf https://mestrantroponova.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/hans-ma... [PDF, 1MB] The issue is that there's effectively no "good" level of tourism (unless you sell things to tourists I suppose). Edit: The analysis itself starts on the third page, after comparing and contrasting two travel journals from centuries apart.

hinkley 5y ago
Paris has more tourists than college towns have students. I’m not sure what Paris would look like with a negligible tourist population, but it would be quite different. Who maintains the historical buildings? Le Mėtro? Straight tax dollars alone won’t cover it without the tourist subsidies.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  Without the tourist euro, they’d just get the rest of France to pay for it. But it is a functioning capital city, most of what goes on there isn’t related to tourism. Museums sure were empty last year when I was there.
Miraste 5y ago
How incredibly bitter, you'd think tourists killed his mother. Some of the points hold true but others have changed since the 50s: guided tours and hotels are much less in vogue than they were and the advent of internet reviews applied to everything has both diluted the crowds at the "sights," aside from the world-famous ones, and allowed for more individualized experiences even in tourist-heavy areas, provided one does one's own planning. AirBnB has even returned staying in local homes to fashion, albeit through the medium of capitalism. I suspect Enzensberger would, if rewriting the essay, cast these changes as yet emptier commodities without even the humanity of a travel agent mediated by faceless megacorporations, but based on the original I don't think tourism has evolved as soullessly as he expected.

hinkley 5y ago

Paris has more tourists than college towns have students. I’m not sure what Paris would look like with a negligible tourist population, but it would be quite different. Who maintains the historical buildings? Le Mėtro? Straight tax dollars alone won’t cover it without the tourist subsidies.

Scoundreller 5y ago
Without the tourist euro, they’d just get the rest of France to pay for it. But it is a functioning capital city, most of what goes on there isn’t related to tourism. Museums sure were empty last year when I was there.

Miraste 5y ago

How incredibly bitter, you'd think tourists killed his mother. Some of the points hold true but others have changed since the 50s: guided tours and hotels are much less in vogue than they were and the advent of internet reviews applied to everything has both diluted the crowds at the "sights," aside from the world-famous ones, and allowed for more individualized experiences even in tourist-heavy areas, provided one does one's own planning. AirBnB has even returned staying in local homes to fashion, albeit through the medium of capitalism. I suspect Enzensberger would, if rewriting the essay, cast these changes as yet emptier commodities without even the humanity of a travel agent mediated by faceless megacorporations, but based on the original I don't think tourism has evolved as soullessly as he expected.