Cities as mobility hubs: tackling social exclusion through ‘smart’ citizen engagement

Project Information

SMARTDEST

Grant agreement ID: 870753

DOI

10.3030/870753

Project closed

EC signature date 13 November 2019

Start date 1 January 2020

End date 30 September 2023

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Europe In A Changing World - Inclusive, Innovative And Reflective Societies

Total cost

€ 3 010 794,54

EU contribution

€ 3 010 794,54

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SMARTDEST (Cities as mobility hubs: tackling social exclusion through ‘smart’ citizen engagement)

Reporting period: 2021-01-01 to 2023-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the last few years, the increasing penetration of tourism in the everyday life of cities has started to produce conflicts, tensions, and paradoxes, like the rising cost of living, housing shortages, the congestion of public services and spaces, the casualisation of work, the transformation of place identities ... What resident communities in the most visited cities in Europe once considered a welcome source of wealth and employment, has started to be perceived as a major factor of disruption of community life and a vector of polarization and exclusion. SMARTDEST’s ambition is to contribute to an urban policy agenda that takes tourism mobilities seriously, at all levels of government. It thus sets on to study how urban inequalities are produced, lived, and coped with; and to bring out the social innovation potential from citizen engagement and collaboration, reconnecting and rescaling it to the formal policy domain for more resilient cities. Our research proceeds from the European scale, seeking for patterns of places facing similar problems, to the finer scale of eight case study cities, where we engage with local communities as informants, as well as policy and industry stakeholders as participants in the co-design of smart solutions. The results are shared with – and expected to influence future actions of – European stakeholders and concern communities.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The SMARTDEST project was articulated in 6 specific objectives tackled though 5 Work Packages, including a bundle of research tasks providing an analysis of tourism and associated mobilities as drivers of social exclusion and their spatial articulation over the European territory, one concerned with case study-based research on the production of urban inequalities, and one dedicated to direct engagement with stakeholders and communities of concern as co-designers of pathways of mitigation of social exclusion, besides the usual coordination, dissemination and ethics work packages. Through these streams of research and impact-making activities the SMARTDEST project has tackled 6 specific objectives. Four have to do with producing knowledge, data and analytics that represent advances in the understanding of the disruptive transformative force of tourism and related mobilities on urban environments and the inclusion of local communities, and the contextual and policy dimensions that could alter these results. One regards the value of bottom-up engagement with citizen in the coproduction of data and analytics and the codesign of solutions, and the latter the possibility to rescale these results at the formal policy level and transfer them to the European policy on inclusive cities.
The project planted three dimensions of impact (scientific, societal and policy) to be attained through various activities inscribed in a Dissemination, Exploitation and Communication strategy and targeting various ‘publics’. The scientific impacts have been above expectations, with 22 papers derived in high-impact journals and a wide presence at academic vents.
From a societal perspective, our outcomes clicked with the revamped interest for the disruptions created by tourism and related mobilities in the postpandemic recovery period. From a policy perspective the administrations of the cities with which we have worked as case studies have demonstrated interested in putting our insights at good use. At EU level we could connect with key organisations that having been involved in our events declared their interest to spread our tools and analytics among their networks for policy design.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

SMARTDEST’s overarching ambition was to make a significant contribution in the analysis of the exclusionary effects of tourism mobilities and related place transformations. Although research on the impacts of tourism is abundant, our approach brings in a novel attention to the agency of mobilities and the heterogeneous connections between different human and non-human mobilities, as well as the political dimensions which frame ‘negotiations’ for place assets.
At the end of the project, this has taken shape as a suite of publications, data generated, analytical tools, fieldwork experiences and participation processes at case study level (7) that has arguably contributed to populate a new phase of the debate on resilient cities under the forcefield of tourism mobilities.
The domains on research in which our project made the most outstanding contributions are the following:
1) The European geography of social exclusion vis-à-vis tourism mobilities and other forms of attractiveness
2) Housing affordability and residential displacement under the ‘touristification of housing’ both across the EU territory and in specific case study cities
3) The monocultural specialisation of city centres and the erosion of economic and place diversity
4) Tourism mobilities vs everyday mobility and the related urban conflicts
5) The nexus of disadvantaged labour in the tourist sector and precarious lives: the city of risk
6) Urban studentification and social exclusion, between hindrances to student mobilities and conflictive nightlife landscapes
7) Inclusive governance and responsible destination ecosystems, including insights on data democracy and the value of citizen science
In all these domains we have striven to propose original conceptual and analytical frameworks inspired by the ‘mobilities turn’ as well as empirical advances that could inform both communities and policymakers about the challenges faced, policy options available, scales and structures of government involved in the necessary reforms that this project has identified.
The progress we made beyond the state of the art refer to datasets and analytics, but most importantly to have given the voice to affected communities, crafting original characterisations of the most pressing issues faced by cities where inclusiveness and socially cohesion is at stake when becoming overtly dependent from and oriented to the attraction of tourists and other hypermobile and temporary populations.

Publication of a SMARTDEST presentation on specialized magazine

Picture of Vila-seca (Spain) kick-off meeting

Project Framework and Research Approach