Abstract

Guest editorial Maria Gravari-Barbas, Sébastien Jacquot and Francesca Cominelli Maria Gravari-Barbas, Sébastien Jacquot and The end of tourism? Francesca Cominelli are all based at the IREST, Universite In 2017, the Copenhagen Tourism Bureau declared the “End of Tourism!”, adding “as we Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, know it[1]”. If, after more than two centuries of steady development, the “end of Tourism as we Paris, France. know it” is finally upon us, the main stage where its demise is being acted out is in our cities. Our cities were the backdrop to the first organized mass anti-tourism demonstrations (Colomb and Novy, 2017). They have been the primary victims of “overtourism”, a subject extensively discussed in the tourism literature in recent years (Popp, 2012; Seraphin et al., 2018). City tourism has also been used as a lever for opening the debate on more global urban problems, such as insufficient affordable housing, galloping gentrification in central neighbourhoods (Gravari-Barbas and Guinand, 2017) and changes in the urban fabric of local communities brought about by corporate development (Sdino and Magoni, 2018; Sonntag et al., 2018). However, research has recently begun to look at cities not just as the main setting for the “end of tourism” but