Exploring tourism ‘slow’ mobilities

Tourism is one of the main facets of the mobility of people, commodities and imaginaries. The increasing complexities of tourism, connected to the rise of the phenomenon in both quantitative and qualitative dimensions over the 20th century, have made tourism one of the eminent realms of observation among ‘new mobilities paradigm’ scholars in the social and human sciences. Tourism mobilities, combined with a number of recreational mobilities, are powerful agents of place-making and are often a ‘fast and furious’ force in space and place dynamics. However, the calls for sustainable, slow or even ‘sweet’ forms of tourism (the three Ss) challenge the disruptive character of tourism. In this contribution, we propose facing tourism mobilities starting from a critique of the variety of paces, rhythms and velocities that may denote tourism as framed by the three Ss. We conclude that tourism necessitates the mobility turn in order to provide deeper analytical accounts of its various relations with space, place and landscape, while at the same time the mobility turn continues needing tourism (and its continuously evolving and often contradictory practices) to feed the new mobilities paradigm.