Tourism infrastructures

Abstract

Tourism is both infrastructured and infrastructuring. Such a claim speaks to a much wider infrastructural turn unfolding within the humanities and social sciences that has sought to take seriously both the material and social strata that undergird our ways of life, what Berlant has called the ‘living mediation of what organises life: the lifeworld of structure’ (2016, p. 393). Conventional understandings of infrastructure often rely upon physical and biological metaphors to contemplate the roads, systems, pipes, cables, connections, buildings, routes, regulations and signs that act as grounds, supports, foundations and substrates that facilitate movement and exchange. Certainly, tourism and infrastructure should be easy bedfellows given that infrastructure is primarily understood as the material networks that connect places–that facilitate the mobility of bodies, goods, ideas, data, capital and much more. This paper examines the relationship between tourism and infrastructure as it intersects with predominant geopolitical circulations such as war, security and migration. In considering how the field has addressed this relationship, and where it is going, we contemplate, literally, the roads and verges and other infrastructural formations which are bound up in tourism, but which also signal its more leaky and uncertain boundaries and its contamination with other social and political practices.