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The purpose of this paper is to respond to recent debates surrounding the observable proliferation and intensification of controversies and disputes surrounding urban tourism. It argues that coming to terms with conflicts about and around tourism in cities represents an important frontier for research and puts forth some observations about its causes and characteristics, the debates they have sparked and the scholarly engagement with them to date.

Literature from international sources was reviewed to identify key themes relating to conflicts about and around tourism.

The paper outlines important aspects to consider when studying conflicts about and around tourism in cities, including, first, the role of urban tourism’s massive and often rapid growth; second, the fact that backlashes in cities are often less directed against tourism in its entirety than against particular kinds of tourism (or tourists); third, the need to look at contestations surrounding urban tourism not in isolation from, but in firm connection to the more general rise of struggles and protests in and about urban space unfolding in cities worldwide; fourth, the extent to which contestations are linked to the ongoing, and, it seems, accelerating, geographical spread of tourism; and, finally, the need to critically engage with the notion of tourism itself and move beyond essentialising narratives that portray tourism as an altogether distinct, easily separable social phenomenon.

The paper brings together a scattered, although substantive, literature in and around tourism-related conflicts in order to provide points of orientation and inspiration for future research.

The purpose of the chapter is twofold. First, it discusses the causes and characteristics of the current proliferation of rail station area redevelopment megaprojects around the globe, revealing them to be an important subset of the new generation of megaprojects discussed in this volume. Second, it offers a detailed and timely account of recent struggles surrounding “Stuttgart 21,” a massive, hugely controversial rail station redevelopment megaproject in Southern Germany, drawing lessons from the controversy over Stuttgart 21 for urban megaprojects more generally. This study is a qualitative case study analysis that involved interviews and document analysis. The experience of “Stuttgart 21” validates previous criticisms of megaprojects regarding transparency and public accountability in decision-making, environmental challenges, and cost-overruns. The political conflicts over “Stuttgart 21” are intimately tied to fundamental disagreements over future urban development and transportation policy, the costs and benefits of multibillion Euro megaprojects, and related democratic decision-making procedures. Rail stations emerge as an important, as-of-yet underexplored subset of urban megaprojects. Rail stations, especially those serving new high-speed rail corridors, are crucial development nodes within complex postindustrial urban–regional restructuring processes. But they also have a distinct character and historical identity. As the mass protests in Stuttgart show, they also clearly serve important identification functions in citizens’ lives.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the administrative problematisations of conflict-prone urban tourism (e.g. noise) as political processes predetermining the future of city tourism. It is shaped by today’s administrative ways of knowing increasing visitor pressure as an issue for urban (tourism) development.

The problematisation of conflictive urban tourism in Berlin is used as case study and lens to analyse how administrative bodies see conflictive tourism like a tourist city. Drawing on Mariana Valverde’s idea of Seeing Like a City (2011), the paper demonstrates how disparate governmental bodies see and reduce the complexity of conflicts resulting from tourism in order to handle it. The authors use policy documents as the basis for the analysis.

The paper provides empirical insights about how political knowledge on urban tourism conflicts is produced in Berlin. The marginalisation of these conflicts on the federal state level seemingly aces out the calls for action on the borough level (Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg). According to these disparate modes of problematisation, older and younger governmental gazes on conflictive tourism and its future relevance interrelate in contingent combination.

This paper fills a gap in the existing urban tourism literature, by focussing on the definition of policy problems by governmental bodies as powerfully linked to the availability of solutions.

The aim of this book is to understand the causes and consequences of new scales and forms of territorial and spatial restructuring in a context of accelerated globalization by focusing on a diverse array of urban megaproject developments that, in various forms and with various objectives, are transforming the global urban landscape at the outset of the 21st century. The contributions to this volume explore the architectural design, planning, management, financing, and impact of urban megaprojects, as well as the social actors and innovations driving them. The contributions also articulate the various socioeconomic, political, and cultural causes and consequences of UMP development, thus providing a context to understand the reconfiguration of urban spaces in the new millennium.

Judit Bodnar is an associate professor of sociology, anthropology, and history at the Central European University in Budapest. She is a U.S.-trained sociologist with a degree from Johns Hopkins University. The author of Fin de Millėnaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of urban life (University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and co-editor of Critical urban studies (L’Harmattan, Budapest, forthcoming), she has written on cities, public space, urban theory, postsocialism, globalization, food, and alterglobalization movements. Her research and teaching interrogate larger themes such as modernity, capitalism, uneven development, and comparative thinking. She is working on a co-authored book that examines local histories of global urban restructuring through a comparative analysis of new housing in Chicago, Berlin, and Budapest.

Overtourism is an emerging concept and a perennial process every destination is going through. It is a cyclic phenomenon derived from the destination, retained in the destination and at last demised by the destination. It's a kind of ‘tourism illness’ spreading rapidly in every destination in the present scenario. The status of overtourism in every destination has been caused by the tourist, of the tourist and for the tourist. In the context of religious places in Odisha, overtourism is a ‘disorder’ that cannot be mitigated, as religiosity, faith and spiritualism have propelled and governed people's sentiment and emotion. Hence ambiguity arises out of making an intrigue situation between a myth or a spiritual sojourn bounded by faith and belief. This chapter significantly contributes by unfolding the existing literature by providing the origin and evolution of overtourism, various stated definitions by the different authors, causes and consequences, and overtourism in religious destinations by adopting an exploratory study, particularly in case of the Golden triangle of Odisha.