Amsterdam is laying down a model for what tourism should look like after COVID

When COVID-19 hit the Netherlands in 2020, Amsterdam emptied of visitors overnight. Long-term residents , inured to the permanent noise and litter and tourists peeing in the streets, welcomed the newfound tranquility. The pandemic, they told The Washington Post, was “a blessing in disguise”.

Amsterdammers aren’t the only city dwellers to perceive the current pause as a much needed relief. From Kyoto to Venice, residents see a return to prepandemic tourist numbers as a threat, not a promise.

For years, we’ve been told that tourism needs to be sustainable, without much consensus on what sustainable tourism looks like.

Broadly conceived as the ability to manage adversity, resilience is touted as coping with uncertainty and change, stress and shock. Resilience was Time magazine’s environmental buzzword of the year in 2013.

The pandemic has, of course, brought global tourism to a virtual standstill. Up to 120 million jobs were threatened. So thinking about how this industry, which previously supported one-in-ten jobs worldwide, might cope with the stress and shock of COVID is no bad thing.

However, critical geographers and political sociologists alike have warned that the concept of resilience is in danger of becoming as empty a notion as sustainability. Critics argue though that, in the social world, we deal not with equilibrium structures, but constant flux. In a city, there is no return to normal state. Instead, cities adapt.

More broadly, resilience thinking is deemed inherently conservative. With the emphasis it places on bouncing back, it is underscores reactive and short-term solutions. These distract from the need to address the root causes of major challenges.

It is also not as harmless a theory as it may seem. Rebuilding after hurricane Katrina in 2005 came at enormous social cost, when the city privileged economic gain over the needs of marginalized communities.

Resilience is nonetheless an elastic concept, and it is increasingly associated not only with the ability to bounce back after a setback, but also to bounce forward – to a new and better state. The UK government’s slogan “Build Back Better,” has become the mantra for myriad post-COVID ambitions, particularly with regard to tourism.

That said, as travel restrictions are lifted and the cruise ships return to Venice’s St Mark’s Square, mere weeks after the Italian government promised they wouldn’t, it looks like this golden opportunity to rethink tourism has been lost.

Governments generally seem more interested in a return to business as usual than in thinking about how much tourism we can actually afford. Calls to come up with a fairer, less exploitative model have, at best, been met with a muted political response. Governments appear loath to discourage business trips, despite climate scientists advocating for less air travel, because they bring in money.

Any attempt to make tourism truly resilient, however, has to address the tourism sector’s carbon footprint and its injustices and ethical quandaries.

In this respect, Amsterdam presents an interesting model. COVID has accelerated the implementation of several measures under consideration well before the pandemic took hold. The city has adopted ordinances that variously prevent souvenir shops from displacing local businesses, developers from turning residential spaces into holiday lets, and new hotels from being built.

Elsewhere, it has hiked up the tax tourists pay for overnight stays and introduced measures to reduce the so-called incivilities (littering, public urination) they unthinkingly leave behind.

More broadly, it has become the first city ever to embrace British economist Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics model for sustainable development. This theory centers on the environment and the basic needs of its citizens as opposed to economic growth. The council has pledged to use it as a guideline for all future policies that govern urban life – from emissions regulations to fixing the city’s housing crisis.

It is still too early to say whether these efforts will pay off. Without a similarly bold rethink, though, more residents will likely rebel against the touristification of their communities. If, on the other hand, more cities follow the Dutch capital’s example (as Copenhagen, Brussels, Dunedin in New Zealand and Nanaimo in Canada are reportedly doing), the idea of a real bounce forward might indeed apply. (The Conversation/ Reuters)