The Economization of Urban Living in a Global Tourism Age: Extractivist and Alternative Paths in Naples and Brussels.

This dissertation examines the place-specific patterns that fuel the economization of precarious urban living in today’s culture-driven tourism industries and conversely initiate alternative approaches to urban knowledge production ‘beyond’ the tourist city. I show how the first set of patterns is highly dependent on the generation of ‘Southern’ urban imaginaries targeting the economic value-extraction of ’urban forms of life’, whereas I attribute the latter to the surge of resident-oriented tourism and trends to ‘re-know the city’. The dissertation consists of three stand-alone but interrelated chapters, each addressing a distinct phenomenon of today’s urban tourism reality while jointly contributing to a wider contention. The first chapter investigates the extractivist economization of precarious living in Naples in the platform-mediated tourism industry via the case of a local slum tourism startup. It questions the revisionist proposition of Southern urbanism’s affirmative notions of precarity and informality as drivers of agency and resilience. The second chapter explores the mutually reinforcing relationship between the film and tourism industry in the urban revival of a previously marginalised Neapolitan neighbourhood by introducing the concept of a ‘film industry-tourism complex’, that reifies the Neapolitan urban fabric as a precarious ‘living stage’. The final chapter centres a counter-position to the previous tendencies through an exploration of alternative practices of urban knowledge production, looking at critically-minded urban tours in Brussels. It discusses the role of ‘niche-producing’ knowledge within a post-tourist debate, between grand promotional urban narratives and ‘lived’ everyday experiences. Methodologically, this research combines ethnography, interviewing and participant observation. Ultimately, it shows both how the subsumption of precarity of urban life into value-extractive industries equally reinforces the precarious status of local industries themselves, as well as how possibilities of thinking tourism and the city ‘anew’ can be fostered.