“Berlin Does Not Love You”

Abstract

The word "Berlin," a crossed-out heart, a capital "U," and an unmistakable message: when the by now notorious "Berlin does not love you" stickers first appeared in the city in the summer of 2011, there was considerable commotion.However, the stickers really shouldn't have been a surprise, since they didn't simply materialize from nothing, but rather reflected a conflict that had been emerging for a considerable period of time, one which the media had already long-since taken notice of.Whereas Berlin's business elites and politicians had been intoxicated by constant new records in the number of visitors, and the booming tourism branch was stylized, with the enthusiastic support of the media, as a kind of savior for the economically troubled city, many residents particularly in the inner city have reacted far less enthusiastically to the constantly increasing flood of visitors in their neighborhoods.While often far more reflective than portrayed by the media, their criticism of and resistance against the increased deluge of tourists has led to heated debates about the way tourism impacts urban space and the role tourism plays in wider processes of urban change.It is a debate that is long overdue and surely worth having but that occasionally gets caught up in unwarranted tourist bashing and anti-tourist rhetoric.This contribution argues that it makes no sense to make tourists the target of political conflicts and that all attention should instead be directed at the politics that have not only tolerated but rather have actively encouraged the steamrolling of many of the city's neighborhoods by tourism and other forms of place consumption.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.