Call for papers

Itinera 1.2027

Special Issue

The City: Practices, Performances, Experiences Between Everyday Life and Tourism

The special issue will explore the city as palimpsest of aesthetic practices and experiences rooted in both the everyday life of the inhabitants and the imaginary of travellers. In particular, the call aims to collect reflections and contributions on the impact of tourism as a diversified set of spatial practices poised between openness to the encounter with places and their "aesthetic consumption”. Tourism, as a historically stratified practice, incorporates both aesthetic and extra-aesthetic habits regulated by norms and exceptions. Its impact on cities and environments operates at two levels: 1) it modifies the inhabitants’ perception of the city’s aesthetic qualities and potentials; 2) it transforms the very structure of the city, splitting it into neighbourhoods (usually, though not exclusively, the central ones) that are staged to satisfy the aesthetic expectations of mass tourism and “back regions” for locals and long-time residents. The special number welcomes contributions that investigate tourism from both the perspective of the history of ideas and its interplay with different aesthetic practices based on neighbourhoods’ life, local artistic scene, the bodily perception of city center, museums, galleries, parks, and public art. Since the impact of tourism on aesthetic habits, perceptions, and experiences varies considerably across cities, papers dedicated to specific case studies are also welcome.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of topics suitable for contribution:

• The emergence of philosophical aesthetics as an autonomous discipline in the mid-18th century coincides with the stabilization of the concept of the landscape as a specifically aesthetic way of considering places, the spread of landscape painting, and the development of tools to intensify the aesthetic experience of places (from the "Claude glass" used in picturesque travels described by Gilpin to the invention of the diorama in performing arts and natural science galleries). These relationships can be investigated historically.
• Places evoke judgments of taste through direct (bodily) or mediated experiences (via illustrations, narratives, audio-visual accounts from grassroots or authoritative sources). How widely shared judgments of taste regarding places and landscapes are shaped by images in the arts, in tourism marketing, and on social media remains an open question.
• Tourism is a site where some of the most significant tensions of contemporary aesthetic debate concretely manifest themselves: the visual versus the immersive, the contemplative versus the performative, planning versus improvisation, habit versus shock, and attunement versus disorientation.
• Different types of tourism evoke distinct aesthetics: resort tourism involves an aesthetic of simulation, naturalistic tourism raises questions of environmental aesthetics, and urban tourism engages with issues of urban aesthetics, cultural heritage, and everyday aesthetics. Generational diversity among tourists further differentiates practices and their aesthetic implications: issues of authenticity and exoticism, categories laden with aesthetic meaning, can arise.
• The impact of tourism on its objects—places—can be observed in processes involving planning, management, and the transformation and manipulation of cityscapes and landscapes. Other processes linked to tourism, such as the heritage-making of historic centers and gentrification, as well as forms of resistance and contestation, presuppose shared and discordant aesthetic values.
• The question of art spaces, such as museums, galleries, parks, concert arenas, and public art sites, intersects closely with models of tourist valorization and the construction and social circulation of taste and niches of cultural consumption.

Schedules:

Submission of full papers: December 31, 2026

Notification of acceptance and review feedback: February 2027

Submission of final revised versions: April 2027

Editors:

Paolo Furia (paolo.furia@unito.it)

Ivan Quartesan (ivan.quartesan@unito.it)