When Tourism Transforms the Metropolitan Space and Society: The Case of the Île-de-France Region

Tourism is a socio-spatial phenomenon involving broad, complex and transversal realities. It flows into and feeds on a broad spectrum of issues. However, the topic of metropolization is rarely crosscut with those of tourism. While literature has long since accepted the fact that major metropolises are in most cases major tourist destinations (Maitland and Newman 2014), it has devoted little attention to identifying how tourism currently constitutes one of the fundamental indicators of metropolization nor has it systematically analyzed the relationship between tourism and metropolises. In most cases, the topic of urban tourism only addresses the emerging tip of the iceberg, in other words, tourist visits to hypercentral districts, often considered (at least during the pre-COVID era) as excessive (Smith et al. 2019; Hospers 2019; Dodds and Butler 2019). But, even if the metropolitan peripheries of “overtouristified” cities lack major tourist sites (which is rarely the case), they actively participate in metropolitan tourism development. They have major tourist gateways (airports, ports and cruise ports), add to the offer of accommodations, have road and motorway infrastructures, and are home to a large percentage of people who work at central tourist sites. In short, considering urban tourism in an isolated manner is paradoxical.