Chiara RABBIOSI, Università di Padova, Italy
In this presentation, I further develop my recent work on slow tourism and walking holidays, by widening my focus to include a larger set of mobilities, and mobilities infrastructure. In fact, walking holidays rarely start by just walking, and rarely include walking only. The ‘transport of tourism’ is often overlooked in tourism research, and accounts of it are mostly analysed in a disembodied way. Drawing from an auto-ethnographic account of a walking holiday, I will use recent phenomenological suggestions to considering transit as one of the subtle, momentary, and ordinary practices forming a significant part of a tourist’s daily routine. Transit in tourism demans a considerable amount of time, attention and practiced negotiation (Barry, 2021). This way, I will present slow tourism and walking holidays as a problematic entanglement of physical movement, representations and practices (Cresswell, 2010). Through this framework, I will locate walking routes as part of a larger multi-modal transport infrastructure, and I will problematize ‘slowness’ as it is generally associated to walking holidays. Reaching out for a walking destination often means popping off long-distance fast transport networks to pop in on obsolete infrastructure transport networks; the latter also being the infrastructure providing public transport in inner areas where walking destinations are located. Therefore, the approach proposed serves not only to have a better knowledge of how tourists get attuned to slowness, but also to discuss contemporary contradictions linking tourism, transport, and local development
Keywords: Walking holidays|Transport|Mobilities|Slow tourism|Phenomenology
A103043CR