Voices of protest and the right to the city in the context of overtourism: reflections from the historic city of Chania, Crete (Greece)

Yiannis Zaimakis and Marina Papadaki

City, 2025, vol. 29, issue 3-4, 459-484

Abstract: After the years of the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008, tourism growth has become a lever for economic recovery in many southern European cities, followed by rapid urban transformations. Based on multimodal ethnographic research in historic neighbourhoods of the city of Chania (Crete, Greece), this article offers an in-depth examination of the transformation of the economic and social fabric of a city threatened by the ongoing tourism growth, promoted by both neoliberal strategies and state policies. Drawing on Lefebvre's ideas on the right to the city, this article contributes to the conceptual debates on tourism monoculture, touristification and place alienation and attempts to initiate a debate on political struggles against overtourism in small historic Mediterranean cities, which are often missing in urban tourism studies. The study reveals a diverse repertoire of protests: resilient narratives that address the deterioration of quality of life, the housing crisis and residential displacement; retrospective voices that look back nostalgically at the past community and express feelings of depression; and, above all, radical actors, usually excluded from the mainstream discourse on tourism, who invoke the right to the city to support the pursuit of a just city through discursive protest and activist practices.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2025.2517978

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