Mobility and Conflicts: The Transformation of Urban Society between Tourism and Migration

Abstract

The pandemic has suspended (who knows how long) the tourism process of the main global urban centers. Being somehow involved in the planetary arrest of mobility, migrant flows had for decades affected the city-form by changing its physical and social morphology. Two different and symbolically alternative forms of mobility contributed to radically change the city: global tourism distorted the characteristics of the “consolidated city”, whilst migrant flows did the same in the “disurbanized periphery”. The article aims, on the one hand, to analyze how the city has been changing by virtue of these contradictory processes of mobility; on the other hand, to think about post-Covid urban society, which brings with it, together with the drastic reduction of mobility, a consequent transformation of territories once organized to receive, or undergo, these flows, and today waiting to understand their destiny.