Recovery against touristification: Challenges of the cities facing post pandemic tourism

Abstract

Tourism has turned out onto the greatest phenomenon on the modern world. It has been responsible of great transformations around the globe. Globalization and tourism have gone together during the last few years, nevertheless, tourism great success has resulted into considerable consequences. Gentrification, touristification and most recently, overtourism, are direct effects of what not to look for when countries and regions choose tourism as a development activity. The sanitary crisis that came with COVID-19, showed the fragile state of the touristic sector on a global scale, being the greatest destinations the most affected ones. For Ecuador´s case, being an emergent destination, it has also been affected due to total paralysation of the tourism industry. Facing this crisis, cities around the world must rethink the type of tourism they want to develop. The present academic work is based on a literature review, which aims to identify the evolution of touristification in patrimonial-historic spaces, on the span of the last 20 years. Since this is an exploratory study, with a qualitative focus, it was based on an historic-comparative analysis of Latin American and European destinations, where touristification is evident, while on Ecuador, La Ronda neighborhood on Quito´s historic centre was taken as a reference. With the results obtained, a series of orientations were stablished, and sustained on them, the process of touristic reactivation must be reconsidered, particularly on cities where tourisms impact hasn´t been significant.