Becoming tourism infrastructure: older age mobilities and the reconfiguration of local mobility environments in Venice

This article examines the lived realities of older residents’ daily mobility in an over-touristed city. While walking mobility is a fundamental dimension of the everyday lives of individuals, communities, and places, it is also part of the ‘extraordinary’ experience that visitors seek for, turning urban space (pavements, streets, squares) into infrastructure for tourists’ walking mobility and tourist attractions in itself. In historic tourist centres, the walking practices and performances of residents and tourists are highly enmeshed in tight street grids, eliciting or hindering one another, producing either spectacle or discomfort, leveraging opportunity or unaffordability. While research has focused on the nature and extent of these hindrances and on the more structural dimensions of overtourism, the mobile component of ‘living with’ tourism has been explored less widely. We use the case of Venice, a notably ageing city, where residents are exposed to the adverse negotiation of overcrowded walking spaces. Drawing on walking interviews with older residents, we examine the spatial scales at which everyday mobility are contested by tourism, and the repercussions on active ageing and life aspirations. In addition, we situate such negotiations as potentially immobilising forces in which bodily ageing quickly clashes with the material and performative elements of an inherently slow mobility environment. We conclude on the tourism-infrastructure relationship-forcing residents’ fixity in a space of estrangement under the hegemony of slow tourist mobilities which complicates their ageing in place.