Tourism gentrification in Nordic cities: unpacking tourism-induced displacement of shops in Reykjavík

Résumé 0

This presentation aims to explore tourism-induced processes of displacement in Nordic cities through the study of tourism gentrification processes in Reykjavík (Iceland). Iceland has indeed witnessed a significant tourism boom in the last decade (from 500 000 tourists in 2008 to more than 2.3 million in 2018). As a result, tourism has been a major driver in the contemporary transformation of Reykjavík with the construction of dozens of new hotels (Mermet, 2015), the conversion of thousands of apartments into tourist rentals (Elíasson & Ragnarsson, 2018; Mermet, 2017), or the transformation of the local retail structure. Like other popular tourist destinations such as Barcelona or Lisbon, Reykjavík is therefore going through a process of tourism gentrification. Tourism gentrification has recently been identified as one of the main battlefronts of gentrification in contemporary cities (Cócola Gant, 2016). There is now a significant body of academic work demonstrating how tourism produces direct and indirect displacement of long-term inhabitants. Existing research has shown that tourism can lead to direct forms of displacement through the transformation of the built environment into tourism amenities or through the transformation of housing into short-term rentals with platforms such as Airbnb. Tourism can also produce indirect forms of displacement, by disrupting local people’s sense of place (noise, overcrowding, cleanliness, etc.) (López‐Gay et al., 2021), but also by changing the supply of local services that caters more to tourists than to locals (Blázquez-Salom et al., 2019). Thus, as Cocola-Gant points out, the fact that tourism-induced displacement is both residential and commercial. However, while the emerging literature on this topic has mainly focused on tourism-driven residential displacement, commercial displacement remains poorly understood. Research is therefore needed to investigate how tourism-induced commercial displacement works. Furthermore, the existing literature on tourism gentrification primarily relies on case studies based in Southern Europe, such as Barcelona (Cócola Gant, 2016), Palma de Majorque (Yrigoy, 2018), Lisbon (Cocola-Gant & Gago, 2021), etc. which provide very interesting insights on tourism-driven gentrification but which are based on local political contexts that are quite different from what happens in Nordic cities. This presentation aims to shed light on how tourism gentrification operates in the Nordic context by analysing tourism-induced processes of shop displacement in Reykjavík. The empirical part of the paper will be based on a mixed-methods protocol. The quantitative part of the research is based on the analysis of a local shop database (Rannsóknasetur verslunarinnar) which allowed me to produce a map of shop displacement in Reykjavík (2015-2021). The qualitative part of the research is based on 14 semi-structured interviews with displaced shop owners and with interviews with local authorities.