Tourism geography I: Capitalist accumulation and the socioecological limits of tourism

Over the past two decades, tourism geographers have approached tourism as a mode of capitalist accumulation that produces space, reorganizes labor and social reproduction, and appropriates nature. This report traces that shift through work on uneven development, financialization, platform capitalism, labor, and political ecology. It distinguishes limits to growth from the contradictions and limits generated through accumulation. These tensions become visible in debates over overtourism, while degrowth, post-capitalist, and regenerative approaches ask what contraction, redistribution, and ecological repair might require. I argue that tourism offers human geography a critical vantage point for examining how these relations might be organized otherwise.