The city is a place of transit. Entwined with the aspiration for settlement and permanence 012 is the very nature of a hub of living trajectories, a generator of movement, a crossroads of destinies 3456789. Rather than in opposition, city dwelling is interdependent and complementary (reciprocal, consonant) with travel, nomadism and pilgrimage 1011121314. Hospitality and accommodation are the foundations of urban civilization 151116.
Exercise: Investigate how the city responds to the necessity to accommodate transitory presences. Start by listing main categories of transient / temporary users significantly contributing to the city’s life and economy. Tourists, students, seasonal workers and commuters, expats, free lance professionals, migrants, etc. Complement your assessment with desk research providing a view on seasonal presences and on the percentage of apartments and rooms available to temporary use respect to residential households. Are such data available, published, compared? Is their balance discussed, regulated, planned? Use the Internet to assess the provision of temporary accommodation, hotels, B&Bs, short term rental etc. Where are they located, are they concentrated, clustered in specific districts or distributed? Are such concentration specialised, i.e. students or tourist districts? Use these data to draft an itinerary starting from the core of the temporary city towards a consolidated residential district. Along the path observe how temporary presences and related economies mark the urban environment. To what extent is the original aspect of the city influenced by temporary presences? How is the local identity transformed or reinforced according to the demand of transient users? What supply of services and goods is connected with their presence? Are urban economies significantly dependant on flows of visitors? Can you spot transformative phenomena like securitization and increased surveillance, gentrification, ‘Disneyfication’, musealisation etcetera, substantially related with the presence of transitory city users? Are there signs of conflict, competition or displacement engendered by transient presences? Try to draft an overall map of the transient city and confront it with the “established” urban geography.