2027-9-viana

Introduction

Viana do Castelo welcomes researchers, practitioners and policymakers to the fourth ATLAS Annual Conference to be held in the city, a gathering that first convened here in 1997, returned in 2007 and 2017, and now reconvenes in 2027 to reckon with a tourism world that has changed almost beyond recognition, and that is being asked to change further still.

The conference theme, Destinations for the Future: Changing Places, Practices and Policies, invites us to interrogate what kind of futures are being imagined, for whom, by whom, and at whose expense. The last decade has exposed with unusual clarity the structural contradictions of tourism as a development paradigm. Degrowth frameworks have moved from provocative minority positions to serious objects of empirical investigation (Murray et al., 2023). Regenerative approaches have emerged as a distinct paradigm, reframing tourism as a living system oriented toward mutual flourishing rather than extraction (Bellato & Pollock, 2025; Bellato et al., 2022). The entanglements of tourism with housing markets, financialisation, and the right to the city have been powerfully theorised through the lens of tourism-led rentier capitalism (Wijburg et al., 2024) and touristification as place-based displacement (Cocola-Gant, 2023).

Meanwhile, the climate emergency has shifted from background condition to foreground urgency, forcing the field to confront not just the environmental footprint of travel but the deeper question of whether the continuous expansion of mobility is compatible with liveable futures for places and people (Bianchi & Milano, 2024).

At the same time, new complexities have unsettled older analytical frameworks. The digital transformation and artificial intelligence are reshaping the labour relations, the spatial organisation, and the political economy of destinations in ways that are only beginning to be understood. Digital nomadism and the blurring of work and leisure mobility challenge the categories through which tourism has traditionally been studied. Cultural tourism, too, is undergoing a deeper epistemological reckoning — moving from a product-centred view of heritage consumption toward an understanding of tourism as embodied social practice, co-created between hosts, visitors and the places they share (Richards, 2021, 2025). And across all of this, communities, themselves heterogeneous, fractured and differentially positioned, are asserting new claims: over their neighbourhoods, their cultures, their coastlines, and their right to shape the terms on which visitors arrive.

It is in this context that we return to Viana do Castelo, a city that has itself navigated the tensions between heritage and change, between the living culture of its fishing and artisan traditions and the pressures of tourism development along Portugal’s increasingly visited northern coast. The thirty years that have passed since ATLAS first gathered here are not merely a biographical milestone for the association; they constitute a natural moment for the kind of critical stocktaking this conference invites. What has changed in how we understand destinations? What has not changed, and why? What theoretical resources does the field now have that it lacked in 1997, and where do the most significant intellectual gaps remain?

We invite contributions from across the social sciences and humanities, from practice-based and policy-engaged research, and from scholars at all career stages. We are particularly interested in work that crosses disciplinary boundaries, challenges prevailing assumptions, and takes seriously the voices of those: residents, communities, workers, non-human actors, who are too often absent from the tourism research conversation.