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Can a Neighborhood Be Instagrammed to Death?

The return of tourism to New York has brought crowds back to one of the most popular selfie
spots on earth. People who live there aren't feeling #grateful.

Two years ago, Prokopis Christou, a scholar of the social and psychological

dynamics of tourism, published a paper that sought to determine whether

people who took selfies at popular destinations tended to marginalize the

destination itself, focusing instead almost entirely on their own image.

Interviewing dozens of European tourists visiting Cyprus and closely

examining the scale of the photographs taken, Mr. Christou and his colleagues

identified what they called the "attraction shading effect." Basically, the images

that found a home on social media rendered the ostensible scene – a

beautiful, abandoned hotel on a peak near Mount Olympus, for example –

inconsequential or at least oddly nebulous.

What was the significance of all this? Researchers hoped to lay the

groundwork for other academics to look at the ways in which a mounting social

narcissism was intersecting with travel; a pursuit traditionally driven by

wanderlust now seemed beholden to an indifferent self-absorption. If historic

sites and sacred spaces were catering to this reorientation, marketing

themselves merely as backdrop, if the lives of people around the world living in

proximity to these intrusions were disrupted, then what we were witnessing,

arguably, was the slow erasure of cultural heritage, a spiritual plundering of

civic character.

To the extent that New Yorkers have always felt a special antipathy for

the couple from Tulsa in town for a week of big ticket theatrical revivals and

unhurried walks up Seventh Avenue, the return of tourism after a long

pandemic lull has, in one sense, restored rather than chipped away at our

identity, reviving a familiar disdain. The city agency tasked with tracking

visitors estimates that more than 54 million people will have come to New York

by the end of this year, a figure amounting to 85 percent of 2019 numbers, an

important boon to an ailing economy. Demand for hotel rooms has been on a

steady upward climb since January.

This would hardly come as a revelation to anyone who has spent time

around the far western stretch of Washington Street in Dumbo, along the

Brooklyn waterfront, where the arch of the Manhattan Bridge framing the

Empire State Building in the distance dominates the view. Aside from Covid's

interruption, for several years now the block has served as a cherished spot

for self-documentation – people showing up to record themselves in workout

clothes, in regular clothes, in wedding dresses, with dogs, with children, with

sonogram images announcing future children. According to Dumbo's business

improvement group, during May and June pedestrian traffic nearly tripled, to

48,000 people, on this stretch over the same period in 2020.

Late last month community members gathered at a town hall to express

their displeasure with what had become an untenable degree of congestion.

"We have seen tourism approach prepandemic levels, and people are working

at home and seeing it from a different perspective now," Lincoln Restler, the

city councilman serving Dumbo and fielding many of the complaints, told me.

"This is one of the most photogenic spots in New York if not the world, but it's

a lot for people living there."

The problem wasn't simply the resurgent flood of humanity but also in

part the economy that had evolved around it – the parade of food trucks, too

many of which, neighbors maintained, were parked illegally and dumped trash

with abandon. Navigation was already compromised by a renovation of the

sewer system that had torn up various roadways; at the same time the city's

Department of Transportation had closed off a section of Washington Street

adjacent to the popular tourist corridor to traffic, as part of the open streets

program.

The current unease points ultimately to a broader problem, a long-term

failure of city planning - an unwillingness to recognize or engage with what a

once industrial neighborhood, bordered by a park decades in the making,

would surely become. It had happened in New York and so many other cities

where cobblestone streets, loft buildings and money converged at the water.

Dumbo outgrew its infrastructure, and things had come to a boiling point.

[...]

Twenty years ago, Dumbo, carved out of a rich stock of old manufacturing

buildings and a developer's prescience, hardly existed as a residential enclave

at all. In the time since it has become one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in

the city. A new building on Front Street, vaguely in the shape of a sail ship,

"grounded in the maritime and industrial inheritance of Dumbo's waterfront," as

described in promotional material, arrived on the market with penthouses

priced upward of $15 million.

Despite the excesses, the neighborhood has evolved, in many ways,

according to the modern urbanist ideal of mixed-use functionality. There are

many small independent businesses at the storefront level, and many offices

above them housing tech companies and architecture and design firms. Some

number of artist studios are subsidized by Two Trees, the original and

predominant developer. A recent survey by the business improvement district

of 129 firms found that 73 percent were back in the office and that more than

half of respondents believed that workers were willing to put fully remote work

behind them because of access to parks and open streets in the

neighborhood.

Two years ago, a looming fear among bureaucrats, business people and

undying loyalists to the city's complexities was that New York would

dangerously thin out, that enough people would make permanent their exodus

to Connecticut or Dutchess County to destroy an already precarious economic

and social equilibrium. Instead the new story is simply a replay of the old one -

a narrative of tensions among impassioned competing interests that all feel

entitled to lay their personal claims to public space. It's maddening, perhaps

impossible in the end and yet deeply reassuring all at once.

From: Ginia Bellafante, "Can a Neighborhood Be Instagrammed to Death?".

Text Comprehension and Analsysis

Complete the following tasks using your own words as far as is appropriate. Quote correctly.

Outline Dumbo's development and the repercussions of recent trends for the different groups of people.

Analyse the writer's attitude towards the changes Dumbo has undergone, taking into account her line of argumentation and its effects on the reader as well as her use of stylistic devices (three examples).

(35%)

Composition

Choose one of the following topics and write a coherent text laying out your ideas.

Think globally, act locally – and travel regionally.
Discuss.

"The traveller sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see." (Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874-1936, British author and journalist)

Comment on this statement.

Describe briefly, analyse and comment on the cartoon.

Crowding: tiger tourism-hapless

(20%)