This paper examines emerging forms of labour loss in the tourist city as a provisional incapacity to work otherwise. This phenomenon is associated with the breaking of promises regarding labour prospects in Barcelona, from the austerity period to the post-pandemic crisis. This examination presents three situations, set within the mundanity of resistance and adjustment, to reflect on distinct yet equally significant labour losses that ground the affective nature of the neoliberal tourist city: occupational illness among chambermaids, youth unemployment, and the cancellation of rickshaw tours. These negative events are experienced through ambivalent dispositions towards labour mobility, migration, and unionism, and through emerging affections of estrangement, belonging, unwillingness, and solidarity that reflect the politics of undoing the tourist city as seen through workers’ experiences.
AhmedS (1999) Home and away. Narratives of migration and estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies2(3): 329–347. https://doi.org/10.1177/136787799900200303
3.
AhmedS (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press.
4.
AndersonB (2023a) Forms and scenes of attachment: A cultural geography of promises. Dialogues in Human Geography13(3): 392–409. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206221129205
5.
AndersonB (2023b) Unsettling relationality: Attachment after the ‘relational turn’. Dialogues in Human Geography13(3): 428–432. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231195672
6.
AramayonaB (2025) Darkening’ informalized workers: Moral geographies and the in/visibilization of transnational migrants in Spain. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research49(4): 892–911. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13328
7.
BerlantL (2011) Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press.
8.
BerlantL (2012) Desire/Love. Punctum Books.
9.
BerlantL (2022) On the Inconvenience of Other People. Duke University Press.
10.
BissellD (2021b) Liminal geographies of exhaustion. Exhausted bodies, exhausted places, exhausted possibilities, in BissellDRoseMHarrisonP (eds) Negative Geographies. Exploring the Politics of Limits. University of Nebraska Press, pp. 149–173.
11.
BissellD (2022) Affective life of financial loss: Detaching from lost investments in the wake of the gig economy. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space54(3): 477–492. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X211052054
12.
BuckleyM (2018) Labour and the city: Some notes across theory and research. Geography Compass12(10): e12400. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12400
CañadaE (2023) Chambermaids: A focus of attention in studies of tourism employment in Spain, in Blanco-RomeroABlázquez-SalomM (eds) Spanish Tourism Geographies: Territorial Diversity and Different Approaches. Springer, pp. 383–396.
CockayneDRuezD (2023) Inconvenience, ambivalence, and abolition: A politics of attachment and detachment in geography. Dialogues in Human Geography13(3): 423–427. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231151415
17.
Cocola-GantAGagoAJoverJ (2020) Tourism, gentrification, and neighbourhood change: An analytical framework. Reflections from Southern European cities in OskamJ (ed). The overtourism debate. NIMBY, nuisance, commodification. Emerald, pp. 121–135.
DekeyserTZhangVBissellD (2024) What should we do with bad feelings? Negative affects, impotential responses. Progress in Human Geography48(2): 190–205. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325231213513
23.
DeleuzeG (2002) Diferencia y Repetición. Editorial Amorrortu.
del RíoS (2025) From cruel optimism to foreclosed futures: The emotional and temporal dimensions of enduring precarity among young adults in Barcelona. Environment and Planning D Society and Space 0(0): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758251364077
26.
DewsburyJDBissellD (2015) Habit geographies: The perilous zones in the life of the individual. Cultural Geographies22(1): 21–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014561172
27.
GarcíaP (2024) Mobility and dispossession on the fringes of literary Barcelona, in GarcíaPToivanenA (eds) Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism. Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 303–324.
28.
González-DomingoA (2025) Situating women’s mobilities through the labour infrastructure in the hospitable city. Applied Mobilities10(2): 194–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/23800127.2025.2481543
29.
González-DomingoARussoAPPastor GosálbezMI (2023) Re-assembling tourism labour and housing precarity: Barcelona during COVID-19. Tourism Geographies25(7): 1778–1796. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2023.2290014
30.
HarrisonP (2008) Corporeal remains: Vulnerability, proximity, and living on after the end of the world. Environment and Planning A40(2): 423–445. https://doi.org/10.1068/a391
HughesSM (2023) Introduction to critical geographies of resistance, in HughesSM (ed.) Critical Geographies of Resistance. Edward Elgar, pp. 1–25.
33.
Jordhus-LierD (2015) Fragmentation revisited. Flexibility, differentiation, and solidarity in hotels, in Jordhus-LierDUnderthunA (eds) A Hospitable World? Organising Work and Workers in Hotels and Tourist Resorts. Routledge, pp. 39–51.
34.
LazzaratoM (2004) From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life. Ephemera4(3): 187–208.
35.
López-GayACocola-GantARussoAP (2021) Urban tourism and population change: Gentrification in the age of mobilities. Population, Space and Place27(1): e2380. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2380
36.
LordonF (2010) Capitalismo, deseo y servidumbre. Tinta Limón.
37.
McDowellL (2009) Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities. Wiley-Blackwell.
38.
McDowellLBatnitzkyADyerS (2007) Division, segmentation, and interpellation: The embodied labors of migrant workers in a greater London hotel. Economic Geography83(1): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2007.tb00331.x
39.
McDowellLBonner-ThompsonCHarrisA (2022) On the margins: Young men’s mundane experiences of austerity in English coastal towns. Social & Cultural Geography23(4): 620–637. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2020.1795233
PrattG (2012) Families Apart. Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labour and Love. University of Minnesota Press.
42.
Rodríguez LópezE (2022) El Efecto Clase Media. Critica y Crisis de la Paz Social. Traficantes de Sueños.
43.
RoseMBissellDHarrisonP (2021) Negative geographies, in BissellDRoseMHarrisonP (eds) Negative Geographies. Exploring the Politics of Limits. University of Nebraska Press, pp. 15–51.
VerdJMGodinoAGonzález-HerasA, et al. (2025) Escaping the trap of temporary employment: Precariousness among young people before and after Spain’s 2021 labour market reform act. International Journal of Social Welfare34: e12645. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijsw.12645
ZampoukosKIoannidesD (2015) Making difference within the hotel: Labour mobility and the internationalisation of reproductive work, in Jordhus-LierDUnderthunA (eds) A Hospitable World? Organising Work and Workers in Hotels and Tourist Resorts. Routledge, pp. 11–26.
