ABSTRACT
Tourism is not an isolated activity, but a significant constituent of urban life. Beyond the economic benefits and impacts of ‘overtourism’, little is known about how tourists and other city users produce urban spaces in conjunction. This chapter contributes an explorative inquiry into such co-production. Building on the happening-like summertime gatherings of up to 300 people at the Admiralbrücke in Berlin-Kreuzberg (an established ‘new tourism area’), the piece frames such public gatherings, which exist in other cities as well, as ‘hang-out commons’. The collective endeavour is driven by neither economic nor governmental interests, and is not the result of explicit coordination. In contrast to conventional commons-thinking, the hang-out commons is constituted by a group whose constituency changes significantly every evening, with several newcomers arriving, and others leaving the scene. To address this choreography of stability and mobility, the chapter draws on the ‘New Mobilities Paradigm’ and approaches building on ‘Performance’. As a result, the constitutive potency of tourism-related encounters of highly mobile people, objects, imaginings and immoveable material components is framed as rhythmic (re-)enactment of temporary socio-material gatherings.
