Elisabetta Gobbo

On what basis, if any, can we legitimately justify spatial integrationist policies? Through a relational egalitarian lens, this article disentangles two phenomena that the wrong of residential segregation typically conflates: minimal segregation (mere clustering) and marginalisation (the production of unequal social standing through spatially mediated relations of disadvantage and disrespect). I argue, in contrast to Elizabeth Anderson's influential ideal of integration, that it is marginalisation, not minimal segregation, that does the normative work for relational egalitarians. This grounds the imperative of de-marginalisation. The analysis clarifies the relational egalitarian position on urban clustering, provides a unified framework for understanding the disagreements between Anderson and her critics (Shelby, Young, Marcuse), and articulates the distinctions needed to evaluate social-mixing policies. Such policies, I contend, may be prudentially advisable or pragmatically sensible, but they are not as such imperatives of justice: their justification is contingent and defeasible, and ultimately turns on whether they reduce marginalisation.

The social (as opposed to environmental) harms of tourism are not yet much discussed in the philosophical literature. Nonetheless, residents in hyper-touristed areas commonly express sentiments of marginalisation and estrangement from the social practices present in their place of dwelling. In this paper, we argue that indeed, as common pre-theoretical ideas suggest, residents in a touristic neighbourhood can be marginalised in their relationship with tourists in a morally objectionable way, similarly to how longstanding residents may be marginalised with respect to gentrifiers in a gentrifying neighbourhood. An important difference, however, between the gentrification and tourism cases, is that while in the former residents and gentrifiers have a more-or-less stable relationship with each other, residents and tourists typically interact only in quite fleeting ways. This might seem to suggest that residents and tourists do not have the right kind of ongoing relationship that would make marginalisation possible in the first place. Here we contend that this is not the case, and in doing so we make two contributions to the literature. First, we present a refined conception of marginalisation, differentiate it from other relational wrongs, and explain how, though marginalisation does depend on an ongoing relationship, a relationship of the right kind is possible in spite of the transience of some of its members. Second, we explain how excessive tourism in particular might generate marginalisation in the spatially defined relationship among fellow users of a shared physical space. Thereby, we contribute to the assessment of the harms of overtourism, identifying a specific moral wrong that residents are likely to experience in certain touristic cities.