Christopher Gaffney is a human geographer whose research focuses on urbanization, tourism, sports, and the political economy of cities. He has taught and conducted research in Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil, Switzerland, Puerto Rico, and the United States, including eight years at NYU, where he worked on tourism and hospitality, sports mega-events, and Latin American geography. His research has examined the impacts of major sporting events such as the World Cup and Olympics, as well as overtourism and its effects on communities.
What brought you to John Cabot University?
I was looking for a new challenge. I was looking for new collaborators, for a new way to teach, and I’d been working on issues of tourism and hospitality and trying to find a place where I could continue my research on overtourism and its impacts.
My goal is to continue my research and to do work I enjoy in an environment that I find conducive to changing people’s minds, while also providing practical skills that they can apply outside of the university context.
What exactly is a human geographer, and what is a “spatial lens”?
Geographers tend to be quite interdisciplinary, and so we examine economics, society, history, philosophy, environment with a spatial lens. We spatialize things, meaning either putting them on a map or seeing how specific phenomena relate to each other across space and time.
A geographer will insist that human and social relations have a spatial element, that we move across time and space, and that this is fundamental to understanding the world.
I think that geography is essentially history and philosophy plus travel, and that’s how I became a geographer. I had a lot of exposure to maps, but I didn’t travel widely as a child. Middle-class Texans in the ’80s weren’t going on holiday to Europe; our vision of the world was limited. It was too expensive to travel abroad, and it just wasn’t part of my world.
Much of your research has focused on the effects of major sporting events. What happens when events like the World Cup and the Olympics come to a city?
For many years, my research was at the intersection of urbanization processes and the World Cup and the Olympics, asking: what happens when these two forces collide?
When the World Cup or the Olympics come to town, it’s a real problem for the people who live there, and that’s why we have increasing protests and movements against these mega-events in cities that don’t want to host, because there is never, there never has been, and there never will be a grassroots movement to bring the Olympics to a city. One of the biggest budget line items in mega-events is security, and the public is forced to spend billions on facial recognition technology, drones, police dogs, closed-circuit television cameras, scanners, etc. The hosting of the Olympics or the World Cup makes the city a terrorism target, and so you have a scenario in which the event itself justifies the massive security outlay. Once the event moves on, the security apparatus does not disappear, but folds into the local policing regime.
That’s but one example, not to mention the stadiums and the hospitality packages and restructuring the city for short-term tourists and corporations, the wealthiest people in the world coming as corporate consumers. In the end, the hosting city is left holding a bag with an enormous hole in it.
You’ve spoken about overtourism in Trastevere, which is very close to JCU. What do you think is happening in the neighborhood, and what role does the University play?
There are many people in Trastevere who are doing very well in the tourism trade, and so it’s not just something that’s external to the place. It is clear that tourism has transformed the neighborhood rather quickly.
What I would really like to know more about is JCU’s relationship to that tourism environment. What are the relationships between JCU and the neighborhood that can be improved upon? Because the University is a vector of change in Trastevere.
We can consider half of our students “educational tourists” whose parents, relatives, and friends come to visit, impacting the neighborhood in terms of short-term rentals, storefront changes, noise, crowding, service industries, traffic, and restaurants. On the other hand, the University has stimulated the local economy and, along with that, brought multifaceted changes that require deeper analysis to understand.
One of the frustrating elements of overtourism is that it appears uncontrollable: because the city government does exert control over where and how people move, there is no coordinated response in a diffuse sector where so much money is being made, and most people seem happy to keep tourism economies expanding. However, everyone recognizes there is a problem.
Mass tourism has become environmentally, politically, socially, and economically noxious, creating economic and labor dependencies that might elevate risk exposure of people and places in an increasingly volatile political and environmental conjuncture. Trastevere has been overwhelmed by tourism-induced conditions that it wasn’t prepared for, and I haven’t yet seen strong municipal governance trying to control or manage it, nor are there clear grassroots movements, and so it may seem as if overtourism, gentrification, crowding, congestion, and all the rest of it are inevitable outcomes.
But tourism is not inevitable. I’ve been working with my students to understand that tourism is not a problem. It’s a condition. And like income inequality, climate change, aging populations, etc., it’s a condition that needs to be understood in its complexity and negotiated.
If overtourism is a condition rather than a problem, what kinds of changes could help address it?
Costs should be embedded in things that have negative environmental consequences. One thing that could be done globally is to tax jet fuel. No nation on earth taxes jet fuel, which is one of the reasons it’s so cheap to fly.
Tourism should not be cheap. In the Middle Ages, it was expensive and risky to go on a pilgrimage; one had to depend on the kindness of strangers. Costs were embedded in your journey: the danger, the food, the new sandals, the robberies. One took years to make a pilgrimage from Rome to Canterbury on Via Francigena. You had to plan for it.
But now you’re just like, “I want to go to Greece for the weekend.” Click, click, and you’re there for 20 euros. Airbnb, click. Tripadvisor review, click. Dinner reservations, click. Instagram reel, click, click, click, like, like, like. All these clicks and likes have repercussions, so no wonder we’re in a fit of tourism-induced trouble.
What do you hope students take away from your classes, and how has your teaching changed?
I hope they take away the idea of a disciplined alterity, which means that if you look at things differently in a disciplined way, if you tilt your head five degrees and look at something from a new angle, that will stick with you forever. This can be something as simple as turning a map upside down or asking why “Going South” is a synonym for doing poorly.
If you discipline yourself to understand that what you see is only one perspective among many possibilities and have a mechanism for maintaining that way of thinking, then that will either give you critical insight or allow your thoughts to flow along different pathways. I have found that this increases acceptance of other perspectives and allows one to offer something different, something critical, something outside the box.
I’m also changing the way I assess students. I’ve stopped having long writing assignments, but I give one long assignment at the end, where students produce multimedia presentations. So, no more long papers, but sharper engagement with text that also involves mapping, audio, and video. I’ve also started giving oral exams. The students and I prepare a list of questions together, but they must be prepared because they don’t know what question they’re going to get.
What are you currently working on?
In addition to continuing my work on overtourism in the global, European, Italian, and Roman contexts, I’ve got a project starting on the 2032 UEFA European Football Championship, which will be split between Italy and Turkey, and Italy’s building a bunch of new stadiums for this, with two new stadium projects going on in Rome. One for Lazio, one for AS Roma. Rome is obviously the best place to study the political economy of stadiums.
The other project I have is looking at the nasoni, Rome’s drinking fountains. There are two things that Rome has always had: stadiums as spaces of public spectacle and water as a focal point of public life. Since 1874, Rome has developed the most extensive drinking fountain network in the world. It’s a project I’ve been working on for a year, and I’m visiting as many of them as I can, trying desperately to get access to ACEA, the utility company that manages water services in Rome.
Nasoni are non-human actors in the city because they attract people, birds, and dogs, but they also have life on them. They host mosses, and so they’re biological entities, each one connected to this vast network that we don’t see, but that comes from the lakes and springs and aqueducts and water distribution system. When you drink water from one of the nasoni on the Trastevere side of the river, it’s warmer in the late summer because it comes from Lake Bracciano, and if you drink it on the other (left) side of the river, it’s colder because it’s coming from Albano, Nemi. Ultimately, each one tells a different, fascinating story embedded in the everyday life of the city.
