Presentation

As an invitation to travel, escape and discover or simply as an opportunity for leisure, tourism generates among recipients and professionals various socio-cultural attitudes. Because of its rhythms, practices and behaviors, the induced interculturality that it generates, tourism has now become subject of anthropological, sociological, geographical and economic studies that it would be useful to revisit.

Both by the capital it mobilizes, the jobs it creates, forms of mobility that it leads and dividends that it generates, tourism is,for some Mediterranean economies, a vital activity. Nevertheless,however it is also a sector as dynamic as vulnerable. In fact, tourism can be undermined both by political and by climatic fluctuations.

Mediterranean tourism is now confronted with the effects of global crisis, which occurred suddenly. The risk of losing tourism revenues and to suffer a serious increase in unemployment is a real threat to many countries of the Mediterranean basin. In social terms, tourism has also paradoxical effects. With vectors of synergies and symbioses of social change, it nevertheless may have perverse effects when it generates exposure to the other or when it is instrumentalized to consolidate conservatism.

What are the real chances in Mediterranean countries coping with the new challenges which face tourism? How can tourism activities avoid falling due to the effects of the global

crisis? What responses will be observed among the various stakeholders? What social and spatial processes are there already, and which can happen? Are forms of competition and the competition among countries bordering the Mediterranean about to change? What kind of role is reserved for the media and new communications technologies in the dissemination of new tourism products?

These are questions that researchers (economists, geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists) are invited to treat. The following lines of investigation can be prioritized :

1. Mediterranean tourism: state of art (people and finance flows;

predominate spaces and

touristic homes ; emerging touristic spaces).

2. Tourism in the Mediterranean basin: dynamics and

vulnerability.

3. Old and new tourism products: risks and sustainable

development.

4. The actors in tourism: economic imperatives and social

demands.

5. Tourism and local societies between progress and effects.

6. Tourism and information and communications technologies.

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