Beyond destination accessibility: tourism infrastructure across mobilities, technologies and embodiments

This introductory article to the Special Issue explores the evolving conceptualisation of tourism infrastructure through the lenses of assemblage thinking and the mobilities paradigm. Moving beyond traditional dichotomies of material versus immaterial infrastructure, it embraces a multidimensional, relational and dynamic understanding of infrastructure as an active agent in shaping tourism destinations, mobilities and socio-spatial inequalities. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from critical geography and mobilities studies, the paper situates tourism infrastructure within the broader infrastructures of everyday life, emphasising its entanglement with bodies, affects, policies and power relations. The Special Issue’s contributions expand on this framework through diverse case studies across Sweden, Canada, France, Spain and Italy, highlighting how infrastructures are co-constituted through tourist, residential and labor mobilities, and how they mediate access, inclusion and transformation at multiple scales. In doing so, the Issue introduces new methodological and conceptual tools–such as “transpitality”, “sensing transit” and the infrastructural backstage–to rethink accessibility, sustainability and territoriality in tourism. It ultimately calls for an “infrastructural turn” in tourism studies that critically engages with the fluid, politicised and experiential nature of tourism mobilities infrastructures in an era marked by crises, socio-spatial inequality and planetary change.