“Food demons have taken over our cities”: Unpacking foodification and airbnbification of an historical market in a southern Europe city

This paper explores the interrelations between foodification, touristification, and airbnbification through an in-depth case study of a historical fish market area in Catania, a mid-sized city in southern Europe. Drawing on a mixed-method approach that combines on-site field surveys, GIS-based mapping, and long-term ethnography, the study explores how these processes, although spatio-temporally sequenced, become mutually reinforcing in a middle-sized city of Southern Europe characterized by a fragmented local governance, and without clear or coherent institutional tourism strategies. In so doing, first the paper provides a novel insight on the literature on foodification and its triangulation with tourism-driven transformation in a “peripheral” city of the Global North: food acts first as an urban manifestation of global consumption-driven restructuring, while, in a second stage, as a co-producer of touristification and airbnbification, which are growingly fostered by - and intertwined with - consumption of food. Moving across different scales - from the circumscribed space of the market to the surrounding neighbourhood, and from material transformations of retailscapes to the restructuring of symbolic everyday rhythms, the paper shows how touristification amplifies the symbolic and commercial remaking initiated by foodification, while airbnbification consolidates these dynamics by exacerbating the symbolic displacement of local retailscapes, deeply connected to the shift in urban imaginaries produced by the historical market's transformation.