Enclaves and Villages:Tourism Spread in Goa

This paper explores the dynamics of distinction-making within Goa’s tourism sector, focusing on how tourists create social and spatial boundaries between themselves and local communities and among different groups of tourists. Based on fieldwork conducted in key tourist areas of Goa, the research reveals how affluent tourists and middle-income tourists experience the city differently, generating distinct urban spaces and reinforcing socio-economic hierarchies. Affluent tourists tend to occupy exclusive, often gated, enclaves—luxury resorts, high-end restaurants, and private beaches—intentionally designed to maintain physical and social distance from the local population and other visitors. This form of tourism not only leads to the spatial withdrawal of elites but also influences urban planning and the rise of exclusive, commodified spaces that cater to these high-paying clients.

In contrast, middle-income tourists engage more frequently with local businesses, markets, and public spaces, creating a more integrated, albeit still hierarchical, relationship with the urban environment. The relationship between affluent and middle-income tourists is marked by distance and difference. To distance themselves from middle-income tourists, affluent tourists seek out and create new tourist destinations, while middle-income tourists tend to follow them there. This process brings more areas within the tourism circuit, alienating the residents of these neighbourhoods and villages.

This study examines how these processes of socio-spatial distinction lead to the production and expansion of elite spaces and discusses the implications for local communities. By situating the case of Goa within the broader context of global urbanisation and elite space-making, the paper contextualises tourism as an agent of physical and social restructuring of urban environments in ways that are analogous to elite-driven processes in other cities worldwide. Still, at the same time, it differs in the global South.