Sharing Space in Tourism Places: a Study of Interrelationships in Sarlat, France

While the relationships between hosts and guests are still frequently thought of in terms of a conflicting opposition between two groups, this article intends to question the co-presence and the sharing of space at work in heritagized and touristified cities. Based on a fieldwork conducted in Sarlat, a city with a very pronouced seasonality in tourism, we argue that the willingness to share the space, even though it is linked to the status of people in relation to the place (tourists / inhabitants), also depends on other factors (socio-economic profiles, attachment to place, territorial anchor, etc.). In this sense, our hypothesis is that the concepts of social and cultural capital, originally developed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, associated to the concept of indigenous capital proposed by Jean-Noël Retière, which reintegrates the spatial dimension at the heart of the concept of capital, can help to refine the understanding of the dynamics and socio-spatial stakes that come into play in touristified cities. We postulate that the input brought by those various types of capitals activates an interesting dialogue between tourism studies and social geography by apprehending the spatial dimension of social reality in a tourism context