Tourism is the greatest social, anthropological and economic phenomenon of our times. Its impact on the lives of cities, changes in landscapes, and countries' and regions' cultures is so great that nothing remains intact wherever it goes. Regarded by some as a source of devastation that particularly affects historical city areas (but whose waves spread far beyond urban limits) and regarded by others as the achievement of the most positive interests and the highest ideals, tourism today is a subject of debate, controversy and urban conflict. By choosing it as the central theme of this number of Electra, we wish to treat it as a complex phenomenon that invites a wide variety of analyses by different disciplines and raises varying ideological viewpoints.

Tourism is also a discourse with its must-see commonplaces. A journey, in its most common sense, could be guided by the following references, in alphabetical order.

A ‘forest city’ is what Ruedi Baur is proposing in opposition to the ongoing urban destruction that is driving citizens and city-dwellers out of the city. The author of this article is a French-Swiss designer with a remarkable international career. He is the creator of the visual identity of the Pompidou Centre and a professor at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon.

Toxic people, toxic environments, toxic whatnot – you know the spiel. Really toxic language, however, is the aftermath of an idea, and words come with a predefined format, as if they were not speech at all, but set in stone. And that stone is carried by the crowd that was schooled in how to be stupid according to a new infallible method.

A person reaches their destination after a long journey and comes across an obstacle. Standing exactly between this person and their becoming, an enormous rock mass, heavy as lead, a skyscraper. It is unsurpassable. The only way to overcome is to summon the prefix trans-, the one that catapults, ignores borders and penetrates into obstacles. The harbinger of metamorphoses.

There is no transparency without light and the association of light with knowledge exists from time immemorial. As the quintessential transparent solid, glass too is connected with knowledge. Galileo polished lenses to study the stars, as did Leeuwenhoek to show us the microscopic world. Spinoza himself was a lens maker, a fact always stressed in his biographies, though we do not know for sure how metaphysics behaves when it hits glass. Nonetheless, we should not forget that the transparent object does not always preserve the image that traverses it. Look no further than Newton’s prism, which decomposes white light into the colours of the rainbow, or the ‘diaphanous mantle of fantasy’ used by Eça to cover ‘truth’s harsh nakedness’.

Trieste, a border city and cultural crossroads, a port in Habsburgian Mitteleuropa, and the cradle of an extraordinarily rich cultural and literary environment, is revisited here by someone intimately familiar with its brilliant arts scene.

The friendship between sociologist Gilberto Freyre and historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda found a correlation in the books in which each attempted to idealise a Brazil based on the notion of the tropics and Portuguese exceptionalism: Casa-Grande & Senzala (1933) and Raízes do Brasil (1936), respectively. At a later date, however, the latter completely departs from that approach to the Brazilian space and, with the notion of border, enters an enduring rivalry with his friend. It is to this divergence of views that we owe two distinct visions of Brazil, which are analysed and contrasted here by Luiz Feldman, a Brazilian diplomat.

David Lynch himself classified the third Twin Peaks series as an 18-hour film. In the current circumstances of the film industry this classification has a substantial reach on the level of theory and programmes.

The relationship between crisis and journalism, as explored by the author in this article, is an issue that goes to the heart of modern society and the age of “uncertainty”, stretching beyond our immediate predicament and concerns. The issue of the crisis in journalism is much thornier than we usually imagine, argues Barbie Zelizer, a leading figure in journalism studies and author of important research into the relationship between journalism and historical and cultural memory.