The digital envelope: From 'Fashion City' to digital 'Green Influencer' to 'New Greener Cities' after Covid

This chapter explores the growing relationship between, on the one hand, digital reproduction and reality replication and, on the other, green innovation and sustainable policies after Covid-19 has become more controlled and its effects more mitigated than at present. We are particularly interested in thinking about the implications of these interventions for downward and diverted expectations for the present and further looming dystopias of ‘global tourism’. In earlier work we have paid some attention to tourism futures that exploit digital media to assist in conserving environments, both natural and cultural, from the current hiatus in the ever-burgeoning negative effects of global tourism. In tandem, we have also explored aspects of ‘green’ policies for sustainable development of future tourism opportunities. Our focus has been on urban and regional systems, which are the proximate recipients of global tourism populations and their associated travel, accommodation, subsistence and entertainment currencies, which are well in the billions and trillions respectively. In this chapter we select narratives and deduce implications from three points on a ‘digital-to-green’ analytical and policy spectrum. First, we explore the re-branding of an ‘Art City’ as a ‘Fashion City’ and think about what, if any, role ‘green-digital’ cross-fertilisation occurs after Covid-19 and the socio-spatial changes the pandemic may have wrought in the cultural milieu of Florence, Italy. We are especially interested in whether learning from similarly ‘over-touristed’ creative or cultural cities in Italy like Venice has been contemplated, practised or rejected. Similarly we analyse the success or failure of digital ‘celebrification’ of green interventions through the engagement of resident cultural icons as sustainability ‘engagers’ or ‘influencers’ through the performances of Madonna in Lisbon. Finally, we reverse the perspective somewhat in anatomising ‘green’ politics and policies for specific cities and regions that have employed in major ways digital media in addition to and with a view to turning urban ‘abandonment’ as a feature of post-Covid-19 urban conditions into sustainable ‘experience’ attractions. The greening of central Paris, Barcelona, Milan and Vancouver (now to include London’s Camden Highline and even Stockton in UK) are counter-narratives to established cases of ‘ruin porn’ that attracts tourist visits to the likes of Detroit, Chernobyl and other ‘Islands of Abandonment’.