Habitus misalignment and the limits of tourism-led urban renovation

Tourism-led urban renovation has been widely promoted as a strategy to revitalize historic districts and reposition cities within global tourism markets. Yet many initiatives produce limited outcomes, even when supported by significant institutional investment and planning. Existing research has largely explained these limitations through political economy, governance arrangements, or spatial restructuring, while paying less attention to the symbolic and dispositional mechanisms that shape the recognition of urban spaces as legitimate tourism assets. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of fields, this article examines how struggles over symbolic capital and embodied dispositions influence tourism-led urban transformation. It introduces the concept of habitus misalignment to explain situations in which institutional strategies aimed at repositioning urban territories fail to gain recognition within the tourism field. The analysis is based on a qualitative case study conducted in a historic port district in Northeast Brazil, combining 62 semi-structured interviews with public officials, entrepreneurs, tourism workers, residents, and visitors, along with participant observation. The findings show that dominant dispositions within the tourism field remain strongly oriented toward coastal mass-tourism imaginaries, limiting the symbolic recognition of the historic waterfront despite institutional efforts to diversify tourism. By conceptualizing tourism development as a process of field restructuring shaped by dispositional dynamics, the study contributes to tourism research by introducing the concept of habitus misalignment and proposing a relational framework for understanding the limits of tourism-led urban renovation.