Intersecting injustices in the tourist city: redistribution, recognition, and resistance in Málaga

This article examines economic and cultural injustices in a context of touristification. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s theory of justice, which conceives injustice as both redistributive and recognition-based, it explores how tourism-led urban restructuring generates intersecting forms of inequality and exclusion. It argues that redistributive injustices (e.g. housing insecurity, labour precarity) are dialectically reinforced by recognition-based ones (e.g. cultural erasure, territorial stigmatization), ultimately weakening political representation and residents’ capacity to shape urban futures. The article focuses on Málaga, a Southern European city that exemplifies the tensions of tourism-led urban restructuring. A sequential mixed-methods design was employed within a transformative paradigm, which seeks to connect structural analysis with lived experience through representative and justice-oriented research. First, spatial and statistical analyses identified five demographic and socioeconomic clusters, revealing patterns of inequality and demographic change. The most touristified areas, located in the historic centre, are marked by concentrations of foreign residents from economically advantaged countries, often linked to lifestyle migration and transnational gentrification. Conversely, adjacent working-class neighbourhoods face increasing displacement pressures and a growing presence of foreign residents from disadvantaged regions. Second, 42 semi-structured interviews with current and displaced residents were analysed using critical thematic analysis. Results show how market-driven narratives and urban policy displace traditional practices and erode local support networks, particularly affecting low-income groups, older adults, and service and care workers. Based on Fraser, lack of political representation is understood to result from intersecting economic and cultural injustices. By integrating Fraser’s relational theory of justice with Mertens’ transformative paradigm, this study achieves paradigmatic coherence, bridging political economy and cultural-symbolic perspectives through a unified relational framework. It proposes transformative policy approaches that address redistribution and recognition in tandem (e.g. the decommodification of housing and culture), the redistribution of tourism-generated wealth, and the dismantling of symbolic hierarchies that devalue historically marginalised residents.