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Last chance tourism, which can be described as the practice of tourism in environmentally damaged or threatened spaces, is an emerging trend that has been considered problematic due to the pressure that it places on already fragile environments. This article explores the possibilities of turning last chance tourism experiences into hopeful tourism experiences, by creating emotionally driven last chance tourism experiences in controlled and safe environments through digital storytelling. We draw on literature on transformative, hopeful and flourishing tourism to argue that last chance experiences provide unique opportunities for eliciting reflection among tourists and promote a greater environmental awareness if they are driven by emotionally engaging narratives. Our study explores the outcomes of an experiment conducted at the Ajuda Botanical Garden (Lisbon, Portugal) with a futuristic mixed-reality game that places users as members of a scientific expedition looking for plants that have become extinct in the twenty-second century. The results of this study show how the game's last chance narrative generated contradictory, mixed feelings among the participants, which ultimately led to hopeful existential reflection about nature conservation action. With this in mind, we reflect on the potential of transformative last chance tourism experiences guided by digital narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban novel ecosystems were sampled across vacant sites in two Portuguese urban regions. The flora were studied with a focus on species' origin, life form, ecological, chorological and naturalisation types. A multivariate constrained ordination technique was used to identify relationships between plant composition and environmental factors. The vegetation of the two urban regions shows differences, highlighting biome influence, as well as due to climatic variables and (to a lesser degree) soil characteristics and lithology. Although native species are clearly dominant, the frequency of non-native species is high and most are potentially or effectively invasive. In the ecological spectrum, the dominance of opportunistic ruderal species suggests a risk of biotic homogenisation in these ecosystems, which is also noticeable in the analysis of life form, but less in chorological and nativeness spectra. Portuguese novel urban ecosystems are, therefore, simultaneously an opportunity, since spontaneous vegetation management is more cost effective and can bring wilderness to cities; and a hazard, because invasive species must be controlled to support biodiversity conservation efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work on cyborg urbanization has unveiled the way in which the city is produced through hybridizations of the human and non-human. However, less attention has been given to the ways by which non-human actors entangle each other without human mediation. On the other hand, literature on urban ruination has explored the agency of the non-human in landscape transformation, however few works have established the link between the processes of ruination and urban transformation. In this article, we bridge these two literatures and argue that it is possible to extend the concept of cyborg urbanization to include urban transformation processes that are conducted by non-human actors, namely vegetation. We explore these missing links through an exploration of the Matinha Gasworks site, located in the Eastern Zone of the city of Lisbon, Portugal, and deactivated in 2001. It is a vacant land, with several ruined derelict constructions of a gasworks. We draw upon archival work, remote sensing techniques, and post-phenomenological fieldwork to explore the 80-year long process of construction and ruination of the Matinha Gasworks site. Our findings highlight the accumulation of distinct temporalities, scales, matters, and subjectivities in the production of the urban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about tourism, visual culture, and imperialism in the post-colonial present. International literature on these issues has been especially focused on the experience of British and French post-colonialism. Few studies have addressed this issue regarding other post-colonial realities. This paper runs counter to that fact by analysing the visual touristic discourse produced in the post-colonial Portugal. The paper examines the way the sub-Saharan Africa is represented in a Portuguese travel photo-magazine – theBlue Travelmagazine – so as to verify the extent to which the ideology of colonialism continues to shape the post-colonial touristic discourse in this former colonizing country of the southern Europe. More than 522 photographs were analysed. Using visual methodologies, the paper concludes that many aspects of the photographs contain encoded encomiastic messages of colonialism and participate in a discursive construction of Africa that was clearly shaped by an imperialist gaze. The paper suggests that not only there is an obvious nostalgia for empire in the Portuguese touristic discourse on sub-Saharan Africa, but also that many imperialist myths continue to circulate diffusely within the Portuguese post-colonial society and to shape the way sub-Saharan Africa is touristically imagined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]