The People We Become in Cities that Aren't Ours

Imagine a meticulously planned holiday: pristine beaches, ancient ruins, or the pulsating rhythm of a metropolis, each promising an escape from the mundane. The flight ticket becomes a quiet permission slip to behave differently: to loosen, to drift, to experiment with versions of ourselves that would feel untenable at ‘home’. “The people we become in cities that aren’t ours” are often less tightly bound to consequence, reputation, and the long memory of neighbours.

This mental shift, often termed “holiday mode” or “vacation mindset,” detaches individuals from their everyday responsibilities and social constraints, fostering a more permissive psychological state. This disinhibition can lead to behaviours that diverge significantly from an individual’s typical conduct in their familiar environment, particularly when combined with the anonymity of an unfamiliar city. In such liminal spaces, tourists may engage in actions ranging from minor transgressions of public drunkenness, vandalism, low‑level scams to more serious deviant acts, often fuelled by a sense of liberation from conventional societal norms. This phenomenon is further exacerbated by the psychological distance tourists perceive between themselves and the local populace, alongside a diminished apprehension of informal social control. This altered behavioural landscape creates an environment where the usual mechanisms of social regulation are weakened, contributing to an elevated propensity for criminal activity among visitors. At the same time, tourists themselves are frequently targets of crime, with studies indicating that they may experience higher rates of certain offences, such as theft or assault, than in their ‘home’ environments, partly because they are distracted, conspicuous, and unfamiliar with local risks.

These patterns can be understood through the lens of routine activities theory, which posits that crime occurs when a motivated offender, a suitable target and the absence of a capable guardian converge: precisely the kind of configuration that tourist-heavy nightlife districts, heritage sites and entertainment zones tend to produce. The same streets that by day promise culture and spectacle can, by night, assemble all three elements in a tight radius of bars, hostels and monuments.

These abstract dynamics become uncomfortably concrete when mapped onto specific cases of tourists who have treated foreign cities as consequence‑free playgrounds. In January 2020, six foreign tourists from France, Brazil, Argentina and Chile were arrested at Machu Picchu after entering a restricted area of the Temple of the Sun, removing a stone that caused structural damage, and defecating inside the sacred Inca site. What might have been framed in their minds as a transgressive travel story, slipping past barriers for a “special view” was recognised by Peruvian authorities, and the world, for the serious crime against cultural heritage it was, carrying the weight of historical desecration rather than mere mischief.

A similar disregard for place and history surfaced in Rome in 2023, when a British tourist was filmed calmly carving “Ivan + Hayley 23” into the ancient stone of the Colosseum. The video shows him smiling as another tourist records the act- a small, almost affectionate gesture toward his companion, positioned against nearly two millennia of architecture. Under Italian law, such vandalism of cultural property can carry heavy fines and even imprisonment; yet in the moment, the act appears framed by the offender as a romantic inscription, no more serious than carving initials into a tree. This is the tourist mindset at its most revealing: the city reduced to backdrop, the monument repurposed as a personal scrapbook, the legal and moral weight of the act shrunk to the size of a souvenir.​

In other destinations, these behaviours are not isolated but form a recognisable pattern attached to particular nationalities and resort cultures. Bali, for example, has repeatedly grappled with a small but highly visible minority of foreign visitors, especially Australian tourists, engaging in alcohol‑fuelled assaults, street brawls and attacks on locals, prompting local media to talk about “Bintang bogans” and an escalating problem of violent, intoxicated visitors who treat the island as an unregulated party zone. Here, the combination of cheap alcohol, relaxed enforcement and a narrative of Bali as a place to “let go” creates a fertile ground for behaviour those same individuals might find unacceptable, or at least reputationally risky, back home. The legal response itself becomes part of the story: cities adapting their governance to cope not just with crimes against tourists, but crimes by tourists who arrive with lowered inhibitions and leave behind a trail of noise, damage and strained local tolerance.​

These examples mirror the psychological patterns identified: disinhibition, perceived anonymity, reduced informal control and a sense that “normal rules” are suspended while on holiday. The city that is not yours becomes a laboratory for behaviour, and sometimes the experiment spills into criminality.

Yet the relationship between risk, perception and behaviour is more complex than a simple slide from tourist to offender. Some research suggests that tourists’ perception of safety is itself a critical factor influencing destination choice: individuals who view a city as dangerous may either avoid it or, paradoxically, enter with a heightened sense of “getting away with it” that further dislocates them from local norms. Places marketed as “party capitals” may attract those already predisposed to boundary‑testing, while others select destinations precisely because they believe crime will be effectively controlled. In this sense, tourists do not just passively respond to a city’s risk landscape; they co‑produce it through their expectations and conduct.

At the same time, cities must balance competing roles: home for residents, playground for visitors, and marketplace for global tourism capital. The people we become in cities that aren’t ours are shaped by more than individual morality; they are sculpted by marketing slogans, cheap flights, lax regulations and the quiet understanding that what happens abroad often stays abroad, except when it cracks ancient stone, stains sacred floors or prompts new criminal codes.

The anonymity afforded by a new urban landscape, coupled with the relaxation of social norms often associated with vacationing, can pull individuals away from their usual ethical standards, sometimes resulting in increased deviance or even criminal activity among visitors. The tourist who carves his name into the Colosseum, the group who defile a temple at Machu Picchu, the drunken fighter in a Balinese street, none of them appear, in their own minds, as “criminals” in the way that label is applied at home. They are simply different versions of themselves, temporarily rewritten by distance, desire and the fragile belief that cities which are not ours will forgive what our own never would.

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