Mike Crang

The trouble with tourism and travel theory

We would like to take this chance to welcome readers to this new journal and sketch out some of its aims at what we think is an exciting and challenging time for work on tourism.The main impetus for founding a new tourism journal was that in our view and in the minds of many key contributors to the tourism field, tourism studies had become stale, tired, repetitive and lifeless. At a time when John Urry has just launched his Sociology Beyond Societies ‐ Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (in which mobilities are argued to have ‘reconstituted social life in uneven and complex ways’); when Anthony Giddens’ 1999 Reith Lectures were called ‘Runaway World’ and when the subject of the 2000 Theory Culture & Society conference in Finland was cosmopolitanism, it seems almost impossible not to see tourist studies as one of the most exciting and relevant topics in these transnational times (Urry, 2000; Giddens, 2000).And yet, it is not. The first trouble with tourism studies, and paradoxically also one of its sources of interest, is that its research object, ‘tourism’ has grown very dramatically and quickly and that the tourism research community is relatively new. Indeed at times it has been unclear which was growing more rapidly ‐ tourism or tourism research. Part of this trouble is that tourist studies has simply tried to track and record this staggering expansion, producing an enormous record of instances, case studies and variations. One reason for this is that tourist studies has been dominated by policy led and industry sponsored work so the analysis tends to internalize industry led priorities and perspectives, leaving the . . . research subject to the imperatives of policy, in the sense that one expects the researcher to assume as his own an objective of social control that will allow the tourist product to be more finely tuned to the demands of the international market. (Picard, 1996: 103) Part of this trouble is also that this effort has been made by people whose disciplinary origins do not include the tools necessary to analyse and theorize the complex cultural and social processes that have unfolded. How many schools of tourism hire the specialist skills of social and cultural theory? Most tourist studies

Picturing practices: research through the tourist gaze

Geographers have shown the centrality of representations of landscape to understanding social geographies. This article suggests that so far more attention has been paid to the representations than the practices that create these representations. Using the example of popular photography, this article suggests that such a focus on representations misses some important processes and reproduces some social ideologies. First, perhaps surprisingly, focusing on the practices of photography serves to reinstate the corporeality of experience often claimed to be lost in visual theory. Secondly, this embodied experience serves to highlight the mediation of visual worlds through technologies and epistemologies. Thirdly, it is suggested studying practices displaces some of the ways geography has posited an ‘authentic’ popular experience against its commodified forms. These ideas are pursued with reference to popular and principally tourist photography. In total it is suggested that such an approach focuses attention on the times and spaces of tourist experience in novel ways. The article insists on the subtle forms of time involved in touristic practices – through the idea of future perfect experience. It also suggests the spatialization of time through the juxtaposition of tourist spaces through pictorial technology. In order to reconcile these developments, the article further suggests that we need to look at not the visual perception of sights but their embodied, technological proprioception; and, to escape the authentic/commodified trap, we must think through a displaced idea of experience not through presence. Finally, it is suggested that this may be important in thinking through appropriate research strategies for mediated experience.

Qualitative methods: touchy, feely, look-see?

This paper follows the case of one city that has deliberately fashioned itself as a regional, indeed global, hub for the information age. Singapore has shaped itself into a global hub in what is often seen as a global information space that depends upon key. The state conceived of the island’s development through a vocabulary of networks and hubs in a space of global flows. This paper follows the Singapore government’s efforts to embrace the new possibilities of being a global hub while coping with the ramifications of changing social and spatial relationships at a range of scales from the local to the global. The paper focuses upon the initiative to create a so-called Intelligent Island and the SingaporeONE project to create a pervasive networked environment. These two linked initiatives aimed to allow Singaporeans to exploit digital technology but also reconfigured the relationship of Singapore to the outside world. The paper will examine the material and discursive consequences of these plans – suggesting that the rhetorical and discursive effects are probably as significant as many of the alleged benefits through information processing. These initiatives are set in the context of a range of other flows – of people and things – to raise issues about the city state as, on the one hand, a purposive actors shaping the environment and, on the other, being pushed by forces that destabilise the linkage of people and place upon which the state relied.

SENTIENT CITIES Ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space

Increasing amounts of information processing capacity are embedded in the environment around us. The informational landscape is both a repository of data and also increasingly communicates and processes information. No longer confined to desk tops, computers have become both mobile and also disassembled. Many everyday objects now embed computer processing power, while others are activated by passing sensors, transponders and processors. The distributed processing in the world around us is often claimed to be a pervasive or ubiquitous computing environment: a world of ambient intelligence, happening around us on the periphery of our awareness, where our environment is not a passive backdrop but an active agent in organizing daily lives. The spaces around us are now being continually forged and reforged in informational and communicative processes. It is a world where we not only think of cities but cities think of us, where the environment reflexively monitors our behaviour. This paper suggests that we need to unpack the embedded politics of this process. It outlines the three key emerging dynamics in terms of environments that learn and possess anticipation and memory, the efficacy of technological mythologies and the politics of visibility. To examine the assumptions and implications behind this the paper explores three contrasting forms of ‘sentient’ urban environments. The first addresses market-led visions of customized consumer worlds. The second explores military plans for profiling and targeting. Finally, the third looks at artistic endeavours to re-enchant and contest the urban informational landscape of urban sentience. Each, we suggest, shows a powerful dynamic of the environment tracking, predicting and recalling usage.

Tourism: Between Place and Performance

Many accounts of tourism have adopted an almost paradigmatic visual model of the gaze. This collection presents an expanded notion of spectatorship with a more dynamic sense of embodied and performed engagement with places. The approach resonates with ideas in anthropology, sociology, and geography on performance, invented traditions, constructed places and traveling cultures. Contributions highlight the often contradictory, contested and paradoxical constructions of landscape and community involved both in tourist attractions and among tourists themselves. The collection examines many different practices, ranging from the energetic pursuit of adventure holidays to the reading of holiday brochures. It illustrates different techniques of seeing the landscape and a variety of ways of creating and performing the local. Chapters thus demonstrate the mutual entanglement of practices, images, conventions, and creativity. They chart these global flows of people, texts, images, and artefacts. Case studies are drawn from diverse types of tourism and destination focused around North America, Europe, and Australasia. Simon Coleman teaches in the Department of Anthropology, University of Durham. Mike Crang is Lecturer in the Department of Geography, University of Durham.

Magic kingdom or a quixotic quest for authenticity

Abstract This paper attempts to look at the practices of interpretation involved in heritage tourism. Instead of focusing on artefacts as images of the past, it investigates the interpretive and communicative work needed to make sense of built heritage. The examples used are a Tudor manor house in the southeast of England, where each year a living history event is staged, and a reenactment society that portrays the events of the British Civil War at historic properties. Participant observation provided the method to examine the activities of interpretation education and the production of a sense of realism and “authenticity”. The paper argues that heritage is a much more self-reflexive activity than commonly portrayed.

The city and topologies of memory.

The relationship of space and time has become a vexed issue in accounts in the postmodern metropolis. Rich and enlivening accounts use spatial categories to describe the interrelationships of elements of the city—moving from historicism to geography, to gloss Jamesons development of cognitive mapping. Postmodern geographies utilising the ideas of cognitive mapping show marked similarities with the accounts of time and space describing classical and medieval arts of memory and the Romantic writings of Flaubert on Athens. However, spatialised accounts of the city often seem to replicate problematic divisions of space and time that also underlay historicist accounts and merely invert the latters priorities. The work of Bergson offers key insights into how this division occurred and a sense of temporality that may be lost in spatial metaphors. This is a sense of difference and alterity that we trace in the work of Proust and argue can be brought to inform the urban theatre of memories through a careful reworking of ideas suggested by de Certeau and Derrida. In this paper we take the case of Athens, bringing together East and West, ancient and modern, original and copy, as a grounding to discuss these issues. We suggest a sense of time- space as both fragmented and dynamic; a sense of the historical sites as creating instability and displacement in collective memory.

Interrogating the circular economy: the moral economy of resource recovery in the EU

Abstract The concept of the circular economy has gained increasing prominence in academic, practitioner and policy circles and is linked to greening economies and sustainable development. However, the idea is more often celebrated than critically interrogated. Analysis shows the concept circulates as an idea and ideal, exemplified by industrial symbiosis and extended product life. Yet, its actual enactment is limited and fragile. Instead, circular economies are achieved mostly through global recycling networks which are the primary means by which wastes are recovered as resources. European policies eschew these circuits. Resource recovery through global recycling networks is regarded as a dirty and illegal trade. In its place, EU circular economies attempt to transform wastes into resources within the boundaries of the EU. Through an analysis of two case studies of resource recovery in the United Kingdom, we highlight the challenges that confront making circular economies within the EU, showing that these are borne of a conjuncture of politically created markets, material properties and morally defined materials circuits. We show resource recovery in the EU to be framed by moral economies, driven by discourses of ecological modernization, environmental justice and resource (in)security, the last of which connects to Chinas resource-intensive development.

Technology, time – space, and the remediation of neighbourhood life

Much theoretical commentary over the last decade addressed the likely impacts of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on urban life works by opposing ‘virtual’ spaces and mediated activities to ‘real’ places. Drawing on recent theorising in media studies about ‘remediation’, this paper attempts to move beyond a reliance on such unhelpful real–virtual conceptual binaries. The paper uses such conceptual discussions to consider more fully the multiple, subtle, and interdependent spatiotemporalities which together work to constitute ICT-based urban change. While innovative work has traced the emergence of various online spaces and communities, our interest here is on the intersection of online and offline practices. Through a case study of two contrasting neighbourhoods in Newcastle upon Tyne, the paper explores in detail how social relations and grocery shopping are being affected by ICT use. It suggests that the remediation of everyday urban life through ICTs involves subtle shifts in the spatial, temporal, scalar, and material processes which together help to constitute urban change, and which are all too often overlooked in conventional and binary approaches opposing the ‘virtual’ realm of new technologies to ‘real’ urban places.

On the Heritage Trail: Maps of and Journeys to Olde Englande

This paper contains analyses of some theoretical ways of comprehending heritage phenomena. It is suggested that commentators on such phenomena have analysed an intended object based on a particular experience of heritage events. Rather, the author stresses that there are multiple ways of experiencing heritage. Throughout it is suggested that it is performance that creates heritage. Travel is used as a metaphor for this process as it stresses the issue of creative spatiotemporal practices. However, the organisation of heritage is reliant on the assumption that heritage is ontologically prior to its performance. The tension between these two perspectives is mobilised through the metaphors of Map and Journey. The reactionary tendency to reify heritage is seen less as a result of misleading versions of history than as a result of their organisation. This organisation freezes a certain experience of heritage into a virtual object. This object is like a map that is used to attempt to project its own selective order back onto heritage experiences. The author uses anecdotes, examples from the literature, and his own research to illustrate these points.