Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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PLACES IN TOURISM
T.C. Chang
Introduction
The concept of 'place' occupies a central position in humanistic geography, providing a way
for geographers to understand how people create spaces of meaning and identity to live, work
and interact in. With tourism and commercialised leisure becoming an increasingly wide-
spread socio-spatial experience, the notion of place has invoked discussions of the manifold
ways in which tourism is constitutive of place formation. The idea of 'tourism creating places'
acknowledges tourism's role in the cultural and political economy of contemporary space
making. From destination marketing and branding, to urban redevelopment and the opening
of new attractions, tourism is seen as a potent force that 'makes places'.
Just as places are made, critical discourses also contend that tourism has the potential to
'unmake places' through its overzealous development tendencies, relentless marketing of
place myths and the creation of destinations that entice and enchant, often at the expense of
enlightenment (Cater, 2001). The contested intellectual terrains of 'place' within tourism
geography will be explored in this chapter. Rather than see this contestation as contradictor y,
the simultaneity of place processes reveals the many ways in which tourism impacts people
and places differently, under different circumstances and scalar resolutions.
The conceptual discourses of place will be empirically tested in the Singapore setting. As
the most public of landscapes, the Singapore River waterfront offers an opportunity to
examine the simultaneous processes of 'place making' and 'place unmaking'. As tourism plan-
ners and business operators create a world-class landscape befi tting a global city, foreign tour-
ists and local residents react differently to this vision of worldliness. While some interpret
landscape change as the 'making of new places', others are dismayed by what they regard as
the 'unmaking of old places'.
Conceptualising the contested terrains of place in tourism
The role of tourism in making and unmaking place is well documented in both theoretical
discourses and empirical studies. This literature review is not intended to be exhaustive, but
serves to highlight some ways for us to consider the varying conceptions of place in tourism
geographies. In humanistic geography, 'place' refers to the spaces that people endow with
