Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
arts and culture within the urban tourism product, and authors such as Bianchini and
Parkinson (1993) evaluated cultural strategies. The impact of arts and cultural festivals has
been assessed by García (2005), highlighting their potential for addressing negative images,
and repositioning the city in relation to key markets. García's latest work has been evaluating
Liverpool 08 (European Capital of Culture), which used the slogan 'The World in One City'
in the bidding stages. Authors such a Ram
et al.
(2000) have highlighted the interrelationships
between ethnic minority communities and businesses and urban tourism in cities around the
world.
Researchers such as Collins (2003) have revealed both the enterprise of migrant groups
and their commercial exploitation in the China Towns and Little Indias of the USA, Australia,
Canada and the UK. Collins (2003) takes an inherently spatial approach, linking concentra-
tions of ethnic groups in Sydney (Australia) to successive waves of immigration. Ram
et al.
(2000) illustrates both the racial and commercial tensions bubbling under the surface of the
Balti Quarter in Birmingham (UK).
A rather different contribution from human geographers draws upon behavioural
psychology. Early geographers such as Lynch (1960) applied cognitive mapping to cities,
analysing the landmarks, nodes, paths, etc., used by individuals to construct 'mental maps'.
The tradition was developed by authors such as Pearce (1977) in a study of city maps, and
Walmsey and Jenkins (1992) in a study of Coffs Harbour (Australia). The same perspective
has also been infl uential in place image studies (e.g. Pike, 2002), and urban tourism texts that
engage with how visitors perceive the urban environment (e.g. Page, 1995). Whilst the
behavioural approach introduced a valuable human element into the 'spatial science' of the
1950s, it is rather at odds with contemporary human geography. As Selby (2004: 83) points
out, such mental images are conceived as 'the result of psychologically determined processes
of perception and cognition. .. natural, non-political distortions of an objective reality'.
Poststructuralist approaches
The representational
Early post-structuralist work sought to challenge conceptualisations of the world as simply
'out there', objective, neutral and universal. Cultural geography was initially concerned with
the ways in which places are represented, and as Aitchison
et al
. (2000) stress, negotiated,
contested, subverted and transgressed. Central to representational cultural studies of urban
tourism is the 'landscape as text' model, drawing upon linguistics and semiotics. The meta-
phor of text is used to conceptualise the reading of both the landscape and its representations
(literature, guidebooks, maps, etc.) as if they were documents. As Ringer (1998: 6) argued,
the visible structure of a place illustrates 'the means by which it imagined, produced, contested,
and enforced'. The basis of the textual model is semiotics, a means of understanding the use
of signs to produce meaning. According to early semoiticians such as de Saussure (1966), the
sign consists of two components, the
signifi er
and the
signifi ed.
Whilst the signifi er is the
expression carrying the message, the signifi ed is the concept that it represents. As Echtner
(1999) explains in a tourism context, more socially orientated genres also introduce the inter-
pretant, forming the semiotic triangle.
The interest in semiotics in the context of urban tourism is hardly surprising. Visitors seek
out specifi c cultural markers in cities, signifying typical histories and cultures, according to
preconceptions about the uniqueness of the destination. As Culler (1981: 127) noted, 'all over
the world the unsung army of semioticians, the tourists, are fanning out in search of the signs
