Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
experience of space occurs in everyday life, where familiar terrain serves as an unquestioned
backdrop to daily work, leisure and rest. Quotidian practices are usually habitually and unre-
fl exively performed in realms of homely continuity and stability and they also reproduce this
space as domestic and familiar.
The spatial constraints and opportunities which inhere in the organisation and affordances
of these familiar places mesh with the bodily dispositions emerging out of the routine prac-
tices of their inhabitants and become embedded over time. Crouch (2000) calls this under-
standing of place 'lay geographical knowledge', a form of knowing that is discursive, practical
and sensual. Claudio Minca and Tim Oakes (2006: 20) underline this perspective: 'Places
are at once the sedimented layers of historical experience, cultural habit, and personal and
collective memory and continually remade by lived bodily movement.'
Thus in such space we generally know how to get things done without much refl ection,
we know where things are and we can sense when things are out of place (Cresswell, 1996).
In considering this habitual, unrefl exive and sensual knowing of place, we might recall the
feel of familiar spaces underfoot, the everyday shifts in the weather, the mundane fl ora and
fauna, the local birdsong and traffi c noise, the smells of gardens, industries or shops. These
sights and signs, smellscapes, soundscapes, tactilities and textures deeply embedded in
everyday life and in memory form an unrefl exive sense of place, one that can be produced at
various scales, from the local to the regional to the national. For instance, the serial sensations
of familiar road signs and shopfronts, the melding of particular birdsongs in the dawn chorus,
the smell of breweries, gasoline and freshly mown grass, and the taste of white bread, ale and
crisps are serial sensations that provide an English sense of homeliness (Edensor, 2002). These
embodied and familiar sensations have a number of consequences for tourism which we now
explore in the rest of the chapter.
Firstly, despite theories that tourism is characterised by a quest for liminality or authenticity -
a movement away from the everyday towards the extraordinary and exotic - much tourist
experience is replete with routine, unrefl exive habits, practices that are circumscribed and
particular culturally specifi c escape attempts from normativity. Moreover, many of these
mundane, iterative tourist practices and experiences are accommodated in familiar homes
away from home, in the serial tourist environments in which tourists dwell and move.
Craik points out that the trend towards the production of large-scale, customised, themed
tourist developments 'entail[s] a convergence or blurring between tourist and everyday leisure
activities' (Craik, 1997: 125). These environments, including luxury hotels and resorts,
festival marketplaces and other kinds of themed spaces and enclaves (Edensor, 2007) produce
carefully controlled environments in which preferred activities are encouraged. Such realms
are sensually regulated to minimise disruption and provide a comfortable homeliness in
which the body is cajoled and cosseted into relaxed ease. Themed designs ensure that few
surprises shock the eye, shutting out 'extraneous, chaotic elements' and reducing 'visual and
functional forms to a few key images' (Rojek, 1995: 62). Smell is monitored to exclude strong
sewage, rotting food and industrial aromas but is augmented by incense and aromatic blooms;
sound tends to be quiet and subtle, with piped music replacing clatter and buzz; textures are
smooth, and clutter and dirt are eliminated to facilitate easy movement; and linen sheets,
cushioned furniture and air conditioning enclose bodies so they may relax in habituated
comfort.
Such realms resonate with the kind of managed environments foreseen by early modernist
architects, wherein the production of smooth walkways, clear vistas and sensory clarity would
facilitate the achievement of 'productive' movement, leisure, work and thought. For instance,
Le Corbusier contended that the provision of plentiful supplies of light, clean air and space
