Brynhild Granås

Arvid Viken

Although blurred and heavily contested, the concept of ’tourist destination’ still deserves careful attention. Despite its unstable characteristics, ’destination’ is a central and meaningful term in play among all parties in the field of tourism, including tourists, tourism operators, and politicians, as well as students and tourism scholars. This anthology draws on different approaches and discourses of tourism destination development, while focusing on how they are shaped and reshaped and how they should be read and rehearsed. The book reveals dominant as well as alternative approaches to the field. The authors demonstrate how tourism destinations are commercial, but socially embedded; how they are both material and territorial, but at the same time socially constructed; how production of touristic brands and images are vital, but contested. Such tensions are unfolded through paradigmatic discussions and a series of case studies from the northern hemisphere. The chapters in the book investigate how destination development is catalysed through theming, how changing environments lead to reorientations, and how destinations are political. Altogether, the book provides experts and students with an up-to-date theoretical and empirical insight into tourist destinations.

Turns and Tactics

Tourism Destination Development

Through an interdisciplinary range of case studies from across the Northern rim of Europe, this volume shows how place reinvention as a concept affects not only global cities but also marginal regions. Linking place reinvention to the economic, the symbolic and the political production of space, the volume puts forward insights into how 'marginal areas' understand their role in the global competition between places and regions through their branding strategies, playing with representations of the unique and the ordinary, urban and rural, reindustrialization and cultural economy. It also shows how and why some places seem to retain and strengthen their uniqueness, whilst others are losing their local distinctiveness in the struggle to survive.

Arvid Viken

Books

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