Robert Maitland

Brent W. Ritchie

Capital city status attracts and drives tourism by enhancing a city's appeal to the tourist and its international standing. With a focus on city tourism themes, this book examines subjects including the identity of a city in a tourism context and practical matters such as promoting the city as a product. By examining tourist activities in national capitals, the book addresses issues in capital city development as tourist destinations with a broad, international approach and case studies on major tourist cities.

National Capital Perspectives

City Tourism

Peter Newman

This book presents new research on the capacity of big cities to generate new tourism areas as visitors discover and help create new urban experiences off the beaten track. It examines similarities and differences in these processes in a group of established world cities located in the global circuits of tourism. The cities featured are Berlin, New York, London, Paris, and Sydney. In these cities experienced city visitors are contributing to the ‘discovery’ of new places to visit. Many neighbourhoods close to the historic centre and to traditional attractions offer the mix of cultural difference and consumption opportunities that can create new experiences for distinctive groups of city users. Each of the cities included in the book offers rich experiences of the re-imagining and re-branding of neighbourhoods off the beaten track, and informative stories of the complex relationships between visitors, residents and others and of the ambitions of public policy to reproduce these new tourism experiences in other parts of the city. World Tourism Cities brings together current research in each of the cities and relates the often separate field of tourism research to some of the mainstream themes of debate in urban studies addressing topics such as consumption, markets and spaces. Drawing on original research in this important group of cities this book has significant messages for public policy. In addition the book engages directly with a range of important current academic debates – about world cities, about cities as sites of consumption and about the smaller scales at which urban neighbourhoods are being transformed. The range of cities and the messages about the making of attractive places provides a timely resource for those focused in this area and the book will also have an appeal among those experienced and sophisticated city users that it focuses on.

Developing Tourism Off the Beaten Track

World Tourism Cities

At a time of increasing city competition, national capitals are at the forefront of efforts to gain competitive advantage for themselves and their nation, to project a distinctive and positive image and to score well in global city league tables. They are frequently their country’s main tourist gateway, and their success in attracting visitors is inextricably linked with that of the nation. They attract not just leisure visitors; they are especially important in other growing tourism markets, for example, as centres of power they feature strongly in business tourism, as academic centres they are important for educational tourism, and they frequently host global events such as the Olympic Games. And there are more of them: first, the number of capitals has grown as the number of nation-states has increased and, secondly, pressures for devolution mean more cities are seeking national capital status, even when they are not at the head of independent states. We need to understand tourism in capitals better – but there has been little research in the past. This book develops new insights as it explores the phenomenon of capital city tourism, and uses recent research to examine the appeal of ‘capitalness’ to tourists, and explore developments in capitals across the world. This book was published as a special issue of Current Issues in Tourism.

Robert Maitland

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