Tourism Mobilities

Places to Play, Places in Play

Mimi Sheller, John Urry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134302642
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Many places around the world are being produced, converted, interpreted and made fit for tourist consumption. This fascinating book analyzes tourist performances such as walking, shopping, sunbathing, photographing, eating and clubbing, and studies why, and indeed how, some places become global centres whilst others don't. Arranged in four distinct parts, Sheller and Urry consider:

• Performing Paradise
• Performances of Global Heritage
• Remaking Playful Places
• New Playful Places.

Incorporating a wide array of empirical research and innovative international case studies, this fascinating book illuminates the tourist performance phenomenon: from Eco-tourism on the beach to shopping in Hong Kong, from the making of 'Cool Reykjavik' to tourism in high-rise suburbs in Paris, and from Inca heritage to medical tourism.

Edited by two world authorities in tourism studies, this revealing book deploys a range of theories related to the 'mobility turn' in the social sciences in order to analyze the contingent and networked nature of how places are stabilized as fit for playful performances. Well-written and researched, with coherent analysis and presentation, this book will appeal to academics, students and those interested in the complex character of global change.

Chapter 1

Places to play, places in play

Mimi Sheller and John Urry

Introduction

This book is about how places to play are also places in play: made and remade by the mobilities and performances of tourists and workers, images and heritage, the latest fashions and the newest diseases. The playfulness of place is in part about the urge to travel elsewhere, the pleasure of immersing oneself in another environment, and the fascination with little differences in the materiality of the world. What is it that provokes a fascination for other places? What makes a place desirable to visit? And even if we desire that other place, why do we actually go through the trouble of physically visiting it? Why be in another place? What are the pleasures it can give that are only available through our physical presence?

But beyond that, the playfulness of place is also about the ways in which places themselves are always ‘on the move’. Places are ‘performed’, often on a kind of global stage, and in these performances they are put into play in relation to other places, becoming more or less desirable, more or less visited. Places consist of physical stuff, which is itself always in motion: new hotel developments, airports and roads, eroding beaches and erupting volcanoes, stinging mosquitoes and deadly viruses – a place can bite back. So we also ask: what needs to be mobilized in order to make a particular kind of place, such as a beach, a city, or a heritage site? How much are places being remade in order to draw in and to capture people on the move? If we are elsewhere with many other people, what does this do to those places? How are places to play stabilized and assembled, and how are they undone and surpassed?

We refer to ‘tourism mobilities’, then, not simply in order to state the obvious (that tourism is a form of mobility), but to highlight that many different mobilities inform tourism, shape the places where tourism is performed, and drive the making and unmaking of tourist destinations. Mobilities of people and objects, airplanes and suitcases, plants and animals, images and brands, data systems and satellites, all go into ‘doing’ tourism. Tourism also concerns the relational mobilizations of memories and performances, gendered and racialized bodies, emotions and atmospheres. Places have multiple contested meanings that often produce disruptions and disjunctures. Tourism mobilities involve complex combinations of movement and stillness, realities and fantasies, play and work.

In this introductory chapter we begin by briefly describing contemporary tourism mobilities, mobilities that increasingly constitute global relationships generally. We then set out our approach to examining places to play and places in play, an approach that looks at diverse systems that contingently orchestrate, organize, and perform these ‘urges’ to be elsewhere and these materializations of places that become the objects of desire. We outline some themes that are developed in the chapters that follow, dealing with places to play in Central and South America, Australia, India, East Asia, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the north Atlantic, as well as ‘round-the-world’ travel. But first let us preview the structure of the book.

Part 1, ‘Performing paradise’, focuses on the beach and the island as particular sites of play. In the iconography of contemporary tourism beaches are the global paradise, places of leisure, nakedness, pleasure, and exhibitionism (Corbin 1994; Löfgren 1999).¹ The Caribbean especially has come to signify a place of playful sensuality that sets the ‘Edenic’ standard for beaches the world over (chapter 2); even in a way for supposed ‘eco-tourists’ whose desire to get ‘close to nature’ leads places to be transformed and sands shifted for their play (chapter 4). But we also show how there are other beaches, beaches of movement, where surfers dwell in a shelter of moving water, the tube, a dynamic place of transcendence where surfers and their soundtracks play (chapter 5). And we examine the rise and fall of beach destinations like Ayia Napa in Cyprus (chapter 3), suggesting how entire islands sway to the fickle flows of tourism.

Part 2, ‘Performances of global heritage’, explores how heritage is mobilized within and through tourism, staged and performed in museums, World Heritage Sites, and ‘historic’ places. The invention of tradition, heritage, and cultural memory always has ‘real’ effects: rebranding a place often occurs through a material ‘face-lift’ in which entire areas are rebuilt, restructured and renamed, often as ‘heritage’ sites (chapters 6, 7, and 10). Global flows of tourism and capital touch down in local places, transforming localities yet also being subjected to ‘glocalization’ effects and divergent temporalities (chapters 6, 9, and 10). And in museums, cultures and bodies are put into play as transnational connections are made and un-made, and distinctions (of class, gender, and national ‘habitus’) worked and reworked through time and space (chapters 8 and 9).

In Part 3, ‘Remaking playful places’, the contributions turn to the remaking of global cities as key sites where the mobilities of tourism are unleashed. On the one hand we explore how cities like Hong Kong and Barcelona refashion their built environments and their inter-textual signification to perform as ‘attractions’ on a highly competitive global stage of ‘world-class’ destinations (chapters 11 and 12). On the other hand we also examine the far more devalued urban landscapes of high-rise suburbs of European poverty (chapter 13) and the semi-mythic favelas of Rio de Janeiro (chapter 14) as places of danger and enthralment, monotony, and awesomeness. These are the new places of play at least for a kind of ‘postmodern middle class’ both fascinated and repelled by their indescribable, indistinct, yet atmospheric post-apocalyptic urbanism.

In the final part, ‘New playful places’, we challenge the conventional boundaries of tourism studies by turning to unexpected sites for tourist mobilities: people documenting their global travels for friends at home on round-the-world websites (chapter 15), man-made platforms (chapter 16), nuclear reactions (chapter 17), and places of death and decay (chapter 18). The meaning of place is itself in play in a world of risks, simulations, ever-mutating diseases, and terrorism. The final chapters of this book bring out how not all play is simply fun: places to play are often also places of disease, danger, and death, especially as the world is currently haunted both by global terrorism and global tourism. Tourism itself is thus in motion, becoming less predictable as changing notions of leisure, authenticity, and risk dramatically reshape global mobilities.

Tourism mobilities

‘Travel and tourism’ is the largest industry in the world, accounting for 11.7 per cent of world GDP, 8 per cent of world export earnings, and 8 per cent of employment. This mobility affects almost everywhere, with the World Tourism Organization publishing tourism statistics for over 180 countries (WTO 2002). Almost no countries are not significant senders and receivers of visitors. Internationally there are over 700 million legal passenger arrivals each year (compared with 25 million in 1950) with a predicted 1 billion by 2010; there are 4 million air passengers each day; at any one time 300,000 passengers are in flight above the United States, equivalent to a substantial city; one-half of British adults took a flight during 2001; globally there is one car for every 8.6 people, with a predicted threefold increase in car travel between 1990 and 2030. Such mobility is highly significant for the global environment, accounting for one-third of total CO₂ emissions (see Urry 2003a, for data sources), and contributing to the rising sea levels that are already threatening to submerge many current places to play.

Many places are being put into play due to the increasingly global character of these contemporary mobilities. The 1990s have seen remarkable ‘time-space compression’ as people across the globe have been brought ‘closer’ through various technologies. There is an apparent ‘death of distance’ in what is sometimes described as a fluid and speeded-up ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000). There are nearly 1 billion internet users worldwide, there are 1 billion TV sets, and new mobile phones are more common than landline phones. But this compression of time-space also stems from rapid flows of travellers, migrants, and tourists physically moving from place to place, from time to time. The scale of physical travel is immense, the largest ever ‘peaceful’ movement of people across national borders. Almost all societies across the globe are transformed by flows of tourists, as place after place is reconfigured as recipients of such flows. This is not to say that such flows are ‘free’, uncontained, or undirected; borders, gatekeepers, police, and security guards filter out ‘legitimate’ tourists, with their tourist visas, from the 31 million refugees also at large in the world today whose arrivals, and detention, in new places are often highly contested.

These global mobilities presuppose the growth of ‘tourism reflexivity’, a system of governmentality that ensures that increasing numbers of places around the world monitor, evaluate, and develop their ‘tourism potential’. This reflexivity involves identifying a place’s location within the contours of geography, history, and culture that swirl around the globe, and locating their actual and potential material and semiotic resources. A good example of this is Havana’s strange legacy of 1950s American cars and their metonymic capacity to signify 1950s American cultural imperialism in its pre-communist heyday. Reflexivity involves networks of systematic, regularized, and evaluative procedures that monitor, modify, and maximize each place’s location within this turbulent global order. These networks ‘invent’, produce, market, and circulate, especially through global TV and the internet, redesigned (and re-redesigned) ‘places’ and signs of their meaning. ‘Tourism reflexivity’ involves the institutionalization of tourism studies (such as books like this one), as well as the development of many consultancy and design firms interlinked with local, national and international states, companies, voluntary associations, and NGOs.² Almost everywhere, it seems, can be subject to signing and re-designing, even places such as Las Vegas that seem in the past to have had a very fixed ‘placing’ upon the global stage (see Rothman 2002).

Indeed more generally, there is an incredible range of employment now found within global tourism. Most people across the globe cannot fail to be implicated within, or affected by, these circuits of tourism and travel. Such employment includes travel agencies; transportation; hospitality; bars, clubs, restaurants, and cafés; architecture, design, and consultancy; media to circulate images through print, TV, news, and the internet; arts and sports events and festivals; and NGO campaigns for and against tourist developments. The growth of the tourism industry also more widely reshapes patterns of urbanization, of infrastructure development (roads, airports, ports), of agriculture and food importation, of cultural production and performance, with implications for almost every economic sector. Such cities provide, according to Rothman, the vision of the twenty-first century as shown in the recent re-placing of Las Vegas as a family entertainment centre (2002).

If tourism is transforming the materiality of many ‘real’ places, it is also having a deep impact on the creation of virtual realities and fantasized places. There are enormously powerful and ubiquitous global brands or logos that increasingly feature tourist sites/sights as key components of the global culture that their brand speaks to and enhances. Corporations over the last two decades have shifted from manufacturing products to producing brands, involving enormous marketing, design, sponsorship, public relations, and advertising expenditure. These brand companies include many in travel and leisure: Disney, Hilton, Nike, Gap, Easyjet, Body Shop, Virgin, Club Med, Starbucks, Coca Cola, and so on. These brands produce ‘concepts’ or ‘life-styles’: ‘liberated from the real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing, these brands are free to soar, less as the dissemination of goods and services than as collective hallucinations’ (Klein 2000: 22). These lifestyle concepts revolve around generic types of places to play: the hotel pool, the waterside café/restaurant, the cosmopolitan city, the hotel buffet, the theme park, the cocktail, the club, the airport lounge, the bronzed tan, exotic dancing, and the global beach (see Löfgren 1999, on the last; and Rothman 2002, on Coca-Cola’s role in the replacing of Las Vegas). Virtual places to play can also be built from scratch (chapter 16), built from memories (chapter 8), or built on the internet (chapter 15).

If tourism sometimes feels ‘unreal’, it nevertheless still mobilizes bodies in sensuous encounters with the physical world. Physical challenges such as surfing (chapter 5), hiking to Machu Picchu (chapter 7), becoming a Viking shipbuilder and sailor (chapter 8), or surviving urban ‘zones of risk’ (chapters 13 and 14) allow the tourist to put his or her own body into play. As Löfgren writes:

The grammar of landscape experiences includes all the different tourist forms of ‘taking in a landscape’: to traverse it, pass through it or past it, to dwell in it, sense it, be part of it … landscapes are produced by movement, both of the senses and of the body.

(2004: 106)

Places are not simply encountered, then, but are performed through embodied play. This playfulness requires equipment for the body: hiking shoes and backpacks, discreet cameras and hidden money belts, bathing suits and towels for more or less naked sun-worship, or suitable outfits for dancing. It also requires equipping of the place: signs and walkways, railways and armoured cars, replica historical heritage and postmodern iconic buildings. These micro-mob...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tourism Mobilities
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Places to play, places in play
• Part 1: Performing paradise
• Part 2: Performances of global heritage
• Part 3: Remaking playful places
• Part 4: New playful places
• Bibliography