ABSTRACT
While many tourists speak of visiting a ‘country’, in reality of course they usually enter that country through a major city and often stay for lengthy periods in that city. The notion of the global city has also given rise to the city as the destination. Thus many tourists visit cities with this status, such as London, Paris or New York. In such cases it is probable that few of those visitors actually travel across many other parts of the United Kingdom, France or the United States. In part this reflects the urban nature of modern society. Museums, theatre, shopping and sporting events tend to be located in cities and so there seems a natural fit between the city and the tourist. There will always be tourists who wish to stray ‘off the beaten path’ but there will be many more who enjoy the delights of the urban landscape exclusively. What this has given rise to is the potential for the city to be recast as a
‘product’ that can be marketed to tourists. As John Hannigan describes it, this involves a process – largely begun in the 1980s and 1990s – of ‘theming’ the city where various activities converge:
In the theme park cities of the 1990s, shopping, fantasy and fun have further bonded in a number of ways … shopping has become intensely entertaining and this in turn encourages more shopping … This convergence is described as ‘shopertainment’ … 1
A critique of this process is that cities are as a consequence produced as landscapes of pleasure for visitors. Residents of the city are then either marginalised to the outer circles of cities, where they might emerge to service the tourist centre, or become themselves part of the tourist trail – the resident that makes the urban landscape ‘real’. This is all part of the manner in which cities both attract inbound capital and regenerate. As Holcomb notes:
As tourism has become an ever more vital strategy for urban regeneration, governments and the tourist industry have invested greater amounts of resources on campaigns to ‘sell’ the city to potential ‘consumers’. This increasingly is how cities are marketed … Public funds are spent on marketing campaigns, and the city ‘product’ is both redesigned and reimaged for visitors rather than for residents.2
