ABSTRACT
Corporate and Government appropriations of tourist destinations are often characterized as exploitative of local people who are displaced, commodified and/ or essentialized. But what happens when it is the local people themselves who appropriate their own spaces by transforming a collection of grassroots tourism-related commercial interests into a fully fledged corporate-led tourist industry in a matter of only a few years? What impact does the appropriation of the physical spaces of a destination have on the narrative of what the place is about? Conversely, how do changing discourses about a place change physical spaces?
In 2003 locals in the village of Doolin in County Clare, Ireland, created a development plan. Since then more development has occurred than ever before in the history of the village. Using ethnographic accounts of the planning process and its subsequent implementation, this chapter tracks the transformation, essentialization and the auto-appropriation of a tourist destination. It analyses not only the corporate appropriation of the physical spaces of the village, but also the narrative appropriation of the definitions of the place. It considers how contestations over these created a village that wasn’t there before – a process of discursive emplacement that began long before it culminated in the concrete reality of development.
