ABSTRACT

Tourism Fictions, Simulacra and Virtualities offers a new understanding of tourism’s interaction with space, questioning the ways in which fictions, simulacra and virtualities express tourism in the built environment and vice versa.

Since its beginnings, tourism has inspired themed built environments that have a constitutive, and sometimes problematic, relationship with the “real” world and its architectural references. This volume questions and rethinks the different environments constructed or adapted both for and by tourism exploring the relationship between the “real” and the “unreal” within the tourist bubble and the ways in which the real world inspires simulacra for tourism use. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach this book touches on a wide range of geographical areas, eras and subjects such as post-socialist tourism in Poland, the Hawaiian imaginary in Las Vegas, Rio de Janeiro’s Little Africa, as well as multiple instances of virtual reality in tourism.

This timely and innovative volume will be of great interest to upper level students, researchers and academics in tourism, architecture, cultural studies, geography and heritage studies.

chapter 1|16 pages

Tourism fictions, simulacra and virtualities

Write, stage and play the tourist game

part 1|2 pages

Fictions

chapter 2|17 pages

White lies

Reclaiming Rio de Janeiro’s denied slave past in the touristic redevelopment of the old port

chapter 3|25 pages

Pałacy-in-progress

Re-imagining East Prussian country estates in post-socialist tourism landscapes of Northeast Poland

chapter 4|25 pages

Tourist bubbles in the Alps

Sliding from the sublime into picturesque worlds

part 2|2 pages

Simulacra

chapter 6|15 pages

(Re)presenting paradise

The Hawaiian imaginary in Las Vegas

chapter 7|15 pages

Tourism, simulacra and architectural reconstruction

selling an idealised past*

chapter 8|19 pages

From the Lascaux cave to Lascaux IV

Repetition and transformation of a simulacrum*

chapter 9|25 pages

“An oriental town patterned upon movies concepts” 1

China City, a tourist simulacrum in Los Angeles (1938–1948)

part 3|2 pages

Virtualities

chapter 10|14 pages

The city of light in the city of signs

Virtuality and tourism at Paris, Las Vegas

chapter 12|13 pages

Virtualities in the new tourism landscape

The case of the Anne Frank House Virtual Tour and of the visualizations of the Berlin Wall in the Cold War context

chapter 13|23 pages

Iconic architecture in tourism

(how) does it work?