ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects the changed role which landscape and culture represent to ‘western’ societies as the new millennium is approached. No longer are such resources largely to sustain local inhabitants, they are now the focus of consumption by consumers resident elsewhere. In response, tourism policy now pervades the more traditional areas of social, economic, environmental, rural and urban policies (e.g. Prentice 1993a). As such, cultural and landscape tourism implies an ultimacy of consumerism: the legitimacy and ability, although temporarily and often imperfectly, to choose as easily as selecting a new sound system or wall hanging, another culture or landscape as a setting for experience. As illusion, outwith the tourism ghettos of non-place differentiated tourism, the tourism settings provided by culture and landscape are a hallmark of postmodernity, since for many such transposition is no longer an extravagance but is perceived instead as a ‘right’ of modern affluence. Residential relocation to areas selected for their cultural or landscape value is the final manifestation of this ‘right’ and achievement of illusion; relocations are frequently the consequence of earlier tourist experiences.
