ABSTRACT
This chapter unfolds relational perspectives of place-specific tourist site development and explores how the place management of tourist sites and destinations can benefit from applying a relational urban design and mobilities thinking into the understanding and development of the tourist place. In a Danish context, it has become increasingly prevalent in tourism development to take a point of departure in place-specific attributes to ensure an authentic development of potentials already present at the tourist site. This chapter expands this thinking and argues that such a place-specific tourism development perspective needs to also employ a relational understanding of place, as tourists’ holiday experience is built from a range of place experiences, where both physical and mental connections between places are important for the overall tourist experience. Places, also tourist sites, should be understood as dynamic and ever-changing spaces of actions (Hvattum 2010) relationally linked in a network with other tourist and non-tourist places. To do this, a mapping of the place network is necessary, which will afford new perspectives on the place and thus mobilise place-specific management for the benefit of the place-specific tourist site development. This chapter contributes with an understanding of tourist places as being related to other places in an entangled network of relationships, not only physical but embodied, imagined, experienced and perceived. This chapter pleads for a relational- and mobilities-oriented as well as a place-specific approach in the continuous management and development of tourist places. Thus, understanding the tourist place as a multilayered entity means we, in the understanding and developing of these complex entities, need to apply network-based architectural and urban design mappings that consider material and immaterial matters of concern.
