ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with the presentation of the process of institutionalisation and professionalisation of tourism and heritage in Cergy-Pontoise, a “new town” built in the west of Paris (France) in the 1960s. A centralised tourism development created a selective and controlled discourse on the city, contributing to build a public image of Cergy-Pontoise revealing some dominant values in the way of defining “exceptional heritage of the city”. In this process, largely influenced by social and political stakes, some spaces of the contemporary city had been largely obscured in favour of the ancient or monumental urban areas.
In the past decade, new kinds of touristic initiatives have emerged in the city from civil society, especially from academia (the new university) and external NGOs. These initiatives are described in the second part of the chapter. They have contributed to enhance new urban spaces (including marginal spaces) and sought to promote more democratic conceptions of heritage in an activist spirit. Following a new globalised paradigm, these initiatives have established the local inhabitant as a central figure of urban tourism and the ordinary and multicultural city as a new archetype of the authentic tourist place. However, these initiatives haven’t really been given room to flourish. They have remained regulated and dependent on public policies, which are linked to the inherited control mechanisms in tourism and image branding in the (post) new city. The Cergy-Pontoise case thus questions the space left to civil society and grassroots initiatives in urban tourism in specific contexts.
