ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the conceptual idea of tourist destinations and their transformation processes as a set of discursive practices. These practices are seen as operating in a certain socio-spatial context and a global-local nexus interconnecting distant places and creating deepening dependency between different regions and scales. The chapter re-contextualizes the framework of the transformation process of tourist destinations. Focus on tourist destination change and development has been a core area in tourism studies. Similarly, the connections between tourism industry and regional development, that is relationships between tourism growth and surrounding socio-spatial structures and processes, have interested tourism researchers for a relatively long period of time. Tourist destinations are subject to the processes of discontinuities of modernity and currently tourist destinations are being transformed much more rapidly and on a more non-local basis than before. The homogenization and differentiation can lead to the evolution of enclavic tourism spaces which have limited connections to surrounding regional structures and processes.
