ABSTRACT
In the concluding essay to their edited work on The Tourist City, Fainstein and Judd (1999a: 261) comment that ‘tourism has been a central component of the economic, social and cultural shift that has left its imprint on the world system of cities in the past two decades’. This simple statement captures the evident truism that cities in the twenty-first century represent important tourist destinations and so any attempt to develop an understanding of the spaces of tourism needs to examine these primary tourist locations. The contemporary significance of urban tourism derives in part from the scale of activity and its diversity – embracing, as it does, several forms of pleasure travel, business and conference tourism, visiting friends and relatives, educational travel and, selectively, religious travel. But more importantly, perhaps, urban tourism has acquired a level of significance through its newfound centrality in the processes of reinvention of cities under post-industrial, postmodern change and the related restructuring of urban economies and societies around consumption. Urban tourism has variously become an essential tool for physical redevelopment of urban space, for economic regeneration and employment creation, for place promotion, for reimaging cities and helping to create identity in the new global systems. As a consequence of these processes, tourism (and its infrastructure) has become deeply embedded within both the urban fabric and the daily experience of people who live within these places.
