Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
PurposeIn recent decades western cities have slowly evolved to extend their cultural offer to “the postmodern mixing of public and commercial culture” (Richards, 2014, p. 120) as a major plank of urban regeneration and development strategies. Urban tourism has been central to this and tourists are now an ever present temporary population of cultural consumers in so many of our towns and cities, even in those industrial cities that until recently would not have been imagined as tourist places. Tourism is thus a part of everyday urban life (Urry, 2002) whether we gaze on tourists going from one cultural space to another in our home towns or whether we ourselves are transformed into tourists as we conduct our cultural consumption in places distant to our usual workaday lives. This research note considers the impact such consumption is having on our urban centres. The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect on the way our urban centres are managed, who the urban citizen now is, and in what direction could tourism research take to shed further light on the way we manage, create and reproduce urban life in the increasingly diverse postmodern city.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is a critical reflection on urban tourism and offers a future research orientation.FindingsThe argument is that in light of new mobilities urban tourism research needs to be more politically reflexive than it often is.Research limitations/implicationsThere is no empirical research content so this does not apply.Practical implicationsThe practical implications are that urban tourism research should be about making cities better places and not simply about being policy performing vehicles in a politically light sense.Originality/valueThe originality of this piece is in the way it mixes urban studies, social theory and tourism studies together to come out with a view and argument on a way forward in researching tourism and cities.
International Journal of Tourism Cities – Emerald Publishing
Published: Dec 4, 2017
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.