From the Grand Tour to today”s packages holidays, the last two centuries have witnessed an exponential growth in travel and tourism and, as the twenty-first century unfolds, people of every class and from every country will be wandering to every part of the planet.
Meanwhile tourist destinations throughout the world find themselves in ever more fierce competition – those places marginalized in today”s global industrial and information economy perceiving tourism as perhaps the only means of surviving. But mass tourism has raised the local and international passions as people decry the irreversible destruction of traditional places and historic sites.
Against these trends and at a time when standardized products and services are marketed worldwide, there is an increasing demand for built environments that promise unique cultural experiences. This has led many nations and groups to engage in the parallel processes of facilitating the consumption of tradition and of manufacturing tradition.
The contributors to this volume – drawn from a wide range of disciplines – address these themes within the following sections: Traditions and Tourism: Rethinking the ‘Other’; Imaging and Manufacturing Heritage; Manufacturing and Consuming: Global and Local. Their studies, dealing with very different times, environments and geographic locales, will shed new light on how tourist ”gaze” transforms the reality of built spaces into cultural imagery.