Destinations (PDF)

Destinations presents new directions for both tourism and cultural landscape studies in geography, crossing the traditional boundaries between the research of geographers and scholars of the tourism industry.
Drawing on selected research from Europe, Southeast Asia, the Pacific and North America, the contributors combine perspectives in human geography and tourism to present cultural landscapes of tourist destinations as socially constructed places, examining the extent and manner by which tourism both establishes and falsifies local reality.
Explaining how geographic perspectives about tourist destinations reveal the experience of place for people who live and work in these communities, and examining forces involved in state planning and global economic activities, the authors show how tourism is essentially about the creation and reconstruction of landscapes through manipulations of history and culture. The 'destination', as configured in a tourist's mind, thereby differs from the 'actual'.
Destinations addresses many critical themes which recent critiques in tourism studies focusing on the attitudes and behaviour of the tourist and on the industry as agents of social change have ignored, including the marginalization of the 'host' community, the privatization and commodification of local culture, and how tourism acts as both agent and process in the structure, identity and meaning of local places. The authors reveal how geographic conceptualizations of tourist landscapes can constructively anticipate the range of changes wrought on emergent destinations.