The construction of global tourism spaces

1
Theconstruction of global tourism spaces
2
The spaces of flows

• Global travel spaces
• Airports
• Airline cabins
• Transit lounges
• Hotels

Non-places?
3
Placeless mobility
Daniel Boorstin The lost art of travel nothing
to see but the weather... I had flown not
through space but time . Passage through space
unnoticeable...robbed of landscape Each Hilton
hotel is indistinguishable...a little
America ...you have the comforting feeling of
not being there dont know where you are
unless you look out window
4
American tourism frontier modernity

• Modernization theory
• Spatialization of modernity
• Mobility agent of modernity
• American touristgt modernization
• Travel spaces connecting places

5
globalizing modernity local tradition
6
US Building the postwar global tourism economy

• Eliminating boundaries
• The Marshall Plan and tourism to Europe
• International airlines and tourist fares
• The jet plane revolution

7
Time-space compression
crossing global distances and
connecting places
8
global travel spacesthe spectacle of mobility
9
Eero Saarinens TWA terminal at JFK airport,
New York (1961)
10
a place of movement
and transition
11
as if inside a flying machine
12
Dulles Airport, Washington DC
13
mobile lounges
-The airport as a machine of movement -Designed
to efficiently move travelers from entrance to
planes
14
LAX Themed Building
15
Making (American) tourism global

• Cold War modernization efforts in the Third
  World
• Tourism agent of econ. development
• US hotel and airline companies expand globally

16

• At the frontier of modernity
• Modern international hotel in Istanbul a little
  American
• A product of the Cold War (1955)

17
Modernist architectural design

• Aesthetized technological efficiency
• Stands out from landscape at the territorial
  frontier of modernity, but
• A dematerialized (not an enclave)
• plate glass, transparent form...
• Open form, no private spaces
• a machine for viewing at the frontier of
  modernity
• a model of modernity, a map of the future

Drawn from Annabel Jane Whartons Building the
Cold war Hilton International Hotels and Modern
Architecture.
18
At the frontierAmerican/global
modernityframes the traditional/ local
19
Global transformations 1960s-1970s

• Economic expansion of Europe and Japan
• The end of the dollar standard Vietnam
  War/Third Worldism/1968
• Failures of modernization theory
• The crisis of Fordism/flex. prod., oil shocks
• gt retrenchment and the relative decline of US
  hegemony

20
End of the global tourism frontier

• Most of the globe accessible to mass tourism
• 1968 US seeks to limit travel abroad
• The ugly American
• Ecological/cultural impact of mass tourism
• End of tourism promotion as development
• Airline hijackings, Airline deregulation
• Intl. Tourismgt staged, commoditified, enclave

21
Globalization 1980s-1990s

• A new vehicle for expansion of US power
  neoliberalism, market reform, privatization..
• The end of the cold war
• Free markets, not modernization
• Developing world integrated into global markets
• Promoting the deterritorialization of capitalism

22
The transformation of tourism

• More reflexive tourists
• New frontiersgt new market segments ecotourism,
  adventure tourism,...
• Places as products cities, theme parks
• Tourism as consumerism
• Americanization no longer
• modernization and shifting frontier

23
Collapsing global travel spaces

• the end of territorial distance
• No territorial frontier of tourism
• Places as products
• Consumerism rather than mobility defines tourism
• Ex. consuming places

24

Americanization deterritorialized gt ...while
international tourism becomes a theme
for tourism in the US
A McDonalds in Saudi Arabia
Paris Hotel, Las Vegas
Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas
25
Travel spaces become places

• Because of increased mobility, the experience of
  traveling is no longer about crossing territory
• Global tourism spaces no longer defined by
  territorial mobility
• Travel democratized and routine
• gt Hotels and airports remake themselves as
  destinations

26
Hotels as destinations

• post-modern architecture The Bonaventure Hotel
  gt
• New styles of luxury hotels

27
The new culture of airports
Shopping at Schiphol airport, Amsterdam
Working at an airport café

• epicenters of post-nationalism
• Shopping malls-with-planes
• Themed airports
• Airport cities
• Growth poles

Denver Airport a locational theme
28
The encounter lounge
Retro-themeing LAX
29
Post-9/11 travel spaces

• New American discourse
• Airplanes as weapons
• American tourists as targets
• Foreign tourists as terrorists
• 30 drop tourismgtUS
• Global mobility threat
• Towards spaces of security

30
American spaces abroad
The new 83 million U. S. consulate outside
Istanbul satisfies important security concerns
but also seems a remote crusader castle. --US
report on Public Diplomacy ...looks like a
maximum security prison --Tom Friedman
31
Possibilities for a cosmopolitan tourism?

• the ambiguous effects of speed --William E.
  Connolly
• Places matter, but not as measures of modernity,
  closed political identities, or objects of
  consumption
• Pluralization within territories more critical
  than mobility or localization
• Global travel as means towards hybridization
  between places
• Mobility only one means to connect pluralized
  locations, but not a means to impose
  transformation/modernization