Throughout the world, cities vie for tourist dollars in a competition so intense that they sometimes totally reconstruct their downtowns and waterfronts to attract tourists. Growing at an astonishing pace, urban tourism now plays a pivotal role in the economic development strategies of urban governments around the globe. In this book, distinguished urban experts from a variety of disciplines investigate tourism and its transforming impact on cities. As cities become places to play, the authors show, tourism recasts their spatial form. In some cities, separate spaces devoted to tourism and leisure are carved out. Other cities more readily absorb tourists into daily urban life, though even these cities undergo transformation of their character. The contributors examine such U. S. tourist meccas as Las Vegas, Orlando, Boston, and New York City's Times Square and continue on an international tour that looks at pilgrimage sites (Jerusalem), newly created resorts (Cancun), and places of artistic and historic interest (Prague). Other chapters take up important themes concerning the marketing of cities, how tourists perceive places, the construction of tourism infrastructure, and strategies for drawing tourists, including sports, riverboat gambling, and sex tourism in Southeast Asia.

The tourist city

Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment

Susan S. Fainstein, The City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, 1980–2000, 2nd Edition, Revised, (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2001).This is a reviewing of Fainstei...

The City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, 1980–2000

Using in-depth case studies, this volume shows how the infrastructure of tourism has transformed cities throughout North America. It makes clear that the modern urban environment is being thoroughly altered to emphasize the growing tourism sector in such areas as renovated waterfronts.

The Infrastructure of Play: Building the Tourist City: Building the Tourist City

World tourism cities: developing tourism off the beaten track, edited by Robert Maitland and Peter Newman, New York, NY, Routledge, 2008, 176 pp., US$180.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-415-45198-7 Rout...

World tourism cities: developing tourism off the beaten track

This article focuses on the social implications of urban policy that draws from festive planning practices to redevelop cities. In the last few decades, municipal and business leaders have turned their attention to the renewal of their city core through the use of tourism. These urban festive policies, however, prove to have significant social and related distributional consequences by impacting community residents and by injecting varied urban identities. Data drawn from four cities shows that redesign processes aimed at creating festive components must seriously consider these unanticipated effects.

Urban festive policies and sociocultural impacts: an international perspective.

This paper focuses on the conditions that gave rise to tourism as a tool of urban economic development. By the 1960s and 1970s, an emerging economy of recreation and tourism was gaining steam as ma...

Social forces and the evolution of tourism: A historical framework of urban change

During the last quarter of a century, urban centers in the United States have invested significant resources to develop a physical infrastructure to support the economic sectors of tourism and leisure. Cities of all sizes in Europe and the U.S. are aggressively promoting tourism and related sectors, and much of this activity is occurring outside the urban core. Using the case of metropolitan Chicago, this paper focuses on the evolving geography of urban tourism by examining how four satellite cities have embraced a strategy of development that mirrors the city of Chicago's strategy. In this paper we argue that, at least in the case of some metropolitan areas in the U.S., tourism development at the urban periphery may compete with and therefore slow the pace of redevelopment at the urban core.

The Changing Geography of Urban Tourism: Will the Center Hold?

Building the City of Spectacle: Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Remaking of Chicago

This contribution focuses on the role of heritage tourism as an economic (re)development tool by examining the development of the Sweet Auburn a Historic District located west of downtown in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1976, the site received the National Historic Landmark designation. In 1992, the National Trust for Historic Preservation identified the area as one of the most threatened historic places in the United States. The significance of Sweet Auburn derives from its position as a center of heritage for the city’s African American population as well as its contributions to the civil rights movement. The Big Bethel A.M.E. Church, the Wheat Street Baptist Church, Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, and the Ebenezer Baptist Church are all located within its boundaries. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church and his nearby boyhood home is part of the Martin Luther King, Jr National Historic Park (designated in 2018). Many African American businesses and organizations were established along Auburn Avenue in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the first African American owned daily newspaper, the Atlanta Daily World (founded in 1928). The construction of the massive Downtown Connector (Interstate I-75/85) through Atlanta’s urban core in the 1950s and early part of the 1960s divided the Sweet Auburn District. Disinvestment and urban decline followed, further accelerating social problems including population loss, housing decay, crime, and unemployment. The Historic District Development Corporation, an organization founded in 1980, has focused on revitalizing and preserving the area. Since then, the promotion of the historic designation, tourist attractions, and commercial opportunities, helped create a vibrant locale with eateries, bars, outdoor and indoor markets, museums, exhibits, and festivals. The recent addition of a stop by the Atlanta Streetcar has substantially increased the number of visitors, making this one of the most sought-after neighborhoods of the city.

Costas Spirou

Papers

Urban festive policies and sociocultural impacts: an international perspective.

Social forces and the evolution of tourism: A historical framework of urban change

The Changing Geography of Urban Tourism: Will the Center Hold?

Building the City of Spectacle: Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Remaking of Chicago

The Sweet Auburn Historic District in Atlanta: Heritage Tourism, Urban Regeneration, and the Civil Rights Movement