Reinventing the Local in Tourism: Producing, Consuming and Negotiating

Citation

Tiberghien, G. (2017), "Reinventing the Local in Tourism: Producing, Consuming and Negotiating", International Journal of Tourism Cities, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 102-104. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJTC-11-2016-0052

This is a book that puts back what is defined as “the local” at the centre of the tourism phenomena to comprehend innovative, creative and often imaginative practices across various spaces, contexts and encounters in tourism and hospitality research. By examining the relationship between place and society as a whole, Reinventing the Local in Tourism: Producing, Consuming and Negotiating Place by Antonio Paolo Russo and Greg Richards is an innovative tourism research volume that draws on a transdisciplinary approach to explain how various tourism encounters are shaped, transformed and consumed in multiple tourism settings and contexts. The authors break the traditional phenomenon of place production and transformation for new conceptual frameworks in a collection of case studies that address the key issues and importance of collaborative and network society as means to counter the mass tourism industry for local knowledge provided by the hosts and intangible resources. A number of epistemological and methodological innovations of tourism as a social and economic practice are contrasted and put in perspective with the “local approach”.

As a manual for innovative and new tourism and hospitality practices centred on the “local”, this book emphasizes various strategies to connect virtual environments and various actors in the production of local places and new localities of tourism. In Chapter 2, the use of experiences of mobility are explored and explained in the light of post-tourists experiences and newly defined roles of tourists as co-producers of socially produced hospitality networks and encounters such as peer-to-peer tourism and hospitality platforms. Chapter 3 unravels the often complicated and under researched contribution of new hospitality networks and platforms in creating a tourist experience focussed on the “local” sense of place. One of the highlights of this book, in particular for tourism practitioners, resides in Chapter 7 with the insightful and well documented “Get Local” programme in Auckland run by the New Zealand Tourism Research Institute (NZTRI). The roles of Information and communication technologies and community informatics are explained to show how they empower “cohesive resilient communities” in the making of authentic and meaningful urban places and related tourism planning and development. Using a range of online tools for content development, the programme is designed to maximize community input into the place making process in the view of building networks, local capacity and increase visitor yield. The engagement with the “local” is additionally examined in Chapter 8 in the social media behaviour of backpackers during and after crisis events. Collective intelligence and the digital social convergence of posts from tourists not only give immediate insights about a location and facilitate the mediation, engagement but also disengagement from the local spaces.

The authors’ discussion of the need for redefining the boundaries of the tourism and hospitality experience in creative reciprocal, intimate and existential host-guest tourism encounters constitute another strong point of interest of this book. The recognition that the interactions between the main actors involved in the production and consumption of urban spaces is an essential factor contributing to the co-creation of new urban localities and “active” tourism experiences is thoroughly explored in Chapter 6. The growth and social impacts of the youth hotel industry in the provision of new globalized tourist spaces (communal, relational) and social interactions either with locals or other travellers is discussed in Chapter 11 across narratives of good hotel practices, creative tips and stories for “living like a local”. An interesting point is made about how youth hostels “blend” with the urban environment to offer new perspectives on locality and sense of community. The conditions and parameters leading to a positive, authentic and memorable tourism experience by “tactical tourists” are synthetized and contextualized in Chapter 9 in regard to the host-guest theory using examples of ethnic and “of the beaten track” tours in Budapest. A well-documented ethnographic and survey research among Airbnb users in Berlin in Chapter 3 explores the notion of sharing and social practices in peer-to-peer tourism platforms to reveal a critical understanding of their various roles and functionalities in the online transactional processes and interactions between peer consumer and peer provider. Such a process is originally explored in Chapter 4 to reflect how host-guest relations in anti-mafia political tourism work in an online environment and reinstates new relationships between post-tourists, ethical travel and new market spaces, producing alternative incentives for socio-political changes and localized economic development.

The authors state clearly that one of the main topics of interest for this book is centred around how the local has become the new “authentic” (Richards, 2014), and live “like a local”, “slowness” and “immersion” the new mottos and markers for meaningful tourism experiences. The consumption of “authentic” place from the local knowledge (“meddling with the quotidian”) and the empowerment of tourists through IT and network capabilities is exemplified in the excellent case studies of home-exchanges in Paris and Barcelona in Chapter 2. The insider perspective is explored in Chapter 14 through the Alternative Tours of Athens operator’s “organic” approach of advocating original tours run primarily in non-conventional contemporary urban spaces as a mean to attract creative visitors interested in engaging with the local out of their comfort zones, “immersing themselves in these areas of otherness”. Using the prime example of Barcelona, the process of touristification of place in culinary practices and rituals is scrutinized in Chapter 12 throughout several indicators of authenticity in detailed case studies’ narratives to reflect on how their singular aspects are influenced and shaped by tourists’ mobilities, traditional and contemporary lifestyles. The main transformational benefits for tourists of sustainable hospitality in the current “diffuse hotel” model are highlighted in Chapter 5 as new means to offer authentic (and rare!) experiential backstage experience with the local community in rural and mountain areas of Southern Italy.

The relevance of the “local” in place making is also nuanced in this volume. Several architectural projects across several cities including Singapore, Vancouver and Dubai are examined in Chapter 10 to unveil the paradox of using perceived unique urban architectural projects as a differentiating factor for tourist destinations while in effect leading to landscape homogenization and banalization. The benefits of the Airbnb model traditionally perceived as a genuinely friendly form of hospitality enabling informal authentic encounters with local hosts to counter the homogenization and standardization inherent to globalization are balanced in Chapter 13 to challenge the traditional assumptions of tourism and “localness” in Barcelona. A quite convincing and documented argumentation centred on the contribution of Airbnb to revitalize neighbourhoods, support families and diversify the tourism offer shows that the Airbnb model works only for some parts of the population (the most wealthy, westernized tourists), thus creating significant urban regulatory challenges and threats for local residents’ wellbeing.

Reinventing the Local in Tourism: Producing, Consuming and Negotiating Place offers a coherent and comprehensive analysis of the linkages between the processes, roles and attributes of actors and stakeholders involved in the creation and delivery of new tourism encounters, places and localities. The book is one of the first volumes that explores to this extent the relationships between tourism networks, societal processes and the production of tourism and hospitality experiences centred on “the local”.