Tourism Fictions, Simulacra and Virtualities offers a new understanding of tourism’s interaction with space, questioning the ways in which fictions, simulacra and virtualities express tourism in the built environment and vice versa. Since its beginnings, tourism has inspired themed built environments that have a constitutive, and sometimes problematic, relationship with the “real” world and its architectural references. This volume questions and rethinks the different environments constructed or adapted both for and by tourism exploring the relationship between the “real” and the “unreal” within the tourist bubble and the ways in which the real world inspires simulacra for tourism use. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach this book touches on a wide range of geographical areas, eras and subjects such as post-socialist tourism in Poland, the Hawaiian imaginary in Las Vegas, Rio de Janeiro’s Little Africa, as well as multiple instances of virtual reality in tourism. This timely and innovative volume will be of great interest to upper level students, researchers and academics in tourism, architecture, cultural studies, geography and heritage studies.

Travel Writing and Re-Enactment: Echotourism explores the popular subgenre of travel narratives that re-enact historically prominent journeys. Drawing on philosopher Walter Benjamin, this monograph reads such re-enactments as quests for aura in which travellers seek to capture a sense of distinction and historical profundity. Travel Writing and Re-Enactment frames the re-enactment of past journeys in a number of contexts, including Benjamin’s writing on mechanical reproduction, Judith Butler’s work on gender performance, and postmodern parody. Echotourist journeys are surprisingly contingent and precarious, and force travellers to navigate historical changes involving empire, gender, and travel practice in densely performative ways. Through close readings of contemporary travel narratives, this monograph considers the legacies of Lord Byron, Charles Darwin, Graham Greene, Mary Kingsley, and Ernest Shackleton, among others. Travel Writing and Re-Enactment examines the way literary re-enactment expresses, and sometimes confounds, the desire to find meaning through travel in the contemporary world.

Since its beginnings, tourism has inspired built environments that have suggested reinvented relationships with their original architectural inspirations. Copies, reinterpretations, and simulacra still constitute some of the most familiar and popular tourist attractions in the world. Some reinterpret archetypes such as the ancient palace, the Renaissance villa, or the Mediterranean village. Others duplicate the cities in which we lived in the past or we still live today. And others realise perceptions of utopias such as Shangri-La, Eden, or Paradise. Replicas – duplitecture – and simulacra can have symbolic meaning for tourists, as merely inspiring an atmosphere or as truly authentic, and their relationship to original functions, for worship, accommodation, leisure, or shopping. Tourism and Architectural Simulacra questions and rethinks the different environments constructed or adapted both for and by tourism exploring the relationship between the architectural inspiration and its reproduction within the tourist bubble. The wide range of geographical areas, eras, and subjects in this book show that the expositions of simulacra and hyper reality by Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Eco are surpassed by our complex world. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach they offer original insights of the complex relationship between tourism and architecture. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change.

Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) uses an ethnographic lens to explore the dissonances associated with the commodification of Chornobyl’s heritage. The book considers the role of the guides as experience brokers, focusing on the synergy between tourists and guides in the performance of heritage interpretation. Banaszkiewicz proposes to perceive tour guides as important actors in the bottom-up construction of heritage discourse contributing to more inclusive and participatory approach to heritage management. Demonstrating that the CEZ has been going through a dynamic transformation into a mass tourism attraction, the book offers a critical reflection on heritagisation as a meaning-making process in which the resources of the past are interpreted, negotiated, and recognised as a valuable legacy. Applying the concepts of dissonant heritage to describe the heterogeneous character of the CEZ, the book broadens the interpretative scope of dark tourism which takes on a new dimension in the context of the war in Ukraine. Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone argues that post-disaster sites such as Chornobyl can teach us a great deal about the importance of preserving cultural and natural heritage for future generations. The book will be of interest to academics and students who are engaged in the study of heritage, tourism, memory, disasters and Eastern Europe.

This book explores ways in which screen-based storyworlds transfix, transform, and transport us imaginatively, physically, and virtually to the places they depict or film. Topics include fantasy quests in computer games, celebrity walking tours, dark tourism sites, Hobbiton as theme park, surf movies, and social gangs of Disneyland. How physical, virtual, and imagined locations create a sense of place through their immediate experience or visitation is undergoing a revolution in technology, travel modes, and tourism behaviour. This edited collection explores the rapidly evolving field of screen tourism and the affective impact of landscape, with provocative questions and investigations of social groups, fan culture, new technology, and the wider changing trends in screen tourism. We provide critical examples of affective landscapes across a wide range of mediums (from the big screen to the small screen) and locations. This book will appeal to students and scholars in film and tourism, as well as geography, design, media and communication studies, game studies, and digital humanities.

Since the turn of this century (and even earlier), a plethora of projects have arisen to promise us bold new interactive adventures and immersive travel into the past with digital environments (using mixed, virtual or augmented reality, as well as computer games). In Playing with the Past: Into the Future Erik Champion surveys past attempts to communicate history and heritage through virtual environments and suggests new technology and creative ideas for more engaging and educational games and virtual learning environments. This second edition builds on and updates the first edition with new game discussions, surveys, design frameworks, and theories on how cultural heritage could be experienced in digital worlds, via museums, mobile phones, or the Metaverse. Recent games and learning environments are reviewed, with provocative discussion of new and emerging promises and challenges.

The volume deals with the effects of digitization on spatial and especially landscape construction processes and their visualization. A focus lies on the generation mechanisms of 'landscapes' with digital tools of cartography and geomatics, including possibilities to model and visualize non-visual stimuli, but also spatial-temporal changes of physical space. Another focus is on how virtual spaces have already become part of the social and individual construction of landscape. Potentials of combining modern media of spatial visualization and (constructivist) landscape research are discussed.