From the Grand Tour to today's packages holidays, the last two centuries have witnessed an exponential growth in travel and tourism and, as the twenty-first century unfolds, people of every class and from every country will be wandering to every part of the planet. Meanwhile tourist destinations throughout the world find themselves in ever more fierce competition - those places marginalized in today's global industrial and information economy perceiving tourism as perhaps the only means of surviving. But mass tourism has raised the local and international passions as people decry the irreversible destruction of traditional places and historic sites. Against these trends and at a time when standardized products and services are marketed worldwide, there is an increasing demand for built environments that promise unique cultural experiences. This has led many nations and groups to engage in the parallel processes of facilitating the consumption of tradition and of manufacturing tradition. The contributors to this volume - drawn from a wide range of disciplines - address these themes within the following sections: Traditions and Tourism: Rethinking the "Other"; Imaging and Manufacturing Heritage; Manufacturing and Consuming: Global and Local. Their studies, dealing with very different times, environments and geographic locales, will shed new light on how tourist 'gaze' transforms the reality of built spaces into cultural imagery.

China's Old Dwellings is the most comprehensive critical examination of China's folk architectural forms in any language. It and its companion volume, China's Living Houses: Folk Beliefs, Symbols, and Household Ornamentation (UH Press, 1999), together form a landmark study of the environmental, historical, and social factors that influence housing forms for nearly a quarter of the world's population. Both books draw on the author's thirty years of fieldwork and extensive travel in China as well as published and unpublished material in many languages. China's Old Dwellings begins by tracing the interest in Chinese vernacular buildings in the twentieth century. Early chapters detail common and distinctive spatial components, including the interior and exterior modular spaces that are axiomatic components of most Chinese dwellings as well as conventional structural components and building materials common in Chinese construction. Later chapters examine representative housing types in the three broad cultural realms--northern, southern, and western--into which China has been divided. Knapp completes his survey with an exploration of China's old dwellings in the context of the rapid economic and social changes that are destroying so many of them.