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Journal of Sustainable Tourism

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Sustaining urban tourism?

C. Michael Hall

Department of Management , University of Canterbury ,

Christchurch, New Zealand
Published online: 01 May 2009.

To cite this article: C. Michael Hall (2009) Sustaining urban tourism?, Journal of Sustainable
Tourism, 17:3, 409-410, DOI: 10.1080/09669580902774979
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09669580902774979

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Journal of Sustainable Tourism

409

r Nonlinear sociocultural approaches to demand and supply as boundaries between

esoteric, hedonic and spiritual become blurred by individualism (Arellano and
Mulligan)

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The collective wisdom from the experts of 2003 needs further exploration to inform
choices to be made by both destination managers and by those seeking to inspire and
influence, through mission, the spiritual lives of visitors and of residents at that destination.
This book supplements Timothy and Olsens 2006 Tourism Religion and Spiritual Journeys.
Both texts are useful devices to promote the management of tourism and religion through
consumer affiliation and destination identity.

Reference
Olsen, D.H., & Timothy, D.J. (2006). Tourism, religion and spiritual journeys (Contemporary geographies of leisure, tourism and mobility). London: Routledge.

Peter Wiltshier
University of Derby Buxton, Derbyshire, United Kingdom
Email: P.Wiltshier@derby.ac.uk


c 2009, Peter Wiltshier

Sustaining urban tourism?

Tourism marketing for cities and towns: using branding and events to attract tourists,
by Bonita M. Kolb, Oxford, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2006, xvi + 310 pp., $39.95 (paperback), ISBN 13: 978-0-7506-7945-9
Tourism, culture and regeneration, by Melanie K. Smith, Wallingford, CABI, 2007, xix
+ 186 pp., $70.00 (paperback), ISBN 13: 978 1 84593 130 8
Total landscape, theme parks, public space, by Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006, 296 pp., $45.00 (hardback), ISBN-10: 0 7546 4333 6
Tourism in urban centres is becoming an increasingly important topic of interest for students
not only of tourism but also for those in urban geography, place marketing and urban studies.
These three books highlight some of the more significant concerns in this area.
As the preface of Kolbs book states, Tourism Marketing for Cities and Towns teaches
readers how to develop a citys brand to attract tourists and their spending (p. xv). Divided
into 12 chapters the book provides numerous examples, checklists and ideas that have
been organised around key marketing concepts. The book is strongly American in focus
although style of the book may make it appealing to those who like a marketing by
numbers approach to the issues faced in urban tourism marketing. The book is easy to
read and will undoubtedly appeal to courses in community colleges, polytechnics or similar
levels of study where issues such as collaboration, partnering, notions of the community
in community-based development or whether we should commodify and promote places at
all, go unquestioned and unproblematised.

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410

Book Reviews

In contrast to Kolb, the edited book by Smith, Tourism, Culture and Regeneration,
provides a far more critical account of the role of tourism in urban development including
relation to marketing. In much of the developed world tourism provides much of the justification for cultural and regeneration projects. Divided into 15 chapters, the contributions
provide an excellent mix of overview and case studies. The first four chapters provide a
good introduction to some of the key themes in urban tourism in relation to such concepts
as cultural planning, the creative city and mixed-use. These themes are then returned
to in the remaining chapters with respect to various studies of regeneration. Although the
cases are dominated by American and British examples, it is also helpful to see cases from
countries to which many Anglophone tourism students will not usually be exposed to such
as Japan (Murayama and Parker on Odaiba in Tokyo) and Brazil (Bath and Goncalves on
interpretative planning in Recife). Undoubtedly, the reader would have benefited from an
even wider range of cases from which comparisons could be made, but the book nevertheless makes a very useful contribution to understanding the way in which cultural policy is
increasingly being interconnected to urban policies in a tourism context.
The final book by Mitrasinovic, Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space, although
not having tourism in the title, is a must-read for any student of urban tourism focusing as
it does on the themeing and commodification of public spaces as well as the broader role of
theme parks in the design, conceptualisation and control of urban landscapes. Divided into
five chapters: you are here, themeparking, themeing, departing, becoming and
with 17 cases or fragments, as the author describes them, the book also has an extensive
number of plates and figures to illustrate the books themes. The aim of the book is to
expose the search for systematic totality in order to employ it analogically in looking at
public spaces and the social realm as a whole. In seeking to achieve this goal the author
draws upon a wide range of literature and cases that illustrate the power of the landscape
and the physical environment to influence consumption by visitors not only in the themed
area but also pre and post-visit.
Mitrasinovics book arguably asks some of the most difficult questions of all of its
readers including questions with respect to the themeing of a variety of public space and
places including universities. As the author observed, Placing experience at the very
center of the discourses on education is a shortcut to an ethical salto mortale, because if
uncritically and hastily executed, it will effectively produce the condition of total landscape
in every campus and every classroom (p. 276). Yet, as Mitrasinovic also noted, who knows
if anyone listens (p. 276). Unfortunately, I have the feeling on reading the three books that
a couple of the readers of Smiths book might be listening, but I dont think any of Kolbs
will be, or would even want to face up to the potential implications of the commodification
of public space and life.
C. Michael Hall
Department of Management, University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand
Email: michael.hall@canterbury.ac.nz


C 2009, C. Michael Hall