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.
Nelson Graburn was educated at Cambridge (1958), McGill (1960), and Chicago (PhD, 1963). He has taught at UC Berkeley for 54 years and served as Curator of the Hearst Museum and chair of Tourism Studies. He also taught in Canada, France, UK, Japan, and Brazil and China, and researched Canadian Inuit (1959-2014) Japan (since 1974) and China (since 1991). His work includes Ethnic and Tourist Arts (1976), Japanese Domestic Tourism (1983), Anthropology of Tourism (1983), Multiculturalism in the New Japan (2008), Anthropology in the Age of Tourism (2009), Tourism and Glocalization (2010), Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches (2014), Tourism Imaginaries at the Disciplinary Crossroads (2016), Tourism in (Post)Socialist Eastern Europe (2017), and Cultural Tourism Movements (2018).
Maria Gravari-Barbas has a degree in Architecture and Urban Design (University of Athens, 1985) and a PhD in Geography and Planning (Paris IV - Sorbonne, 1991). She was Fellow at the Urban Program of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA (1990). She is the director of the EIREST, a multidisciplinary research team dedicated to tourism studies, with main focus on cultural heritage, development, and urban-tourism evolutions. From 2008 to 2017 she was the director of the Institute for Research and High Studies on Tourism (Institut de Recherches et d'Etudes Supérieures du Tourisme, IREST) of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Since 2009 she is the director of the UNESCO Chair of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and the coordinator of the UNITWIN network 'Tourism, Culture, Development'. She is the author of several books and papers related to tourism, culture, and heritage.
Jean-François Staszak received his PhD in Geography at the Sorbonne University. After serving as Associate Professor in the Universities of Amiens (Northern France) and Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris), he became full Professor at the Geography Department of the University of Geneva (Switzerland). His early research focused on the history and epistemology of Geography, and then on economic and cultural Geography. His most recent work addresses geographical imaginaries in the fields of art and tourism, analysing the geographical othering process and especially the exotic. His understanding of the articulation of geographical representations, practices, and realities owes much to deconstructionist theories and to postcolonial and gender studies. Among his recent books: Quartier réservé. Bousbir, Casablanca Genève, Georg (2020), Simuler le monde. Panoramas, parcs à theme et autres dispositifs immersifs, Genève, Métispresse (2019), Frontières en tous genres. Cloisonnement spatial et constructions identitaires, Rennes, PUR (2017), Clichés exotiques. Le Tour du Monde en photographies 1860-1890, Paris, De Monza (2015).
