Looks at tourism maps to offer new insights into the social construction of place

At first glance, the relationships among tourists, tourism maps, and the spaces of tourism seem straightforward enough: tourists use maps to find their way to and through the sites of history, culture, nature, or recreation represented there. Less apparent is how tourism maps and those using them construct such spaces and identities. As the essays in Mapping Tourism clearly demonstrate, the extraordinary interactions of work with leisure and the everyday with the exotic make tourism maps ideal sites for exploring the contested construction of place and identity.

Construction sites in the “New Berlin,” Alabama’s civil rights trail, Québec City, a California ghost town, and Bangkok’s sex trade are among the spaces the essays examine. Taken together, these essays allow us to see tourist space as it truly is: contested, ever changing, and replete with issues of power.Contributors: Mary Curran, Eastern Connecticut State U; Dydia DeLyser, Louisiana State U; Owen J. Dwyer, Indiana U; John R. Gold, Oxford Brookes U; Margaret M. Gold, U of North London; Rob Shields; Karen E. Till, U of Minnesota.

Vincent J. Del Casino Jr. is assistant professor in geography and the liberal studies program at California State University, Long Beach.