Chapter 4: Creative Tourist Spaces

Our discussion of embodied experiences in the previous chapter alluded to the central role of space in tourism. In fact, Wearing et al. (2010) remind us that ‘[t]ourism is first and foremost about space’ (p. 76). It would seem amiss to study the creative tourist experience without considering tourists’ interactions with space and place. Before people leave home to become tourists, they often project themselves to foreign places and fantasise about exotic sights, people, food and other materialities that they may encounter in distant locales. This observation brings us to consider tourist space as a multidimensional concept. While we may be tempted to associate space with physical settings such as buildings, streets, city squares, local cafés, resorts, geographical areas and wildlife habitats, Crouch, Aronsson, and Wahlström (2001) invite us to think of space as both a material context and an imaginative realm that is constructed in the mind. This imaginative space emerges through past travel experiences and destination images, which emanate from a vast range of commercial and non-commercial information sources. Amirou (1995) contributes to this discussion by suggesting that, in fact, the tourist experience is largely instilled with expectations, fantasies and myths that originate from the tourist’s culture. An example of such myths is the romanticised image of the Spanish gypsy woman in the Western imaginary. Caltabiano (2009) explains that the Western fascination with the exotic gypsy was born in the late eighteenth century when ‘the French and Italians created the myth of the dark mysterious and sexual gypsy woman’ (p. 14). Bizet’s famous opera Carmen exemplifies this myth. Amirou (1994) goes so far as to argue that the tourist imaginary is, in fact, une illusion touristique. It is deemed an illusion in that Western tourists have become fascinated not by reality itself but by a world of fanciful images that people take as real, or in other words, as Boorstin (1964) put it, the tourist ‘has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers’ (p. 79). The notion of tourist space, therefore, is endowed with both a tangible and an intangible dimension. Not only do both dimensions conflict with each other but they also both cohabit within the self, thus sometimes leaving tourists confused about the meanings and authenticity of the cultural space they are exposed to. In this regard, in his Thailand-based study, Walter (2017) notes that, infused by the Western ideas of a mythical Thai past, creative culinary tourists encounter a rather equivocal space of Thai everyday life and culture. Space, therefore, as Crouch et al. (2001) contend, acts as ‘a medium through which the tourist negotiates her or his world, tourism signs and contexts, and may construct her or his own distinctive meanings’ (p. 254).