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Travel through time. Walk the streets as they were. See through floors. Hunt for ghosts (with drink in hand). Hear the walls speak. These are just a few of the ways that locative tourism applications seek to augment the urban experience. This book explores the universe of locative tourism applications. It uses multi-sited sensory ethnography with diverse apps in 12 cities around the world to interrogate how these applications layer (often branded) maps of meaning over the urban environment, and exposes what their use - at the embodied intersection of physical and digital space - can tell us about the production of cityscapes for touristic consumption. Locative Tourism Applications takes a journey in three parts to evaluate how these "extensions of the senses" mediate users' experience of urban locales. The first offers the reader some theoretical and methodological orientation, the second takes them on a whirlwind tour of locative apps, and the third settles in for an extended exploration of two destinations: Montreal and Christchurch. With broad cross-disciplinary appeal, this volume will be of interest to scholars from tourism studies, cultural geography, urban studies, new media studies, and sensory studies and will be particularly valuable for sensory ethnographers examining mobile and location-aware media.
List of contents
Introduction
Part 1: Departure Points and Orientations
1 Departure Points
2 Orientations
Part 2: A Tour of Locative Tourism Apps: Between Gaze and Performance
3 Gaze
4 Performance
Part 3: A Tale of Two Cities (Case Studies)
5 A City of Gaps - Mediating the Ruin in Christchurch
6 A City of Screens - Augmenting the Branded Cityscape in Montreal
Conclusion
Appendix A: 12-City Tour of Applications
Bibliography
About the author
Erin E. Lynch is Senior Fellow in the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Canada.
Summary
This book explores the universe of locative tourism applications.
Report
"This timely text considers how tourists connect to urban environments through sensory applications. [...] Lynch does a marvelous job allowing readers to feel they are part of the stories she captures. Libraries with collections focusing on tourism studies, cultural geography, urban studies, new media studies, and sensory studies should have a copy of this text." - K. M. Woosnam, University of Georgia in CHOICE
