Experiencescapes : Tourism, Culture, and Economy [1 ed.] 9788763099707, 9788763001502

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EXPERIENCESCAPES: TOURISM, CULTURE AND ECONOMY

TOM O’DELL & PETER BILLING (EDS.)

Copenhagen Business School Press 3

Experiencescapes: Tourism, culture and economy © Copenhagen Business School Press Printed in Denmark by Holbæk Amts Bogtrykkeri Cover design by Morten Højmark 1. edition 2005 e-ISBN 978-87-630-9970-7

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Table of Contents Notes on Contributors 7 Acknowledgements 9 1 Experiencescapes Blurring Borders and Testing Connections TOM O’DELL Experiencescapes 15 / The Cultural Turn 19 / Identity Production and the Consequences of Scaping 23 / Marketers, Alchemists, and Warriors 25 / A Post-Sightseeing Society 27 / The Slower Pulse 30 / Easy Money, or a Risky Economy? 31 2 Looking With New Eyes at the Old Factory On the Rise of Industrial Cool ROBERT WILLIM Industries Beyond 2000 36 / Early Industrial Experiencescapes 39 / The Rise of Industrial Cool 41 / Staged Factories – The Transparent Factory, Dresden, Germany 43 / Recycled Factories – The BALTIC Art Factory, Gateshead, UK 46 / What’s Cool and Sublime? The Undertow of Industrial Harshness 48 / 3 A Theory of Tourism Experiences The Management of Attention CAN-SENG OOI The Attention Structure Framework in Context 53 / Attention and Experience 55 / Attractions and Distractions 58 / Lessons for the Tourism Industry 64 / Conclusions 68 4 Regional Experiencescapes as Geo-economic Ammunition RICHARD EK European Cross-border Regions, Place Marketing and Geo-economic Warfare 69 / Geo-Economic Warfare, Spatial Play and Regional Experiencescapes 73 / The Øresund Region 75 / “Scale Wars” 79 /

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“Sim Wars” 82 / The Exclusive Experiencescape’s Excluding Tendency 84 / Conclusion 87 /

5 Mobile Dreams MARIA CHRISTERSDOTTER An Experiencescape in the Making 92 / A New Malmö 96 / De Signs 98 / A War Between Symbols 100 / Hotales 103 / Transit and Mobility 106 / Conclusion 108 6 Nostalgiascapes The Renaissance of Danish Countryside Inns SZILVIA GYIMÓTHY Outlining the Kro Nostalgiascape 112 / Patriotic Nostalgia: The Kro as a Representation of Danishness 114 / Popular Culture: The Kro as a Representation of Lower Class Taste 117 / Ways of Belonging: The Kro as a Representation of Home 122 / Conclusions 124 7 Management Strategies and the Need For Fun TOM O’DELL Making Reservations for Experiences 128 / Techniques of Experiencescaping 130 / Context over Liminality 132 / Experience as Gift Exchange 135 / WorkPlay 137 / 8 Promoting the Known and the Unknown of Cities and City Regions SØREN HENNING JENSEN Empirical Data and Analysis 147 / Cities as Known and Unknown Elements 148 / Exploring the Known and Unknown in the Urban Experiencescape 150 / Cities as Spatial Entities 153 / The Experience Economy as a Cognitive Shift 155 / Bringing Experiences into Urban Competition 158 / Conclusion 159 Bibliography 161 Index 191

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Notes on Contributors Maria Christersdotter is a Ph.D. candidate in European Ethnology who is enrolled at the Department of Service Management, Lund University, Campus Helsingborg, Sweden. Her dissertation project, finishing in spring 2006, focuses on the intertwining of economic and cultural processes within the genre of boutique hotels. Richard Ek is an assistant professor in the Department of Service Management, Lund University, Campus Helsingborg, Sweden. Previously he has published Öresund Region: Become! The Discursive Rhythm of Geographical Visions (2003) which is his Ph.D. thesis, written in Swedish. He has also published extensively on the subject of place marketing. Szilvia Gyimóthy is an assistant professor in the Department of Service Management, Lund University, Campus Helsingborg, Sweden. Her research interest focuses on strengthening a phenomenological focus in the service marketing and management field. Apart from a number of journal articles, she has published The Quality of Tourist Experience (2002) and co-authored The Kro Brand: Brand mythologies of Danish Inns (Varemærket Kro: Danske Kroers Brand Mytologi (2003). Søren H. Jensen is an assistant professor at the Copenhagen Business School, Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy. His Ph.D. dissertation from 2003 combines strategic management and neoinstitutional theories in an analysis of the role played by occupational health in connection with the tendering of public services. He has recently published a book on strategic management and knowledge. His research interests revolve around the translation and application of traditional management tools in an experience economy context as it is linked to the organizing role of concepts. Tom O’Dell is an associate professor in the Department of Service Management, Lund University, Campus Helsingborg, Sweden. Previously he has published Culture Unbound: Americanization and Everyday Life in Sweden (Nordic Academic Press 1997) as well as having edited two volumes on tourism and the experience economy,

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Nonstop! Turist i upplevelseindustrialismen (Historiska Media 1999) and Upplevelsens materialitet (Studentlitteratur 2002). Can-Seng Ooi is an associate professor in the Department of International Economics and Management, Copenhagen Business School. His work focuses on the mediation of experiences, the impact of tourism and the invention of cultures. He has published in Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism, Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism and other journals. Besides contributing chapters to books, he is also the author of Cultural Tourism and Tourism Cultures (Copenhagen Business School Press 2002). Robert Willim, who holds a Ph.D. in European Ethnology, is currently working as a researcher and lecturer in the Department of European Ethnology and the Department of Service Management, Lund University, Campus Helsingborg, Sweden. His main research interests are in the cultural dimensions of digital media. This research has also led to studies of the relations between traditional manufacturing industries and the creative industries. Recent publications in English include, Magic, Culture and The New Economy (Berg, 2005), coedited with Orvar Löfgren. For more information see www.pleazure.org/robert/.

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Acknowledgements The contributions presented in this book are the product of a growing network of scholars in Sweden and Denmark who are working to better understand the manner in which tourism, the realm of experience and everyday life are entangled in one another. The development of this network has been facilitated by the economic support it has received from the Committee for Research and Development of the Öresund Region (Öforsk). I would like to thank each of the contributors to this volume for their enthusiastic participation in this research network, as well as for their commitment to this particular book project. Along the way a number of people have helped this book see the light of day. I would like to thank Can-Seng Ooi for introducing me to the people at the Copenhagen Business School Press, Minna Willim for doing the book’s lay-out, and Hanne Thorninger Ipsen at CBS Press for her guidance and support as the text in hand was transformed from a manuscript to a finished book. Similarly, a word of thanks must be directed towards Sue Glover of Word-stugan i Rimbo HB, Sweden for checking and correcting the language in each of the chapters presented in this book, and for translating the chapters that were originally written in Swedish. The work in this book has received financial support from several sources to which I am indebted. I would like to thank Nordenstedtska stiftelsen who has funded many of the costs of producing this book, The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) who has funded my research, and the Committee for Research and Development of the Öresund Region who has funded the research of many of the other authors contributing to this book.

Tom O’Dell Lund, Sweden, March 8, 2005

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Experiencescapes: Blurring Borders and Testing Connections

TOM O’DELL

Every visit to Yankee Candle is a New Experience! Adventure. Style. Fun. Taste. There’s always something new at the Yankee Candle Flagship Store in South Deerfield, one of Massachusetts’ most popular attractions (Yankee Candle Advertisement).

wonderful for both the body and soul (Varberg Kurort Hotel & Spa brochure, 2002:46).

The cultural manifestation of modernity that appears alongside the local introduction of successive forms of industrial capitalism are in considerable measure associated with new patterns of consumption, with new ways of interacting with merchandise (Pred, 1995:33)

Direct from the experience industry, the Saab 95. (Swedish TV commercial slogan).

Give away an experience: A gift check from Varberg’s Kurort Hotel & Spa contains many outstanding experiences and becomes a personal gift,

…fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its co-ordinates; that is, it literally ‘teaches us how to desire’ (Žižek, 1997:7).

Progress, adjusted to the profit motive, seemed finally to have come down to the irruption of a host of machine-toys for adults who could, with their aid, do what they had been forbidden to do as children… Almost everything technical change was to force on us would be done in the name of this prohibition to prohibit… (Virilio, 2002:1-2).

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Tom O’Dell Experiences have become the hottest commodities the market has to offer. Whether we turn on the television at night, read the paper in the morning, or stroll down a city street at noon, we are inundated by advertisements promoting products that promise to provide us with some ephemeral experience that is newer, better, bigger, more thrilling, more genuine, more flexible, or more fun than anything we have encountered previously. At the same time, consumers themselves are increasingly willing to go to greater lengths, invest larger sums of money, and take greater risks to avoid “the beaten track” and “experience something new.” The depth to which this spirit of our times penetrates society was clearly reflected in the political debates that erupted in Germany on August 20th 2003. On that day, a plane carrying fourteen tourists who had been held hostage in Algeria touched down in Köln, Germany. The diplomats who had labored for several months to negotiate the release of the hostages had good reason to celebrate. Nonetheless, the tone of the comments coming from a number of leading German politicians reflected a deeper concern about the trends they believed this homecoming reflected. One Christian Democrat summed up the situation by sternly warning, “A person who lightheartedly exposes herself or himself to danger solely for the purpose of having a nerve tickling experience has to be prepared to pay the costs of being rescued.”1 Only a few years earlier that statement would have been widely condemned as cold-hearted. But instead of criticism, the comment received support from several other politicians across party lines. From a political perspective, the warning given by this Christian Democrat reflects an unsettling awareness of the significance that people attach to the pursuit of new experiences, as well as the lengths to which they are willing to go to obtain them. In doing so, however, it highlights an even deeper concern that the search for experiences is leading a rapidly growing number of ordinary people into a borderland beyond reason – a borderland in which the state’s control over its citizens is diminished, and in which the state is not prepared to accept sole responsibility. In other words, from the perspective of at least a few politicians, some forms of adventure tourism and the search for “experiences” are getting out of hand.

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Quoted in the Swedish National Newspaper, Dagens Nyheter on August 21st 2003, page 11.

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Experiencescapes:Blurring Borders and Testing Connections However, the growing interest in adventure tourism represents only one of the more radical ways in which experiences have gone from simply being a value adding aspect of more concrete goods and services, to valued commodities in and of themselves. At the same time, while extreme sports and adventure tourism (including everything from base jumping to diving amongst sharks) may offer some of the most spectacular and risk-filled forms of experiences on the market today, they are not the mainstays of this market. Less dramatic, but more prevalent, are the promises of fun, adventure and relaxation made by amusement parks, IMAX theatres, theme restaurants, and suburban shopping malls around the world. Even entire cities, from Las Vegas to Barcelona, are aggressively vying for consumer attention through beefed up appeals to the realm of experience. Similar promises are echoed in the promotional campaigns of smaller communities, such as Freeport, Maine. As Freeport’s promoters point out: Our uniqueness lies in the diversity of shopping opportunities, coupled with adventure experiences galore…. We are fortunate to be able to offer our visitors a truly one-of-a-kind experience in an area that is rich with history (Freeport, Maine brochure). The “adventure experiences” offered by Freeport (ranging from sealwatching cruises and the celebration of the calving season’s opening to lobster dinners in the harbor and upscale shopping opportunities in pricey shops) might not necessarily be as extravagant or glittery as those being organized and staged in Barcelona and Las Vegas, but they are nonetheless attracting millions of visitors each year. Working with an interdisciplinary approach, the objective of this book is to critically analyze the significance that this market for experiences (and interest in them) is having as a generative motor of cultural and socioeconomic change in modern society. The authors contributing to this book come from the disciplines of anthropology, business administration, cultural geography, and tourism. The common factor uniting them lies, in part, in a shared interest in the study of tourism. This has, however, subsequently led to a more specific theoretical and empirical focus upon the manner in which experiences are being produced, packaged, consumed and staged around the world – a primary theme that is actively pursued throughout this book. At the same time, this is not a theme that comfortably falls within the folds of the traditional field of tourism studies. The problem here is that 13

Tom O’Dell although the search for new experiences is an important aspect of tourism, it is not a phenomenon limited to tourism. It is also intimately linked to many other leisure activities, entertainment forms and consumption practices that people continuously encounter and engage in as an aspect of their everyday lives. A realization of this fact forces us to broaden our field of study. If we are to truly appreciate the role that tourism plays as a force in society today, then we argue that there is a need to more systematically place the study of tourism within the larger cultural and economic context of everyday life in which it is embedded. After all, attractions and entertainment facilities being constructed in cities around the world – in the hope that they will help attract tourists – are in many cases also being extensively used and serviced by the local population. A seventeen year old high school student may work part-time as a waitress serving tourists at the Planet Hollywood Restaurant in Miami during the evenings, only to find herself strolling amongst those very same tourists in the upscale shopping districts of Miami Beach the following day. An all too strict focus upon an empirical field defined as “tourism” is simply not well suited to analytically illuminate and interrogate the complexity of this phenomenon.2 Others have come to a similar conclusion and worked to broaden our understanding of tourism and daily life. David Crouch, for example, points to the fact that we need to consciously work to undermine the premises upon which any absolute and clear distinction between tourism and leisure can be maintained (1999). As he argues: Tourism is often theorised in terms of meetings of cultures, or one-way exploration, and suggests travel. There is a persistent confusion of categories between leisure and tourism…. As tourism and leisure have become less and less functional and increasingly aestheticised, the differentiation of tourism and leisure is eroded. 2

A realization of the existence of this linkage has not been lost on scholars studying tourism. A great deal of attention has been paid to the fact that wherever you have tourists, you have people serving them, and obviously a great deal has been written about the fact that tourism does affect local as well as national and regional economies and cultural contexts (cf. Gössling, 2000; Waldren, 1997). Others have argued for a need to thoroughly deconstruct and problematize the host/guest dichotomy underlying much of the research on tourism (cf. Abram and Waldren, 1997:3). We are arguing for a need to broaden this perspective and more systematically analyze the manner in which tourism intersects with, affects and cross-fertilizes spheres of daily life that are not otherwise necessarily defined in terms of tourism.

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Experiencescapes:Blurring Borders and Testing Connections Leisure becomes commodified (in places) and tourism is accompanied by similar commodification, and both have capacity for reflexivity (1999:1). Having said this, Crouch then goes on to remind us that tourism and leisure can work as distinct categories, but also as a dual category in other contexts. The selling, packaging, and ultimate consumption of experiences is perhaps one of the best examples of a phenomenon that can thoroughly transcend and blur the border between tourism and leisure. Beyond this, however, as I shall argue momentarily, it is even a phenomenon that has become a force – and an integrated aspect of modern management strategies (see for example, Berg, 2003; Peters, 1994; Riddestråle and Nordström, 2002; Schrage, 1999; Willim, 2002) – to be reckoned with in places of work, as part of the process of work. In this sense, the focus upon the realm of experiences moves us beyond the empirical field of study usually encompassed by tourism and helps to illuminate some of the complex linkages that exist between such diverse fields of everyday life as tourism, leisure and work.

Experiencescapes When movement and circulation are the norm rather than the exception, when people regularly reside in more than one place. It is difficult to say which is the everyday place and which is the extra-ordinary (Williams and Kaltenborn, 1999:228). Studying experiences, and the market for them, is not a task without problems of its own. Experiences are highly personal, subjectively perceived, intangible, ever fleeting and continuously on-going. Nonetheless, as commodities they are more than randomly occurring phenomena located entirely in the minds of individuals. The commodification of and search for experiences has a material base that is itself anchored in space. They occur in an endless array of specific places, such as stores, museums, cities, sporting arenas, shopping centers, neighborhood parks and well-known tourist attractions. At the same time, they do not need to be limited to any single space. Experiences can be (and often are) planned in one place, developed in another, and staged for consumption in a third. Thus, while experiences may be ephemeral, they are organized spatially, and generated through the manipulation of the material culture around us.

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Tom O’Dell It may be impossible to completely re-present the phenomenological essence of people’s experiences, but a focus upon the spaces and materiality of experiences can help us to analytically come to terms with the cognitive, social and cultural processes that work to define and frame them. As sites of market production, the spaces in which experiences are staged and consumed can be likened to stylized landscapes that are strategically planned, laid out and designed. They are, in this sense, landscapes of experience – experiencescapes – that are not only organized by producers (from place marketers and city planners to local private enterprises), but are also actively sought after by consumers. They are spaces of pleasure, enjoyment and entertainment, as well as the meeting grounds in which diverse groups (with potentially competing as well as overlapping interests and ideologies) move about and come in contact with one another. Viewed as landscaped spaces, we refer to these spaces as “experiencescapes” in order to underline the degree to which the surroundings we constantly encounter in the course of our everyday lives can take the form of physical, as well as imagined, landscapes of experience. Within anthropology, Arjun Appadurai has used the metaphorical invocation of landscapes in order to illuminate the manner in which processes of globalization can unite different groups of people around the world at the same time that they further aggravate the divisions existing between other groups of people. Referring to mediascapes, ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, financescapes and technoscapes, Appadurai outlines the conceptual framework by which we might better be able to understand the processes and flows through which transnational communities of people and ideas are organized (see Appadurai, 1996 for a more complete discussion of these metaphorical landscapes). These landscapes of shared knowledge that Appadurai describes can be understood as points of cultural reference, but as such, they also constitute a series of critical parameters and linkages around which a larger cultural economy is organized, and through which power and knowledge are distributed asymmetrically. Appadurai explains: The suffix -scape allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterize international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles. These terms with the common suffix –scape also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision, but rather, they are deeply perspectival constructs, 16

Experiencescapes:Blurring Borders and Testing Connections inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors… These landscapes thus are the building blocks of what (extending Benedict Anderson) I would call imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe (1996:33) While these scapes may be visualized as imagined worlds, they are more than things of mere fantasy, for along these scapes we find a growing potential for the realm of imagination to gain relevance as it develops into new forms of social practice (Appadurai, 1991:198). As a consequence of the global linkages that these metaphorical landscapes represent, people around the world are able to imagine alternative lives and livelihoods than those presented to them in their immediate local settings. The end result of these imaginations may be the production of “imagined worlds,” but ultimately the social practices that they generate have very real consequences (cf. Urry, 2000:36). Experiencescapes are part of this phenomenon of global interlinkage. They may be located in specific cultural geographies, but they are also part of a larger global economy, and take their cues from the larger transnational flow of culture that is not so easily bound to any one place, region or nation. In this sense, places such as Colonial Williamsburg, Skansen, (the open air museum in Stockholm), and the Docklands project in London, are all part of a larger cultural heritage industry that has established certain forms of packaged history as legitimate experience arenas (cf. Lowenthal, 1996; Svensson, 1999). Similarly, the interior design of the Hard Rock Café, Planet Hollywood, and the Rainforest Café reflect and follow the transnational symbolic grammar of “the theme restaurant” as a genre of dining experience to be found around the world. However, as I am arguing, experiencescapes involve more than culturally organized powers of the imagination or globally shared recipes for the packaging of fun; they also include a spatial component that should be understood. More specifically, they involve issues of spatial production that remain underdeveloped in Appadurai’s work, and that need to be further explored for our purposes here. To this end, Henri Lefebvre provides us with another important set of conceptual tools.

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Tom O’Dell Lefebvre has argued that space needs to be understood in terms of the way in which it is perceived, conceived and lived (1991:38ff.).3 That is, it has, in the first place, physical material attributes that are produced through social activity and that can be measured, quantified, observed and described. Secondly, however, it is also something that can be planned, manipulated and designed to influence us in particular ways. Space can, in other words, be thought about and created – by architects, urban planners, social scientists, artists, etc. – with specific ends in mind. In this sense it is a politically charged realm though which power relations come to expression as actors assert their wills and ideas over space (and notions of space) and thus affect people who come in contact with that space. But it is also lived, appropriated and changed as a part of everyday life. This latter aspect of space, sometimes referred to as “thirdspace” (See Soja, 1996), is the point from which powers of domination are both experienced and resisted as people work and rework the world around them and imbue it with (new) meaning in the process. It is also at this level that the realm of imagination (that Appadurai discusses) comes to expression in new forms of social practice. In short, Appadurai’s work draws our attention to the manner in which experiencescapes are linked to larger transnational flows that distribute knowledge and power in an asymmetrical fashion, and it underlines the fact that this affects the way in which we think about ourselves and our immediate local settings. However, Lefebvre (who is not oblivious to these issues either) provides us with a set of theoretical tools that focuses our attention more specifically on the complex manner in which these spaces of production and consumption are organized in terms of their physical, mental/cognitive and social elements. The synthetitization of these two scholars’ conceptual work creates an analytical prism that helps to problematize the fact that experiencescapes may be places of fun and relaxation, but that they can also be places in which the local and global are entwined and where power relations are played out, political interests are materialized, cultural identities are contested and dreams are redefined. This is important to bear in mind, because to a large extent, the 3

Lefebvre referred to the perceived, conceived and lived aspects of social space in terms of: social practice, representations of space, and representational space. Lefebvre argued for the importance of realizing that all three of these moments are an integral and ever-present aspect of social space. See Lefebvre, 1991:36ff.; Merrifield, 2000:174f.; and Soja, 1996:64ff., for a wider discussion of the trialectics of space.

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Experiencescapes:Blurring Borders and Testing Connections offerings of these experiencescapes are as elusive as they are intangible, even though their cultural, economic and political consequences are quite real.

The Cultural Turn …economic and symbolic processes are more than ever interlaced and interarticulated; that is, (…) the economy is increasingly culturally inflected and (…) culture is more and more economically inflected (Lash and Urry, 1994:64). In our new age, being elusive is good. If you can touch something, it is probably not worth a great deal (….) What is valuable is the intangible (Ridderstråle and Nordström, 2002:115). As tourism continues to grow and people search to find ever more exotic and “experience-rich” places, it becomes increasingly apparent that “culture” (and the experiencing of “culture”) is itself an enormous commodity for sale in different forms in the global market (Ooi, 2002; Urry, 1995:154ff.).4 As a commodity of tourism, “culture” is constantly being packaged and sold to us in terms of such things as difference, otherness, heritage, cultural identity, song, dance, music and art (cf. Craik, 1997; Clifford, 1997; Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, 1998; Macdonald, 1997). However, the entanglement of culture and 4

In the popular discourse that focuses upon the potential economic gains that can be made via the commodification of culture, the term “culture” is used in a very ambiguous manner. It includes everything from the phenomena usually associated with the term “high culture,” such as dance, theater, art, music, and museum exhibitions, to phenomena more usually associated with “low culture,” such as tourism, a day at an amusement park or the selling of a lifestyle. In this sense, “culture” stands largely in contrast to traditional mass produced goods; it is something abstract and ephemeral rather than physical or permanent, potentially everywhere, but not necessarily in any one place. Nonetheless (and this is somewhat paradoxical) culture is framed in the popular discourse as a reified thing, a commodity that can be bought and sold. This popular perception of culture stands in contrast to the anthropological culture concept that emphasizes the degree to which culture is a process lacking clear territorial delineation and anchorage. As a process it includes (among other things) the flow and exchange of ideas, values and beliefs (cf. Clifford, 1997; Gupta and Ferguson, 1992; Hannerz, 1992 & 1996). In my discussion of culture as a commodity, I am referring to the popular representation of “culture”, and not the anthropological concept. In order to distinguish the anthropological concept from its popular invocation, I will set the latter concept within quotation marks. Where quotations marks are not used, I am referring to the process, and not the reified conception of a thing.

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Tom O’Dell economy is not a phenomenon limited to the tourist industry. Processes linked to the economization of “culture” (such as those listed above) are more broadly spread out in society. Industries such as advertising, fashion and film are also very active in the commodification and economization of “culture” (du Gay and Pryke, 2002; Negus, 2002; Nixon, 2002). These are industries which, at first glance, may seem to have very little to do with tourism, but like tourism, they work intensively to sell much more than physical objects – focusing more intensively than ever upon the creation of pecuniary value through the commodification of the ephemeral. In so doing, however, they are also implicated in parallel processes that contribute to the “culturalization of the economy”, as they increasingly strive to align their own creative efforts with the production of anything from values, images, lifestyles and dreams, to vaguely defined experiences and notions of identity (Lash and Urry, 1994:64; Löfgren, 2001).5 In this sense, the material commodities of the industrial age, and the services provided under the guise of post-industrialism, represent only a portion of the commodities being offered on the market. Some scholars, such as economists Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, have gone so far as to argue that we are entering an entirely “new, emerging economy” (1999:11) in which experiences have attained an increasingly dominant and central position. It is something that Pine and Gilmore refer to as “the Experience Economy” (1998 and 1999). And they explain that, “In the Experience Economy, experiences drive the economy and therefore generate much of the base demand for goods and services” (1999:65). Although Pine and Gilmore’s observations are interesting, their material focuses primarily on places of business and the question of how enterprises can capitalize on the current interest in new and diverse forms of experience. Consequently, their discussion tends to take the form of a cookbook, offering “how to” recipes that fail to place their object of study in a larger cultural, social and historic perspective.

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As Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke argue, the culturalization of the economy involves processes by which goods and services are “deliberately and instrumentally inscribed with particular meanings and associations as they are produced and circulated in a conscious attempt to generate desire for them amongst end-users” (2002:7). Included here are processes of aestheticization that are used to provide goods and services with a specific aura that may facilitate the manner in which they are linked to issues of lifestyle, identity production, image and taste, as well as intensified feelings of excitement, pleasure, satisfaction, etc.

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Experiencescapes:Blurring Borders and Testing Connections Thus, not surprisingly, their analysis downplays the fact that the selling of experiences is not necessarily a new phenomenon (Löfgren, 1999; O’Dell, 2002). Almost from the start, General Motors, for example, understood that they were in the business of selling experiences and not just machines (cf. Gartman, 1994 and 1995; O’Dell, 1997:119ff.). And While Pine and Gilmore present an economic model that resonates of economic evolution – a world in which the economy advances from stage to stage – we argue for a need to resist any tendency to explain today’s interest in experiences in terms of unilinear processes of evolution. Instead, it might be more fruitful to focus our attention upon the different ways in which the economy has been culturalized at different times, and in different contexts (cf. Ray and Sayer, 1999:7 & 22). For example, in his contribution to this volume, Robert Willim describes the way in which traditional sites of industrial production have long functioned as tourist attractions and objects of aesthetic beauty. As Willim points out, large factories, hydroelectric dams, and huge bellowing smoke stacks could, in the eyes of the nineteenth century tourist, seem awe-inspiring, majestic and powerful – sites worth viewing just like any other overwhelming natural landscape. Although most tourists today do not appreciate bellowing smoke stacks as sites of beauty, Willim describes the way in which these types of industrial environments are currently being re-aestheticized and converted into new sources of entertainment and sites of cultural heritage. In many cases the old assembly lines have been replaced by art galleries, museum exhibitions and amusement centers. This, however, is only one of the shifting ways in which the economy has been culturalized. This process of culturalization has even affected the manner in which many of us view our own relationship to work. For example, in the nineties, in the midst of the expansive years of the New Economy, managers of many dot.com enterprises found themselves struggling to attract and hold the best creative talent their companies could find (Thrift, 2000). According to the common logic of the time, places of work – as well as the people working in them – had to be creative, flexible and innovative (cf. Kelly, 1999; McRobbie, 2002: 106; Schrage, 1999). In order to achieve this, while simultaneously building loyalty and a sense of community, it was increasingly believed that work should be fun (cf. Andersdotter, 2001; Peters, 1994; Jensen, 1999; Willim, 2001). In his contribution to this volume, O’Dell argues that this manner of valuing the linkage between work and play has spread to places of 21

Tom O’Dell work throughout many other sectors of the economy not directly associated with the dot.com companies of the New Economy. A conference on a cruise ship or at a health spa, a night of bowling, a day racing go-karts, are all activities that employers are investing in, in the hope of reducing stress, improving relations between employees, making places of work more enjoyable and ultimately, increasing productivity. As Angela McRobbie critically observes: Work…incorporates and overtakes everyday life. In exacting new resources of self-reliance on the part of the working population, work appears to supplant, indeed hijack, the realm of the social, readjusting the division between work and leisure, creating new modes of self-disciplining, producing new forms of identity (2002:99). Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain any simplistic notion of a clear distinction between work, tourism, leisure and play (cf. Bassett and Wilbert, 1999:183). From the perspective of the academy, it has been argued that tourism research has been assigned a relatively low status (Brown, 1998:13). As some have pointed out, “there is more than a little suspicion that to study tourism is to study something frivolous. A job is work, but to be a tourist is to have fun” (Fainstein and Judd, 1999:271). This is even a trend that has been identified with regard to play and leisure more generally (Thrift, 1997). While recognizing that these tendencies do exist, we argue for a need to move beyond simple dichotomies such as work and leisure. This is not to say that work and play are one and the same, but that we need to better understand the manner in which they bleed into one another, formalizing our private lives in new ways, and forcing new modes of self-discipline upon us. Viewed in this way, we find a complex level of interplay between the economic structures of daily life and the socio-cultural realities in which people live and work. In short, the shifting dynamics of the ongoing interest in experiences not only influence the context within which economic growth takes place, they also affect the conditions under which people structure their working lives (cf. Peters, 1994; Thrift, 2000; Willim, 2002), their free time (Crouch, 1999), their consumption habits (Bjurström, Fornäs and Ganetz, 2001; Miller, 1998a and 1998b; Pine and Gilmore, 1999), their social lives (Putnam, 2000); and their political engagement (Ehrlich and Dreier, 1999). Against this background, the question becomes one of how all this 22

Experiencescapes:Blurring Borders and Testing Connections affects the manner in which we perceive ourselves and the world around us. Phrased slightly differently, if the search for new experiences is not limited to any single or particular sphere of daily life, then how might it affect our values and the expectations we place upon life in general? These are questions that will defy any single or simple answer and prompt us to remain analytically flexible, while bearing in mind that experiencescapes come in a variety of shapes and sizes that can be studied at levels ranging from specific micro-contexts to entire regions.

Identity Production and the Consequences of Scaping Thus, while some may find it easy to dismiss the study of tourism, leisure and the market for experiences as “frivolous”, a number of the contributions to this volume point to the fact that fundamental issues of everyday life, such as identity production and identity politics, are of great importance. At the micro end of the scale we find specific businesses: such as the Danish roadside inns (called kro in Danish) described by Szilvia Gyimóthy in her contribution to this volume. At first glance, these small (often family owned) establishments may seem rather unassuming, especially in comparison to many of their high profile brethren in the Experience Economy. However, as Gyimóthy demonstrates, these are places that intricately pull together, and play off of, many competing forms of identity that are linked to issues of class and national belonging, as well as popular perceptions (and representations) of cultural heritage and notions of “home”. These are rather special experiencescapes that derive much of their symbolic power from a series of romanticized images of a bygone era of Danish rural conviviality and warmth. Gyimóthy calls these “nostalgiascapes”, and in so doing reminds us of the need to better understand how multiple forms and interpretations of identity, belonging and history can affect the cultural organization of experiences. On a slightly larger scale, many cities actively, and without reserve, work to cultivate a more unified identity for themselves as exciting places capable of offering visitors a wealth of activities and entertainment possibilities. Such is the case for Malmö, a small city in southern Sweden, where, in 2001, politicians and other civil servants presented a series of plans and visions for the city’s future. Among the development projects they had in mind was the creation of a theme park on the outskirts of the city, the construction of a huge experience center in the heart of the city, and the production of an event complex

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Tom O’Dell that included a hotel (which, according to the plans, was to be northern Europe’s tallest building), an event stadium, a shopping mall and a residential neighborhood further south. If these plans are realized, the hope is that they will help to create new sources of income for the city and generate new jobs for its inhabitants. However, they also run the risk of forcing the relocation of many groups of people living in Malmö, and reshaping the manner in which these (and other) people move about in the city and feel at home in it. As John Hannigan has argued (1998), urban renewal projects designed to attract tourists and make cities into more exciting places of entertainment and consumption, have an overwhelming tendency to marginalize politically and economically weaker groups in those cities. This point was brought home by comments made to me by a leading strategist from one of Copenhagen’s largest and most influential tourist organizations. From the perspective of his organization, the attractiveness of Copenhagen as a destination would be increased if youths and immigrants could be moved out of the center of town where tourists tend to congregate. These segments of the local population simply did not fit in with the image of Copenhagen that his organization was trying to create. As a consequence, it was with great approval that they watched as plans were drawn up to convert one of the larger arcades and entertainment centers in downtown Copenhagen (a place in which youths and immigrants tended to congregate) into an expensive luxury hotel. The situation in Copenhagen illustrates one of the ways in which we mean that it is important that experiencescapes are viewed as more than spaces of leisure. Their physical contours also delineate spaces in which ideologies are materialized, and through which they can be contested (cf. Lefebvre, 1991). They are, in other words, not politically neutral arenas, and here there is a need to more vigorously interrogate the linkage between leisure, identity and the politics of everyday life. But in addition to very concrete and physical attempts to refurbish and transform specific cities and regions, a great deal of cultural work is being invested in redefining these places; creating new images for them, shifting their identities and linking them to specific lifestyles and values. This is a phenomenon that Maria Christersdotter clearly illuminates in her contribution to this volume. Her chapter focuses upon the plans to build a small exclusive hotel in Malmö, designed by the world famous architect Frank Gehry. None of the urban planners or architects whom Christersdotter has talked to during the course of her research has had a very clear idea of what the hotel might look like, or 24

Experiencescapes:Blurring Borders and Testing Connections what it could really be used for. More important than the hotel itself was the fact that Malmö might be able to align itself with Gehry’s name and his past projects (including the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain). As Christersdotter argues, image is of central importance here, and a hotel designed by a world famous architect has (at least in the minds of the men Christersdotter has talked to) a special potential to help symbolically redefine Malmö and place it on the world map of attractive tourists sites.

Marketers, Alchemists, and Warriors Similar attempts to create new, attractive and attention grabbing identities can be found nearly everywhere as private enterprises, municipalities, cities and even entire nations endeavor to stake out a place for themselves in the imagination of tourists. Along these lines we find such claims as: “Tobago – green, clean & serene,” “Dubai – expect the world,” and “Øresund – the human capital.” Slogans such as these are marketing tools, but they are also much more than that. They are tools that are as vital to the production and conception of space and cultural identity as the physical materials used in the construction of those places. This is all part of a process that ethnologist Orvar Löfgren has referred to as a “Catwalk Economy” (2001:8ff.). Like models showingoff clothing on the catwalk of a fashion show, businesses, cities, regions and nations all have to compete for the attention of the surrounding world. The goal is to create a cultural package that is both appealing and believable. In this contemporary context, place marketers and city-branders might be likened to modern alchemists. Mixing catchy slogans and airbrushed images with a generous flair of event-management, and a sense for the hottest coming trend, they struggle to conjure forth an aura around their cities or regions that will attract tourists and generate economic prosperity.6 The problem is that this is a crowded market, and it is not always easy to be heard above the cacophony created by the multitude of actors competing for attention. Focusing upon the role of place marketing as viewed from a regional perspective, Richard Ek, in his contribution to this volume, likens the situation to one of warfare in which regions are not only struggling to 6

For more on the conjuring effects of place marketing, see the discussions in Berg, Linde-Laursen, and Löfgren, 2000 & 2002.

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Tom O’Dell win the tourist’s attention, but even using place marketing as a means of asserting their own legitimacy and strength as spatial entities in relation to the spatiality of other geographic territorialities such as cities and nations. The ability to define oneself as a region has been a particularly important process in the European Union, where large economic resources have been allocated to promote regional growth. As a result, place marketing has not only played an important role as an aspect of tourism, but also as part of a larger political process, in Europe as well as in other parts of the world. Bearing this in mind, it is somewhat paradoxical to note that even as cities, regions and nations all around the world are marketing themselves on the basis of their uniqueness, the manner in which they do so follows a well-established pattern (cf. Ek, 2002; Henning Jensen, in this volume; Åberg, 2002). It includes the assertion of one’s local history and culture, exciting shopping environments, a “hot” nightlife, and the right balance between urban pulse and opportunities to slow down and relax. Pick up a brochure for any destination and you are bound to find pictures of historic buildings, modern and gleaming hotels, clean streets, healthy well-dressed people, and if possible, white sandy beaches. In other words, place marketing, asserts the unique and novel experiences that travelers can expect to find at any given destination, although it does so through a fairly standardized global recipe – that often works (cf. Ehrlich and Dreier, 1999). At the same time, many of the slogans being launched by placemarketers may, at first glance, seem rather superficial. They are, however, part of a larger reserve of cultural tools used to help tourists come to terms with, frame, and understand the destinations to which they are traveling. In his contribution to this book, Can-Seng Ooi problematizes the manner in which this can be accomplished. Ooi argues that tourists are highly dependent upon what he calls “mediators” (from guidebooks to tour operators) who help tourists frame and understand the cultural settings they encounter. In addition to explaining what it is that tourists should see and do, mediators play a critical role in explaining why tourists should see specific sites and engage in particular activities. In a sense they are attention managers who strive to keep tourists on track and focused on the “right” sights. In part, the work of mediators might be understood as manipulative, but in part it is also an essential part of the tourist experience that many tourists rely upon, and that we need to understand better. Søren Henning Jensen endeavors to do just that in the study he presents in this volume. He argues for a need to better appreciate the 26

Experiencescapes:Blurring Borders and Testing Connections manner in which place marketers and tourist organizations work the tension between that which is known about a place and that which is more ambiguous, or “unknown” in the eyes of the tourist. As he points out, it may be that place marketers work with a rather limited but globally recognizable set of attributes with which they endeavor to promote their markets, but equally important, they also have to invoke ambiguously understood qualities about the places that they are promoting in order to create an exciting aura around them. They (cat)walk a fine line between processes of mystification (emphasizing that which is exotic or different) and banalization (reducing the places they are marketing to something bland, ordinary and boring). Henning Jensen argues that, in Copenhagen, place marketers seem to work the catwalk in a slightly different manner depending upon whom they are working to attract: tourists or businesses.

A Post-sightseeing Society Experiences are the best you can receive. Give away a trip. Buy a gift check for a vacation trip as a Christmas present (Text on a travel agency’s advertising poster in December 2001). Images aside, there is more to succeeding in today’s competition for tourist attention than just Catwalk Economics. It is one thing to conjure forth an image that attracts tourists, but quite another to be able to sustain interest. And although a great deal of attention has been given to the significance of the tourist gaze (Urry, 1990), it is becoming increasingly apparent that tourists do not simply want to travel around the world passively observing what lies before them. On the contrary, a growing number of people want to engage that world and do things. In this context we find backpackers in Asia who work hard to come in contact with people in local settings. We also find middle-class Americans who would rather spend a week in France on wine tasting tours of the countryside than seeing the Eiffel Tower, and middle-age Swedes who spend the weekend on City-breaks in Copenhagen shopping, eating in fine restaurants, drinking coffee in pleasant cafés, and going to the symphony, rather than taking a look at the Little Mermaid or the Royal Castle. To some extent it might be said that we are living in a time in which “seeing the sights” is not enough. As a result, we have to rethink the manner in which we perceive tourist destinations and “local culture.” In some cases, as Szilvia Gyimóthy and Anders Sørensen have pointed out, experiencescapes

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Tom O’Dell may actually be more like winding trails through a jungle than clearly delineated places.7 For example, one of the more prominent tourist attractions in Boston is The Freedom Trail. The trail is actually a red line (at times made out of bricks placed in the city’s sidewalks and streets) that winds its way through the city and connects many of the historical sites that were of importance in the struggle for America’s independence. Tourists can pick up a brochure in the local tourist bureau that describes the significance of each site, and then either walk the trail themselves or pay a small fee and take a guided trolley tour along The Freedom Trail. Several different sorts of tourist trails are being developed in Österlen, in south-eastern Sweden. The Art Round (konstrunden) which takes place annually during the Easter weekend is an example of a huge attraction that involves thousands of people driving around the countryside of Österlen and visiting one artist’s studio after another.8 While a great deal of art is sold over the course of the weekend, it might be argued that one of the weekend’s primary driving motors is people’s curiosity about the kind of culture that might be found in the stone farmhouses of Österlen. This is a search driven as much by curiosity as by the exhibition of art. Working in a different way, Ystad (also located in south-eastern Sweden) has its own equivalent of the freedom trail in the form of a fire engine from 1939 that shuttles tourists between Ystad’s historic sites. As the fire engine makes its way around the town, a guide explains the history of what is being seen – and to hold the attention of the young at heart, he spices the story with tales of ghosts and trolls (Eriksson, 2002). But the ride on the fire engine only offers one aspect of Ystad’s history. German tourists have been flocking to the town in search of a very different historic experience. As it turns out, the Swedish author, Henning Mankell’s books are very popular in Germany, and the local tourist bureau has been swamped by Germans who want to search out and experience the murderous, fictive world described in Mankell’s books (Jarlsbo, 2002).9 In this case it is not the 7

“Trails of experience” is an analytical framework that is being developed by Gyimóthy and Sørensen as a means of helping us rethink experiences as phenomena created in motion and through mobility. For a more complete discussion of the significance of “trails of experience”, see Billing and O’Dell, 2001. 8 See Edström, Beckérus and Larsson, 2003 for a more detailed description of the Art Round. 9 The significance that literature, and especially fictive writing such as the work by Henning Mankell, can have as a tourist attraction was a topic of discussion that Ivar

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Experiencescapes:Blurring Borders and Testing Connections actual history of places such as Marsvinsholm (a castle that features in the drama of one of Mankell’s books) which have facilitated tourism, but the fact that they have been woven into a fictive tale. The trails of experience that these German tourists – and other tourists like them – embark on do not, in the first place, wind their way through the actual local history of Österlen, but through the history of an author’s imagination. It could be asserted that these trips are not really indicative of anything new. The fire engine tours in Ystad are perhaps not that much different from the tours made by sightseeing boats and buses in cities like New York or London. At the same time, however, the examples described above do differ from the traditional boat and bus tours that are normally associated with tourism. They are different because they do more than just serve tourists a complete sightseeing package that they passively consume. The Freedom Trail provides a guideline by which people can walk through the city and discover its history on their own. For a family with young children, a tour of Ystad on a fire engine is a very different experience than if the tour operator had opted to use a traditional bus. For those in search of Mankell’s Ystad, it is fiction rather than fact that makes the area interesting. In each case, history and culture are the commodities being sold, but they are all multi-sited, and the movement between sites is as important for the success of the experience as are the contents of the actual sites themselves. In the future, place marketers, city planners, and civil servants in local governments, may find it necessary to rethink their notion of the local. Those who are able to work across municipal, regional and national borders might find new forms of synergy from the fact that tourists want to be on the move. The trick here will not be simply to keep tourists in your particular town or city as long as possible, but to keep them moving through it, and even coming back to it.

Björkman introduced at the Vadstena Forum, “Hur djup är kulturens brunn? Om kulturen som källa för samhällsbyggnad och regional utveckling.” May 27-29, 2002. What is interesting in the present context is the significance this literary form has for facilitating international tourism. As the local paper, Ystads Allehanda, reported during the summer of 2002, Mankell’s work has not only attracted tourists to the Ystad area, but even journalists and radio and television teams from Germany, whose reports promise to facilitate an even greater interest among German tourists to spend time in southern Sweden (see Jarlsbo, 2002).

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Tom O’Dell

The Slower Pulse Some might argue that the problem for smaller communities trying to operate in the Experience Economy derives from the fact that they will never be able to provide the pulse or volume of activities that can be found in larger cities. But then again, tourists are not always looking for pulse, intensity, and the hottest nightlife. On the contrary, many people are trying to escape the tourist traps and big bustling cities of the Experience Economy. They are in search of a different type of experience: peace and quiet. And this is a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked in the literature on the Experience Economy. The seriousness of this desire to find “impulse-free” zones comes to expression on many different levels. For example, it is becoming increasingly common to find commuter trains that now offer special “quiet” compartments, in which mobile phones must be turned off and passengers are not allowed to talk. Within tourism, we find a growing interest in monastery retreats as a vacation form. These retreats offer people little more than a chance to spend a period of time in silence. For a small fee, visitors can stay in a sparsely furnished monastery cell, be served simple meals, and spend a good deal of time meditating, reflecting upon themselves and their lives, or perhaps, doing absolute nothing. During the past decade, the search for peace and quiet has even spawned the rapid development of spas and health resorts. This is a growing industry that exists in the borderland between tourism, health sciences, individual development and spirituality (O’Dell, 2005a). One of the primary products that spas are selling could be said to be “slow experiences.” That is, many spas thrive by selling the perception (and experience) of slowed down time and tempo. For example, a brochure for one of Sweden’s larger spas, Varberg’s Kurort Hotel & Spa, invites you to, “Feel…how wonderful it can be…to be given the time for living” and promises, “Here there is time to catch up with yourself and room for reflection” (Varberg Kurort Hotell and Spa Brochure, 2002). In this sense, spas capitalize on the experience economy by striving to create the illusion that they embed their clientele in a space in which mobile phones, beepers and digital calendars are banished. Beyond this, it is even a space that is devoid of many of the social stresses linked to everyday life, such as family pressures, intrusive neighbors, and household budgets in which the ends never meet. At the same time, these types of “slow experiences” are slightly different than those usually associated with the experience economy. Whereas Disneyland, Las Vegas and the Hard Rock Café are expected 30

Experiencescapes:Blurring Borders and Testing Connections to provide immediate gratification, stays at spas, convents or meditation centers are expected to resonate longer, and more dramatically affect a person on a psychosocial plane. These are experiences that are saturated with the expectation that they will, in one way or another, help visitors to “find new energy,” or help them “recharge their batteries.” If we look more closely at places such as spas, however, we find that behind the swimming pools, massage tables, “lean cuisines,” and images of healthy sun-drenched bodies there exists a large pool of service providers working under conditions that are far less exciting, adventurous or glamorous than the image their labor creates (cf. O’Dell, 2005b). The situation is similar throughout this market of experiences. The vitality of the world of leisure and experience production is extremely dependent upon a large number of low-wage employees, who are, in many cases, not employed because they are presumed to have a high level of education, but because they are expected to perform fairly routine and traditional services for little pay (cf. Thrift, 2000): from providing massages, to serving meals and washing dishes. What we find here are women employed to do jobs that have traditionally been filled by women. This is a world in which hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity and class make a difference and need to be taken seriously. Here we find continuities with the past that must not be neglected, and which are in further need of investigation.

Easy Money – or a Risky Economy? We live in a time in which there is a great deal of pressure on politicians, civil servants and entrepreneurs to convert “culture” and experiences into economic capital. But the desire to capitalize on “culture”, or the production of experiences, can be very treacherous, because as commodities, “culture” and experiences are endless. They are resources that can never be depleted and which always exist – at least potentially. Unfortunately, tapping into that potential is an extraordinarily difficult task. Nonetheless, in places such as Sweden and Denmark, where it is difficult to attract tourists with the lure of sand, sun and low prices, the appeal of “culture” and experiences as possible sources of economic growth is almost limitless. Political ministers located at the highest levels of power in these countries are extremely active in promoting attempts to capitalize here. In Sweden, the example that so many politicians, governmentally appointed civil

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Tom O’Dell servants and hopeful private entrepreneurs return to is that of the Icehotel, located in the polar region of Sweden.10 “If you can make money on ice, you can make money on anything,” seems to be the political slogan of the day. But the fact that so many proponents of the Experience Economy in Sweden return to the example of the Icehotel, is an acute reminder that perhaps there are not very many large-scale success stories of this kind in Scandinavia. From a political perspective, the Icehotel fits in well with the spirit of New Liberalism permeating global politics today. The Icehotel is a private enterprise (as are the majority of examples we have presented here). If it fails there are no politicians who can be held accountable, and no tax dollars wasted. The point is that the prerequisites for experiences can be staged, and as the contributions to this book demonstrate, there are very many different types of experiences which can be sold, and which people are looking for. However, the cacophony of the market means that only a few of the investments made today will ever have a chance to be noticed, and the plethora of failures in this economy will usually disappear without a trace. In this sense, the Experience Economy is also a risky economy, in which it is all too easy to point to the success stories while forgetting the failures hidden behind them. Succeeding in this market may not necessarily prove to be an easy feat. And while “culture” and experiences can potentially be found everywhere around us, it may prove to be extremely difficult to convert them into economic capital. Indeed, their presence does not necessarily mean that they are an economic resource at all. It is against this background of great expectations, large investments and new understandings of both work and play, that we see a need to examine the manner in which investments in the Experience Economy are 10

The Icehotel, located in a small desolate village called Jukkasjärvi, in the far north of Sweden, was started in 1989 when a 60 square meter art gallery, the Arctic Hall, was made out of ice and used to house an exhibition. On one evening a few visitors decided to spend the night in the ice gallery, sleeping on reindeer skins. “The next morning they were very thrilled by the night they had spent. Arctic Hall was never planned to be a hotel, however, well-rested guests maintained that it was a warm and exciting experience” (see www.icehotel.com). Now there is even an Ice Bar, Icehotel Cinema, Ice Church, and a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater – made out of ice – in which Hamlet and other plays are performed. According to the Icehotel’s own statistics, they had 14,000 overnight guests and 33,000 day-time visitors during the 2000/2001 winter season. The hotel itself is 4,000 square meters in size (ibid). Every spring the entire facility melts, and every fall it is rebuilt.

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Experiencescapes:Blurring Borders and Testing Connections changing the face of everyday life for people around the world. Our effort here takes its point of departure in the study of tourism, but as I have argued above, it endeavors to move beyond the traditional boundaries of any single field of study or any single sphere of daily life. In striving to move in this way, our hope is that this volume will help to better illuminate the central significance that tourism and leisure play as motors of both change and stability in society.

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2

Looking With New Eyes at The Old Factory On the Rise of Industrial Cool

ROBERT WILLIM

During the final weeks of the hot summer of 2002, the Kockum’s crane, one of the key symbols of the Swedish city of Malmö, disappeared. The crane that had been located in the city’s central shipyard, had long dominated Malmö’s skyline. Since the closing of the shipyard in 1986, Kockum’s crane had worked as a dormant symbol of the flourishing industrial years of the past. Unfortunately, it was also a bitter reminder of the recession that followed. In 2002 the crane was sold, deconstructed and transported to Ulsan, South Korea, where it would be put into service by Hyundai Heavy Industries. The crane, however, soon re-appeared in Malmö, this time as a motif on sweaters, underwear and a number of other textiles. Lollopard, a young Malmö firm, used the crane’s silhouette as an image on some of their textile designs – an initiative recognized by the daily press, fashion magazines and the selected boutiques that sold the textiles. The physical removal of the crane, and the recurrence of its image in new contexts, symbolizes change: the change from Malmö as an industrial-based city to one in which new types of products and services form the economic core. Knowledge, digital hi-tech products, research-intensive medical technology, tourism and experiences are the

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Robert Willim new commodities. In this chapter, I will discuss the processes taking place in this transformation. In order to describe and analyze these processes, I use the term Industrial Cool. The term illustrates a number of industry-related processes of change and can be used to show how new experiencescapes take shape. It also indicates how people are starting to look with new eyes at old factories.

Industries Beyond 2000 In recent years, many commentators have spoken about the death of the industrial society, and about ways in which we are entering a new era: The Network Society, The Information Society, The Knowledge Society, The New Economy, The Experience Economy, The Attention Economy, The Post-industrial Society and so on. This thinking is based on the assumption that traditional industries lose much of their economic impetus in society, like farming once did. New industries spring up – according to the rhetoric – at the expense of previous ones. While a lot can be said about how these processes take place, there are a number of indications that previously successful industrial forms of production are now changing. The trend of shutting down plants and factories in large parts of the Western World, and moving production and labor to “low salary” countries in other parts of the world, has become more widespread. Former factories have thus become empty shells that can, in many cases, be re-used. The shipbuilding area around the Kockums’ crane is an example of how new activities spring up in former industrial environments. In this particular case, ITcompanies, cultural institutions, and Malmö University are examples of enterprises that have moved in. This transformation of the area can be illustrated by an advertising supplement that read as follows: Kockums’ crane has gone and biking dock-workers have been replaced by biking students. The university campus is Malmö’s future and its establishment represents a transformation of the harbor area to a hyper-modern IT-landscape. The historical winds have turned. The people of Malmö have taken a stride into the knowledge society. (Advertisement supplement: Näringsliv Skåne) By focusing on how former industrial milieus have been changed, the representatives of Näringsliv Skåne (a trade and industry organization) in Scania want, through the advertising supplement, to spread the image of how a new community is in the process of developing.

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Looking With New Eyes at The Old Factory Parallel to these changes in the industrial environment, the comprehensive task of preserving what has come to be regarded as industrialized society’s cultural heritage has begun. In particular, museums are investing great effort in the documentation of what they perceive to be a disappearing industrial society. As an aspect of this, there are also discussions of how the assets (such as different forms of knowledge) from the industrial era should be safeguarded (Fritz et al., 2002). These initiatives to eagerly preserve the industrial past are similar to those efforts made by museum curators, ethnologists and other collectors of cultural artefacts who at the beginning of the 20th century struggled to conserve and document cultural aspects of peasant society that they feared were vanishing. Industrial tourism, has developed as an extension of these ongoing processes and as a part of the cultural heritage movement.11 This particular type of tourism is mainly directed towards redundant industrial environments, although it can often include visits to industries that are still active. In Sweden, this museum-directed industrial tourism has developed in connection with such things as the historic mining sites in central and northern Sweden. One of the more well-known is the Falu copper mine, which has even been classified as one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites. Internationally, there are several examples of industrial tourism, such as those found in connection with the steel industry in Pennsylvania USA, or in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where you can go behind the scenes of the Schiphol Airport and harbor-based industries. Industrial tourism represents a new form of economic sustenance that has emerged as the signification of older factories has changed. It has in a sense, become an industry of its own. But what actually constitutes an industry? It might be worth taking a closer look at the meaning of the word: Etymology: Middle English industrie skill, employment involving skill, from Middle French, from Latin industria diligence, from industrius diligent, from Old Latin indostruus, perhaps from indu in + -struus (akin to Latin struere to build) Date: 15th century

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The term industrial tourism refers to tourism in which industrial milieus provide tourists with venues and attractions. It is not connected to the type of industrial tourism that has been discussed by Edward Abbey in his book Desert Solitaire (1968/1973). By using the term industrial tourism, he wanted to show that tourism became a mass-phenomenon that, according to industrial principles, was directed towards profit and implied an exploitation of the natural environment.

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Robert Willim 1: diligence in an employment or pursuit; especially: steady or habitual effort 2a: systematic labour especially for some useful purpose or the creation of something of value b: a department or branch of a craft, art, business, or manufacture; especially: one that employs a large personnel and capital especially in manufacturing c: a distinct group of productive or profit-making enterprises d: manufacturing activity as a whole 3: work devoted to the study of a particular subject or author (Merriam Brewster online dictionary). That which is industrial is primarily characterized by its size; its systematic production; reliance of processes of standardization, and orientation towards profitability. To a certain extent, the word is synonymous with business, but has primarily been used in connection with the manufacturing of different types of physical products, such as metals, papers and foods. Successively, other industries have also developed around such phenomena as: tourism, music, film and entertainment. These have at times been collectively referred to via wider categories such as “the creative industries”, “the cultural industries” or “the experience industries”.12 But what actually happens when the word industry is coupled to words like “culture” or “experience”? The fact that something is industrialized usually means that it is commercialized and made more systematic. Industrial activities are usually bound by standardization systems. The word industry is associated with large-scale production, cost-effectiveness and, at worst, negative phenomena such as exploitation and alienation. Johan Fornäs has written about the growth of the so-called experience industry. He sees it as: …a kind of rationalization, goal-oriented manipulation, commodification or industrialization of experiences, that can go hand in hand with a commercialization, institutionalization and professionalization of different activities that were previously more spontaneously organized. (…) On the other hand the experience-industry mind-set points to how the so-called postindustrial society aestheticizes or culturalizes production and 12

In Sweden, the term “the experience industry” (upplevelseindustrin) has, to a large extent, been marketed and used by the organisation KK-stiftelsen (The Knowledge Foundation).

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Looking With New Eyes at The Old Factory distribution of goods and services and, in a more thoroughly planned manner, designs space and time. This side of things could be called an experiencification of industries (Fornäs, 2001:375). The expansion of the experience aspect of industry is increasingly identified as being of great importance for processes of economic transformation in early 21st century Sweden. Industrial production and distribution is culturalized. Fornäs emphasizes that this is nothing new. It’s not the first time that industrial production has been loaded with cultural symbolism.13

Early Industrial Experiencescapes Industry is something that has constantly been aestheticized in different ways. Industrial milieus have been designed to create impressions. For example, several factories of the late 19th century look like gigantic brick cathedrals, and both the design and architecture of factories have largely been influenced by the prevailing aesthetic trends of the time. Ford’s first conveyor-belt construction, opened in 1913 in Highland Park in Detroit, Michigan, is an early example of the importance that was given to design and architecture. Another early and spectacular construction often highlighted as an example of innovative design is FIAT’s Lingotto factory in Turin, built during the 1920s. The factory is crowned with a kilometer-long race track on the roof, designed for test-driving the newly produced cars. The vehicles were moved up story by story during the production process in order to arrive at the top and be test driven on the roof under the open sky (Darley 2003:85). While such buildings were created as production environments, they were also designed to make an impression. David Nye has coupled the sense of fascination for the industrial and the impression of grandeur that you get from these milieus with what he calls The Industrial Sublime (Nye, 1996). During the 19th century, when industry was a novelty and perceived by many people as 13

Trade and industry’s sponsorship of cultural institutions is also a kind of culturalization. For example, already at the turn of the century – 1900 – the Danish brewer Carl Jacobssen, with the help of money from the company Carlsberg’s sale of beer, set up the museum and art collection, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, in central Copenhagen. A later and more controversial example in Sweden was in 2001, when the electronic company Sony was allowed to sponsor the Modern Museum in Stockholm. Questions raised included the nature of artistic freedom and whether a multinational company should be allowed to make such explicit use of the art gallery for exposing their trademark (cf. Schibli, 2002).

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Robert Willim symbolic of the future, the new factories became tourist destinations. Industrial milieus came to be regarded as sublime scenarios and comparable to majestic mountain landscapes, waterfalls and other milieus that – in conjunction with the growth of tourism – had been transformed into sights worth seeing. The sublime radiated power and drama and bordered on the dangerous. Orvar Löfgren describes the growth of the sublime and how it is connected to recreation and travel: “In the midst of all the idyllic harmony there grew a need for a heightened sensation, a cult of the sublime – ‘all that surprises the soul, all that creates a sense of fear,’ as Diderot defined the concept” (Löfgren, 1999:27). The sublime is manifested in majestic scenarios such as Niagara Falls. But it doesn’t only represent magnificent beauty. The sublime refers not only to the majestic or magnificent, but also to the terrifying or awesome, the presence of forces stronger than man, be they demonic or godly. Moments of the sublime must grip the onlooker, through the dialectics of the repelling and the fascinating (Ibid: 28). Industrial milieus began to radiate this tension between magnificent beauty, danger and forbidding powerfulness. The new large factories, with their belching emissions of smoke, fumes (and sometimes fire) could simply not be ignored, and attracted tourists and experience hunters (ibid:126). Mills and plants were set against nature’s own display of sublime experiences. Industrial landscapes were evidence of how mankind had successfully manufactured machines and constructions that could compete with the grandeur of nature. For example, some visitors to Niagara Falls were more impressed by the big turbines in the hydroelectric power station than by the actual waterfall (Nye, 1996:135). During the 19th and 20th centuries, industrial landscapes became experiencescapes in that they were physically visited and visually represented in different forms of media. With the development of cameras, stereoscopes and other technical tools of experience production, industrial images could now be mediated more easily. That which was large-scale and enormous was emphasized, and long rows of machines stretching into the horizon became a favorite theme of representation. A perfect example was the uniform lines of spindles in the textile mills “that became a visual metaphor for the promised cornucopia of industrial production” (Nye, 1996:115). The Industrial Sublime united that which was large-scale with that which was repugnant, and at the same time integrated associations of 40

Looking With New Eyes at The Old Factory an improved future for humanity where industrial production and human innovation could combine to create a better world. The Industrial Sublime can therefore be linked to a progressive optimism that kept pace with industrialization and modernization. In order to experience industry as something sublime and part of a fascinating experiencescape that pointed towards a better future, it was necessary that there existed a degree of distance between the observer and the industry being viewed. Those who monotonously slogged away at factory machines had a difficult time stepping back and enjoying the beauty and the sublime of their working environment. There was therefore an important social and class-related dimension to the phenomenon. Growth of the Industrial Sublime presupposed a certain distance to industry; something that relates it to the rise of Industrial Cool; a phenomenon that has much to do with distancing.

The Rise of Industrial Cool There are a number of processes at work today contributing to the aestheticization and culturalization of the manufacturing industry. Former industrial milieus are converted into museums or cultural heritage attractions. New enterprises, such as museums, art galleries, new companies or universities, have been established in former industrial premises. Components and symbols from the time when industrial production was in its heyday have been also preserved in order to create an aesthetic aura. Furthermore, new industrial plants have been built to emphasize new aspects of the industrial era. Showcase-plants have been constructed where production can be presented in an attractive way for visitors, and where businesses can mediate their company-profile and brands. In order to describe the processes involved when industry is changed, the term Industrial Cool can be used. Another example of Industrial Cool concerns how things and images connected to traditional industry are incorporated in popular culture and the art world, such as when the Malmö firm, Lollopard, turned Kockums’ crane into a motif on its textiles. Industrial Cool can also be detected in connection with music and the visual arts. All these processes contribute to making industry into something aesthetic and – as in the growth of 19th century Industrial Sublime – something distant. Such dissociation also concerns phenomena linked to industrial production, such as pollution, grime, smoke, noise and exploitation. These phenomena still occur, however, particularly in those plants where cheap production and low wages are prioritized, although such plants are becoming increasingly invisible in large parts 41

Robert Willim of the Western World. As a rule they either are geographically distant, or toned down by companies who prefer to emphasize more attractive aspects of their production. Today, many people in the Western World have the privilege of keeping the grime of industry at a distance.14 Low-wage industries have, to a large extent, moved abroad, and the manufacturing that remain have become less labor-intensive. Distance is also illustrated and emphasized when the word ‘industrial’ is combined with the word ‘cool’. Cool can signify distance. In an interview recorded for a documentary on U2’s album, “The Joshua Tree”, Brian Eno said that “to be cool is to be detached from yourself” (Musikbyrån, 2002). To be cool is to wear a kind of mask. Coolness is to create a distanced relationship to something, and be “safe from harm”. As far as Industrial Cool is concerned, it can signify that a certain distance to an industry is either physically or emotionally retained. At the same time, this distance signifies the possibility of a reflexive attitude and even the creation of a sense of enchantment. There is a certain power to something that keeps a distance or is “mystically” absent, and such enchantment is evident in connection with the changing role played by industries in several countries of the Western World, such as Sweden, Denmark, England and Germany. The production industry that was once omnipresent has now become less conspicuous. If the growth of Industrial Sublime during the 19th century was associated with the belief that industries could contribute to the future establishment of a better world, then Industrial Cool is an example of how traditional industry can be aligned with phenomena that are linked to the past. But there is also a tension in the aestheticization that occurs within the frame of Industrial Cool; a tension between the beauty of the grandiose and the hazardous repulsiveness that characterizes the Industrially Sublime. The emotional storms that characterized the Industrially Sublime experiences of the past have, within the frame of Industrial Cool, gone on to facilitate a more reflexive attitude. As a result, a number of industrial production sites in the Western World have acquired a new aura as they have been incorporated into art and popular culture. For example, a nostalgic passion for ruins, where artists, photographers and filmmakers are attracted by industrial landscapes and details in a state of decay can be seen as part of this trend.15 The new industry that is established is aestheticized to such a 14

For some, however, this is not a privilege when the move or closure of industries has resulted in long-term unemployment and difficulties in finding new jobs. Sometimes the alternative to a gritty job can, in this sense, be all but appealing. 15 For more information about industrial ruins, Tim Edensor’s website www.staffs.ac.uk/schools/humanities_and_soc_sciences/te1/index.php is worth

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Looking With New Eyes at The Old Factory degree that even this constitutes a kind of distance to what is actually produced. I will illustrate this in a moment. Retaining distance is thus important. That which is absent, or kept at arm’s length, cannot only be perceived as cool, but also as something that attracts and entices. The phenomenon is illustrated to a certain extent by the proverb, “the grass is greener on the other side”. That which is not immediately accessible can exert some kind of enchantment and possess a power of attraction. The nostalgic lure of former industries is, in this context, an important force in the production of experiencescapes (see even the discussion in Gyimóthy’s contribution to this volume). The word cool, however, doesn’t only signify a retained distance. It can also imply that something is perceived as stylish and aesthetically correct or suitable, or that it keeps pace with the diffuse concept that goes by the name of the “spirit of our times”. Something that is cool can be synonymous with being trendy. In the context of popular culture, the genealogy of the word cool can be traced to the jazz music of the early 20th century. The word also appears in connection with the rapidly shifting design whims in the world of fashion (Löfgren, 2005). Industrial Cool indicates how industries have become increasingly connected to aesthetic currents and how sensitive they are to changing trends. In the next section I will present phenomena that tangibly indicate the rise of Industrial Cool and the processes involved. These include the rejuvenation of former industrial milieus and objects, and the staging of industrial production in newly built factories.

Staged Factories: The Transparent Factory, Dresden, Germany If you walk towards The Great Garden from The Museum of Hygiene in the center of the German city of Dresden, you soon come across a tourist miniature railway similar to those of the Deutsche Bahn railways. It is quite a modest, but classic tourist attraction. Behind one of the railway stations at the park’s northern end, there is a parking area. If you walk beside this parking area, a shimmering glass and metal building quickly looms into view: The Transparent Factory (Die Gläserne Manufaktur).16 The building is a car factory where VW manufactures, markets and sells its luxury model, the Phaeton. The visiting. Edensor has also written a book on the same theme (published by Berg), but which is not yet available in the bookshops. 16 I would like to thank Peter Billing for drawing my attention to the significance of VW’s plant in Dresden in connection with Industrial Cool.

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Robert Willim plant is a new tourist attraction in the city, and attempts to be anything but unpretentious. The aestheticization and culturalization of industries in recent years has made it possible to track the development of new experiencescapes. Within many traditional industries one now finds numerous examples of how production and consumption have been united in new ways, and how the aesthetic and cultural dimensions of industry have been strengthened as a result. The Transparent Factory is one of the more noteworthy examples of how a new experiencescape has taken shape. It is also a good example of the rise of Industrial Cool. Visitors are encouraged to visit the factory to view the production of cars that takes place in a carefully designed and aesthetic way in the architecturally lavish premises. Entry, like the guided tour and the testing of attractions such as the car simulator, is free. While the absence of an entrance fee makes the visit seem like a bargain, in other respects the factory emanates luxury. Car production takes place behind the pane of glass that separates visitor and employee. Those who assemble the cars are dressed mostly in white, and leisurely (but methodically) operate silent battery-driven tools. Precision, value and care are radiated as a result. In a sense, the employees operate as both production workers and actors. It is a staged production that takes place in the factory. On the one hand, The Transparent Factory can be seen as a new way of combining customer contact with industrial design, exhibition activities and production. A forty-meter glass tower consisting of fifteen stories accommodates the finished cars. On an evening it shines like a gigantic glass sanctuary. The bonnets of the glossy cars point north, south, east and west, and look like objets d’art in the gigantic showcase. It sets the tone of the surrounding area and accentuates the car company’s presence in the city. One of VW’s managers aptly describes the factory as “a constant marketing event” (quoted from Patton, 2002). Otto Riewoldt describes such plants as “brandscapes” and draws a parallel to the historical importance of designing factories to symbolize the company’s identity. Recent developments, however, show an increasing desire to communicate an enticing image of the company with the aid of specially designed plants. …in the past, the focus was invariably on adding value: the functional buildings required to meet a company’s industrial purpose were raised to the status of symbols. Current developments go further still, with architecture and interior design becoming primary instruments of customer-oriented brand 44

Looking With New Eyes at The Old Factory communication in their own right. Brandscaping – the threedimensional design of brand settings – is all about forging backdrops for experiences with a high entertainment value, from flagship stores to corporate theme parks, from customized modular shop systems to innovative mall concepts (Riewoldt, 2002). Companies other than VW have also adapted the idea of mixing consumption, production and showcasing in order to create value. The journalist, Phil Patton, writes about how the car industry per se remodels its manufacturing sites, and how the VW plant – particularly through its location – can be seen as one of the more innovative ways of changing the manner in which industrial plants are experienced: Other companies are reshaping factories as showcases for customers. BMW has just hired Zaha Hadid to design a showcase factory in Leipzig, where assembly lines will snake around offices, intermingling blue- and white-collar work. Ford is rehabilitating the River Rouge plant, birthplace of automobile mass production, as a “clean and green” showcase, designed by William McDonough. But no-one has taken the process as far as VW. Located in the middle of Dresden, the new factory borders the Great Garden, a park and botanical garden that began as the royal hunting ground 300 years ago. It’s as if someone had built a factory adjacent to Central Park (Patton, 2002). What actually goes on in this city-center industry? Essentially it is an assembly plant where prefabricated parts are assembled into the finished product. This means that much of the production takes place elsewhere. Car parts are transported to the factory in specially built socalled “Car-Go-Trams” that use the tracks of the city’s transit system. In the factory itself, robots and well-polished machines operate in conjunction with white-clad workers using battery-driven hand tools rather than loud pneumatic ones. All is silent. It is reminiscent of a museum or art gallery to the extent that any noise that might be associated with an industrial milieu has been minimized. Other elements often found in connection with heavy industry, such as belching chimneys, dazzling welding flames, grime and smoke, are nowhere to be found. A distance to that which is usually associated with industry has thus been created. This leads to a distinct aesthetization of both the production and the factory, ultimately making this a typical example of the phenomenon of Industrial Cool. 45

Robert Willim

Recycled Factories: The BALTIC Art Factory, Gateshead, UK Concurrent with the closing down of manufacturing industries and the abandoning of premises, former factories are being given a new lease on life. Cultural institutions, such as art galleries, arts centers and museums, are moving into former industrial premises and giving them a new value. In Sweden, an example of this can be found in Norrköping, where the premises of centrally located former textile industries straddling Motala ström (the name of the river running through Norrköping) have, for example, been converted to house the Worker’s Museum and the city’s university campus. One of the more distinct and internationally renowned examples of a recycled factory is the art gallery and arts center, BALTIC, in northeast England’s Gateshead. It is a former industrial flourmill that has been given a second chance. The buildings have been redesigned, revamped and remodeled to house an Art Factory; a meeting place for both artists and the public. Characteristics, narratives and well-chosen stylish aspects of former industrial times have been emphasized and aestheticized within the frame of the new activities. While the milieu can easily be associated with the past, this linkage to history has been exploited to create an aesthetic aura that surrounds the art factory. The enterprise consists of two buildings – The Riverside and The Main Building. The Main Building is a recycled industrial brick factory dating from the 1950s. The Riverside Building comprises BALTIC’s two story main entrance. Sune Nordgren, manager of the enterprise from its establishment through to 2003, describes the experience as one of going into the building and emerging on the open sea. To me, it’s very much like entering a ferry! You squeeze into the ferry and then it opens up and you’re out on the sea. It’s similar to here, you come in and the entrance street is quite low. But then there’s an enormous light that draws you into the building (B.Info. www.balticmill.com). The old factory has been turned into an experiencescape that can be associated with going out to sea. The enterprise should not be experienced as something closed, but rather as something that opens itself up to encounters with people as well as to imaginative associations. The old flourmill is situated near the River Tyne, and rubs shoulders with other initiatives that have been aimed at turning run-down industrial environments into a new attractive area. The 46

Looking With New Eyes at The Old Factory rhetoric of the area is partly a reminder of that which in Malmö is described as a rejuvenation of the harbor area. In BALTIC’s information material, The Gateshead Quayside is described as a landscape in transformation: BALTIC sits alongside other projects of international significance, which together create a new cultural complex in Gateshead. The Gateshead Millenium Bridge, a new pedestrian and bicycle bridge, connects Baltic Square with the rejuvenated quayside in Newcastle. The Sage Gateshead offers concert halls and a music school. A Taylor Woodrow leisure and residential scheme incorporates a cinema, restaurants, bars, night-club, a Hilton International Hotel, as well as 220 loft-style apartments in the area behind BALTIC (ibid). Initiatives to create new activities in former industrial milieus in a manner that retains the association with previous operations are central for the rise of Industrial Cool. These initiatives of recycling old industrial milieus can also be found in many other countries, each one contributing to placing the former industry in a new light. The rejuvenation of industrial milieus does not only take place through the physical establishment of former industrial premises, however. In using the picture of Kockum’s crane on their underwear, the clothes company, Lollopard, was using an industrial artefact in a new context. Recording sounds and images in an industrial milieu and turning it into art is a similar example. The advent of digital equipment now makes it relatively easy to take the sounds and images of an industry, and then manipulate and adapt the material so that it can be used, in such things as musical compositions and films. Artists that use digital media often try to transform sound fragments and images from one context to another, creating an aesthetic value in the form of a new tune, film or collage of images. Recording the sound in an industry and manipulating it by computer into a musical performance may create a sense of aesthetic detachment. The sound is put into a new musical context and given new significance.17

17

During autumn 2002, some colleagues and I set up a project based on ideas of the development of Industrial Cool. The project includes reflections about the role of industry in aesthetically uniting industrial environments using digital media (see http://pleazure.org/ic1/).

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Robert Willim

What’s Cool and Sublime? The Undertow of Industrial Harshness Industrial Cool is a way of accentuating the beauty of the industrial. Emphasizing that which is cool helps to tone down some of the multifaceted and complex faces of industry. It has to be said that industrial activity is not a bed of roses – a statement as valid today as it was forty or a hundred and fifty years ago. When the beautiful, cool or sublime is emphasized, however, attention is drawn away from its least attractive sides. During the 19th century, when the interest for the Industrial Sublime was in its heyday, there was also a lot of criticism towards the industrial environments that were then developing. Critics were concerned by the way in which industrial workers were dehumanized and reduced to physical support mechanisms in factories. The image of the industrially exploited manual worker is, of course, very well-known, but is nevertheless worth emphasizing in relation to both Industrial Sublime and Industrial Cool. In order to understand industry as either sublime or cool, a certain distance to the industrial process is necessary. In order to bring out that which is beautiful, much must be hidden from view. Issues of power are involved in the concealment of repulsive or nonappealing aspects of industry today. Industrial Cool emphasizes that industry is changing and that, to some degree, it belongs to the past. In many ways, this is an aesthetic reflection of ideas and values embedded in post-industrial society. When these become part of people’s perceptions of reality, the everyday view of traditional industrial work also changes. Slavoj Žižek expresses the ominous sides of these mechanisms: In the ideological sensibility of the West today, is it not work itself – manual labour as opposed to ‘symbolic’ activity – rather than sex, that has become the site of obscene indecency to be concealed from the public eye? The tradition, which goes back to Wagner’s Rheingold and Lang’s Metropolis, in which the working process takes place in dark caves underground, now culminates in the millions of anonymous workers sweating in Third World factories, from Chinese gulags to Indonesian or Brazilian assembly lines. Due to the invisibility of all these, the West can afford to babble about the ‘disappearance of the working class’. Crucial to this tradition is a tacit equation of labour with crime: the idea that hard work is a felonious activity to be hidden from public view (Žižek 2000:40-41).

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Looking With New Eyes at The Old Factory Manual work is described as something that should be hidden from public view. At the same time, society is supposed to make room for new and attractive experiencescapes. But what kind of taboo areas do experiencescapes represent nowadays? The pessimistic view of the situation is that while we establish experiencescapes of Industrial Cool in the West, harsh and oppressive industrial experiencescapes that are hotter than hell develop in other parts of the world. The phenomenon of Industrial Cool is a process that opens doors to new opportunities, while at the same time closing others. The Transparent Factory in Dresden is an example of an enterprise that creates possibilities. New contacts – between the producer, consumer and inquisitive visitors – are facilitated. A well-polished and artistically-directed production of cars can thus be linked to the cultural life of the city. At the same time, not all of the production processes fit into this aspiration for transparency and visibility. This is why some of the production is done elsewhere. The dirtier and noisier activities take place in other factories. Some of the production also occurs in the basement of The Transparent Factory, although as a visitor there’s no access to these parts of the factory. The banished manual production is, however, described and illustrated by video presentations that can be seen on TV-screens in the factory’s information area – thus keeping parts of the industrial process at a distance. In Dresden, industry is portrayed as something futuristic. What is really on display is a well-polished and cleverly directed industry. In other parts of the world, where industrial processes explicitly highlight cost-effectiveness, rationality and a rapid production flow, it seems as if another future is approaching. Aspects of Industrial Cool, and particularly the aestheticization involved in the rejuvenation of industrial milieus and their symbols, point to industry as something associated with the past. Industrial remnants are carried into the future through new enterprises, such as the BALTIC Art Factory, or through the fashion-based or digital use of industrial images and sounds. There is a nostalgic dimension to this rejuvenation, however, part of it is directed towards the future. When we write and talk about experiencescapes, there is a risk that our thoughts focus too indiscriminately upon the manner in which one can create positive experiences, pleasurable consumption, and increased tourism. A more critical use of the term Industrial Cool can say something about, such things as, the transformation of Malmö’s industrial harbor area. Kockums’ gigantic crane was dismantled to make room for new activities and enterprises of a post-industrial nature. Selective aesthetic rejuvenation could now take place in its 49

Robert Willim stead. Meanwhile, thousands of tons of heavy metal were transported to the other side of the world – to Ulsan in South Korea – to be used in industrial production. What does that say about the rise of Industrial Cool, the role of industry today and how different experiencescapes are shaped? While the aestheticization and culturalization of industrial production is going on in one place, completely different processes are happening in another.

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3

A Theory of Tourism Experiences: The Management of Attention CAN-SENG OOI

The tourism industry is in the business of selling experiences (Li, 2000; Mannell and Iso-Ahola, 1987; Ooi, 2002; Prentice, Witt, and Hamer, 1998; Waitt, 2000). Tourism destinations, attraction operators and other tourism businesses assume that experiences can be managed and packaged, so that tourists will only be offered exciting and memorable experiences (see Christersdotter, Gyimothy in this volume). This assumption, however, seems untenable if we consider three characteristics of tourism experiences. One, experiences arise out of people’s social and cultural backgrounds. The way people frame experiences is embedded in the social order of specific societies and social groups (Abrahams, 1986; Heelas, 1996). For instance, the very term “experience” is a coded word in western and modern culture (Williams, 1976:126—129). Tourists’ different interests and backgrounds lead to diverse interpretations of a single tourist cultural product. How is it possible to offer a single product that will interest and excite all customers? Two, experiences are multi-faceted; they arise from activities and the physical environment, as well as the social meanings embedded in the activities. People have different experiences even if they are doing 51

Can-Seng Ooi the same thing in the same place. For instance, some Danish tourists who have visited Prague see it as a historical city, while others see it as crowded, polluted and touristified (Ooi, Kristensen, and Pedersen, 2004). How would tourists, even if they have the same cultural background, notice and appreciate the product in the same way? Three, experiences are existential. They are embodied in people in that they are personally felt and can only be expressed. People’s moods and personal feelings of the moment affect their experiences. But how can the internal psychological and cognitive functions of tourists be managed, so that the tourism product induces only pleasurable experiences? Even if tourists say that they enjoy themselves, it does not necessarily mean that they all have the same exciting and memorable experiences. Some researchers argue that “[t]ourists, even if they all look the same, experience their vacations […] in different ways” (Lengkeek, 2001:174). Tourists constitute a diverse and unmanageable group of consumers and their behavior is not easily predictable. They interpret and experience tourism products in ways that please them, regardless of the “intended” manner in which the products are supposed to be experienced. Nevertheless, tourism businesses and authorities, as well as researchers, are constantly seeking ways to improve tourism products and thus offer memorable experiences to all. How do experiences converge around specific tourism products? This chapter aims to throw some light on the issue through an attention structure framework. In order to do this, I will therefore begin by discussing the manner in which various tourism researchers, using different approaches, attempt to explain how tourism experiences emerge. Their approaches vary; some approaches assume that most tourists will respond similarly to a product, and other approaches concentrate on an individual’s personal interpretation of the product and the diversity of interpretations among tourists. What underlies these approaches, this chapter argues, is that experiences emerge dynamically through the flow of tourists’ attention. To date, attention structure has largely been ignored in tourism experience studies. Such a framework places the market for experiences in the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck, 2001). This article thus examines how human experiences are generated, crafted and manufactured through the shift of tourists’ attention. The following sections will present the basis for an attention structure framework, and explain how competition for tourists’ attention can arise. Tourism mediators play a significant role in managing this competition and crafting tourism experiences. This chapter will also subsequently discuss various tourism experience product strategies based on the attention structure 52

A Theory of Tourism Experiences framework. Contrasting illustrations are used to demonstrate how the shifting of attention shapes experiences. However, these illustrations are not used with the intention of making generalizations, but to show the myriad of possibilities in framing and packing tourism experiences.

The Attention Structure Framework in Context The complex nature of understanding and analyzing tourism experiences is widely acknowledged in the literature (Lee and Shafer, 2002; Prentice, 2001). There are at least six different approaches to studying and understanding tourism experiences, each offering different angles and perspectives. To bring about a holistic and coherent understanding of tourism experiences, issues raised in these different streams of research must be addressed. The attention structure framework provides a way of doing this. In the first approach, researchers concentrate on the cognitive psychology of tourism experiences (Lee and Shafer, 2002; Mannell and Iso-Ahola, 1987; McIntosh and Prentice, 1999; Stamboulis and Skayannis, 2003). Such an approach deals with tourists’ perceptions and how these affect their experiences (Waitt, 2000; Waller and Lea, 1999). Tourists’ preconceived ideas and expectations are shown to affect how they consume, evaluate and experience the product. In the second approach, researchers argue that tourism activities enable tourists to gain experiences that are regarded as personally beneficial. Some of the benefits of participating in tourism activities include improving one’s psychological mood and well-being, asserting self-identity and learning about other places and cultures (Lee and Shafer, 2002; Prentice, Witt, and Hamer, 1998a). Pursuing tourism experiences is thus a means to an end. The third approach concentrates on the state of mind, and the depth of experiential engagement (Ellis, Morris and Voelkl, 1994). Such studies concentrate on “optimal experiences”, which include the types of mental states that people experience – often described as special, meaningful or out-of-the-ordinary (Walker, Hull and Roggenbuck, 1998). These experiences are not only engaging, but are also emotionally intense. People may “feel a sense of transcendence, as if the boundaries of the self had been expanded” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993:xiv). Tourists may feel that they are intellectually challenged, become deeply attentive or lose their sense of time when they have optimal experiences (Ellis et al., 1994; Walker et al., 1998). Not all tourism experiences are optimal, however. The phenomenological approach marks the fourth stream of tourism experience research. It attempts to capture a range of personal 53

Can-Seng Ooi experiences that are not only intense and optimal (Cohen, 1979; Lengkeek, 2001; Li, 2000). For instance, Cohen (1979) presents a five mode experience typology based on different styles of consumption, including tourists’ inclination towards the restoration of their own personal well-being, their escape from boredom, their search for aesthetic meaning and their quest for alternative lifestyles. Li (2000) proposes an empirical phenomenological approach to understanding tourism experiences by gathering rich, reflexive and intimate information. Such an approach attempts to describe the immediacy of personal experiences. In the fifth approach, tourism experiences are slotted into the gap between locals and tourists, and attention is paid to the relationship between them. Urry (1990) highlights the fact that tourists experience a place by noticing things that are different from their daily life. Tourists also lack the local knowledge to experience the destination in the same way as residents, which means that their experiences become reflections of their own backgrounds. As a result of this gap, researchers, such as Hannabuss (1999), claim that while tourism experiences may be enriching, tourists can only approximate local cultural life, which means that their access to local experiences is limited. Finally, the sixth approach concerns staging experiences (Pine and Gilmore, 1999). Unlike the other approaches that concentrate on personal interpretations and a personal relationship with the product, this staging approach uses the dramaturgical metaphor to argue that engaging experiences depend on the degree that people interact with the product. The right environment, props and cues will make people interact with the product at a deeper level, and these people thus feel that the product has been personalized to suit them. Their experiences will then be more satisfying. These approaches focus on how people react to the products offered and/or their personal construction of the product. Such approaches inform us about various aspects of the tourist-tourism product relationship. The above explanations become even more complete if they factor in the active role played by tourism mediators. Tourism mediators – tourism operators, tourism promotional authorities, tourism agencies, tour guides, travel reviewers, guidebooks, tourism attraction information leaflets and advertisements, friendly locals, helpful friends and relatives, etc – inadvertently manage the tourism experience and direct tourists’ attention. As O’Dell highlights in this volume, experiences are situated in specific time and space. However, time and space are socially and culturally interpreted (see Gyimothy, O’Dell, Willim in this volume). Depending on people’s various 54

A Theory of Tourism Experiences backgrounds, they may pay attention to different things even if they are at the same place at the same time. Mediators help direct tourists’ attention and focus not only their gazes, but also their interpretations of tourism sights and sites. Besides constructing and packaging tourism products, tourism mediators give advice, tell tourists what to notice and how to consume various tourism products. These mediators offer diverse information and suggest tips for more comfortable and richer tourism experiences (Belk, 1997; Cohen, 1985; Ooi, 2002). As will be elaborated later, they play a significant role in tourism because tourists need their help. By acknowledging the role of tourism mediators, it is then possible to discuss the convergence of experiences among a seemingly unmanageable group of consumers. Tourism mediators craft tourism experiences by controlling and directing tourists’ attention, although some mediators cooperate with each other to secure the tourists’ attention, while others compete. As I will explain in the next section, pull and push factors are included in this competition for our attention – similar to what Ek frames as “warfare” in the next chapter. Tourism mediators play a central role in drawing our attention to certain things and ignoring others. I will explain more after introducing the basic characteristics of human attention structure.

Attention and Experience As human beings, we do not and cannot notice everything around us at the same time. Our physiological make up means that we can only focus on one thing at any given moment. It is how we manage our immediate environment, as we have to single out what is relevant and significant. We can easily be overwhelmed by information, observations and experiences in our daily life. For example, we become stressed when we have to pay attention to a lot of tasks at the same time. This is partly because we can only deal with one thing at a time, and it is stressful when we have to switch our attention between different things too quickly. Our ability to pay attention to only one thing at any given moment is one of four human attention characteristics that will be discussed here. One example of this is a commonly reproduced image which, when you view it from one perspective, looks like a duck’s head. However, take a moment and shift your perspective, and the duck suddenly seems to become a rabbit facing the opposite direction. Where the duck’s beak once existed, one now sees the ears of a rabbit (another classic example of this is a dark square which at first sight seems to contain the image of a white vase that is centered in the square, but when looked at a second time, the white vase can become the empty 55

Can-Seng Ooi room between two human heads – in silhouette – facing one another). Most of us will be able to see both pictures after a while, but we can only see one of them at a time. And while we may flip our visual attention between the duck and the rabbit, we can still only see one of them at any one fleeting moment. This is a neuro-physiological process found in primates and other animals (Davenport and Beck, 2001). The second characteristic of human attention is that our behavior and experience is affected when our attention shifts (Benjamin, 1987; Polanyi, 1962). Davenport and Beck define attention as “focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act” (2001:20). Our immediate experience depends on what we pay attention to at any given moment, because it is then we are explicitly aware of the situation. For example, people attempt to manage stressful emotions through attention shifts – focusing on other things that are less stressful (Heelas, 1996:173). In assuming an attention framework, Urry (1990) argues that the visual is one of the most important, though not the only, aspect of tourism experiences; tourists’ attention is caught visually, and visual sights are able to engage tourists’ attention and shape their experiences. Many researchers, such as Graburn and Barthel-Bouchier (2001), Moscardo (1996), Prentice (2001), Perkins and Thorns (2001), extend the understanding of tourism experiences beyond the visual gaze. There are other ways to attract and hold tourists’ attention, such as through stimulating their five senses, challenging them intellectually (Moscardo, 1996), making use of their imagination (Lengkeek, 2001; McIntosh and Prentice, 1999b; Ooi, 2002) and tapping into their senses of nostalgia (Rojek, 1997). With the control of attention, strong emotional experiences can be invoked. The third and related characteristic of human attention is its scarcity. It is scarce because one can only focus on one thing at a time (Benjamin, 1987; Davenport and Beck, 2001; Henderson, 1999; Polanyi, 1962). As mentioned before, a rapid shifting of attention between different focal points can be stressful, as it means that we have to do many different things within a short period of time. To Davenport and Beck (2001), the scarcity of attention leads to competition in the “attention economy”, in which businesses compete with each other to catch and hold people’s limited attention. People will not and cannot pay attention to everything, so businesses advertise their products and compete with other advertisers to grab people’s attention, so that potential customers become aware of, and eventually, buy their products. 56

A Theory of Tourism Experiences The fourth characteristic of attention structure is that there are many different reasons why we pay attention to one thing. As a heuristic, and in taking the tourist as the starting point, there are complementary internal-push and external-pull factors in the competition for attention. These factors are interrelated and are dialogic. Internal-push factors refer to a person’s motivation for paying particular attention to certain details to achieve a goal or to enhance and receive pleasure. People are motivated to spend more time in pleasurable situations. On the other hand, people also pay particular attention to things and details to avoid a negative and uncomfortable situation, or to avoid an undesirable consequence. By the same measure, external-pull factors refer to objects in the surroundings and conditions of the environment that attract our attention, such as a loud noise, an unusually huge monument or dirty streets. All these can either please or offend us. Due to our individual psychological and cognitive differences, as well as our life circumstances, we may pay attention to things that other people are less interested in, or to the same thing but for different reasons. Even when we pay attention to the same thing we may also interpret the situation differently. For instance, many tourists avoid dangerous places, although some adventure-seeking people intentionally travel close to dangerous destinations as “danger-zone tourists” for the thrills (Adams, 2001). To summarize the four interrelated characteristics of attention structures: one, we can only pay attention to one thing at any one moment in time; two, attention shifts affect our experiences; three, attention is scarce; four, people pay attention to different things and there are different reasons as to why they pay attention to the same thing. In the tourism experience business, mediators help to direct the attention of their customers. These mediators strive to make tourists pay attention to some things and not to others. This is often necessary and inevitable because tourists visit a place for a relatively short period of time, they lack local knowledge and they are on holiday (Ooi, 2002). Mediators direct tourists towards certain products and interpretations of products. For tourists lacking information and knowledge of local subtleties, tourism mediators offer a shortcut for them to consume a place. Tourists are dependent on mediators in order to be able to function in and enjoy a destination. Belk (1997) calls tourism mediators “priests” because they assist in the rituals of travel and cultural consumption. With the assistance of sacred texts (tourist information guides), they welcome tourists as members of their congregation, and teach them reverence for significant sites and sights and the acquisition of relics, gifts and souvenirs (Belk, 1997). Similarly, Cohen (1985) calls tour guides “cultural brokers”. These 57

Can-Seng Ooi intermediaries select sights and provide information and interpretations to tourists. Their mediation may lean towards the guide’s own professional training or personal preferences (Cohen, 1985; Ooi, 2002).

Attractions and Distractions A tourism product is more likely to be appreciated in diverse ways if mediators do not direct tourists towards limited or specific ways of appreciation and enjoyment. In their task of generating tourism experiences, mediators have to deal with the scarcity of human attention as well as various sources of distractions. I will now discuss the four primary arenas within which tourism mediators have to compete for tourists’ attention: between different products, the social cultural contexts in which the product is embedded, the physical environment in which the product is situated and tourist preconceptions of the tourism product. Tourism mediators have to manage tourists’ attention in all these competitive arenas. But distractions do not necessarily result in unpleasant experiences. Allowing room for distractions, as will be explained later, can also generate interesting and exciting experiences. The mediation of experiences does not, however, mean the absolute control of tourists’ attention, but a balance of the need for tourists to notice and interpret tourism products in desirable ways, while at the same time allowing them to feel engaged in making choices, bridging the foreign/local gap and overcoming difficulties. Experiencescaping: the seduction of other tourism products Firstly, different tourism products compete for the attention of tourists and tourists-to-be. Competition for tourists’ attention exists between all types of tourism products and at all levels, such as between and within cities, villages, museums, gardens, shopping areas, theme parks, ethnic enclaves, scenic sites, etc. Tourism sites and attractions demand tourists’ immediate time and energy as they are only visiting for a short period of time. Even within a museum, the exhibits may compete with each other. For example, many visitors to the Louvre Museum in Paris are overwhelmed by the variety and number of collections, which means that they often seek out special items, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, because they have already heard about the famous painting. Some tourism products may not only compete with each other, but also send out contradicting or conflicting messages. For instance, the 58

A Theory of Tourism Experiences trendy and cultural attractions of Copenhagen compete for space with advertisements about escort and massage services in the official tourist guide, Copenhagen This Week – something which has led to complaints. On the other hand, competition between tourism products and attractions can generate an exciting atmosphere within a destination. Many cities are marketed as places that overwhelm tourists with choice. Such destinations are attractive precisely because there are many things for tourists to do. The quick shift of attention that occurs when tourists are bombarded with advertisements telling them that they can do a multitude of things, gives the impression that something exciting will always be happening. New York, London, Berlin, Shanghai and Singapore are examples of places that attempt to sell themselves as cities that will overwhelm visitors; they want to offer choices to tourists and thus appeal to more people. Consequently, many tourism destinations use the “supermarket” approach of selling themselves. Tourists can themselves pick and mix the products and construct their own itinerary. The array of tourism products competing with each other in a destination can lead to both excitement and confusion – and such feelings may overlap. While a city is exciting, it also generates a sense of bewilderment (e.g. how does one make sense of the city? How does one navigate through the place?). In order to offer some form of structure to guide tourists, many tourism places are branding themselves. The brand accentuates certain products and interprets the selected products through certain themed brand values and stories (see Morgan, Pritchard and Pride, 2004; Ooi, 2004). These brands give a structure to the diversity of products, and offer a framework for tourists to build their myriad of tourism experiences in the place. For example, while Slovakia offers a range of products – modern museums, spas, mountains, traditional cultures, rock concerts, etc. – it also positions itself as “The Green Heart of Europe” (Ooi et al., 2004). This brand accentuates the beautiful natural landscape, the Slovak folk culture and the comfort of a pristine environment. It also points to the geographical position of Slovakia as being in the center of an expanding European Union. The branding ignores its socialist past, economic problems and industrial pollution, and does not put much emphasis on its more modern manifestations, but instead directs tourists towards an understanding of Slovakia according to the brand story. In the context of competing tourism products, the brand acts as a mediating tool, singling out the more “significant” ones.

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Can-Seng Ooi Experiencescaping: noticing the social embeddedness of tourism Secondly, a tourism product is embedded in a number of social contexts, and these social contexts may also attract the attention of tourists. These contexts refer to the social, cultural, political and economic underpinning of the product. For example, researchers who are concerned with the touristification of society, highlight the clash of economic and cultural social interests in the host society. Many tourism cultural products, for example, are lived cultures in a local society but are also commodified for tourism consumption; the commercialization of culture for tourism is frequently frowned upon by locals, and would also disappoint many tourists. Many tourism products, especially cultural ones, attempt to marginalize, disguise and overshadow the commercial and touristic contexts embedded in the products (Garrod and Fyall, 2000; Ooi, 2002; van der Borg, Costa and Gotti, 1996). Some tourism products enable tourists to go local, thus imparting the idea that they are not engaging in commercial tourism. For instance, tourists can have a meal with a local family (instead of in a restaurant), or visit a popular local bazaar (rather than a tourist shopping area). The Lonely Planet guidebooks are an example of how some tourism mediators give instructions to tourists, so that they can go “behind the scenes” (MacCannell, 1976:91-107). Ironically, tourists, by their very presence, introduce the tourism aspects of a place, and for authenticity-seeking tourists, this ends up being something they wish to avoid. On the other hand, the “clash” of social contexts, such as business and culture and the old and the modern, may also generate interesting tourism experiences. For example, Ribe is the oldest town in Denmark and the local tourism authorities promote Ribe Cathedral. Visitors to Ribe and the cathedral are told that the church was originally built in the 12th century. However, what makes Ribe Cathedral special is its chancel. It was decorated by the internationally renowned Danish modern painter, Carl-Henning Pedersen, in 1987. Pedersen’s colorful and stunning, but highly abstract and ambiguous pictures, depicting Bible stories and Christian religious figures, invite strong reactions from both residents and visitors alike (Kværno, 2002). Whether people like the church or not, Pedersen’s contributions have made the church into something very unique. His works jolt people because they are unexpected in the setting of an historical church. For visitors, even though their sense of awe or disgust may have nothing directly to do with religion, the heritage site is able to create strong emotional reactions. The tourism authorities thus promote Ribe Cathedral as an icon of the ancient Viking town, knowing that the contrast of modern paintings will generate strong experiences among its visitors. 60

A Theory of Tourism Experiences Locals and tourists have different interests. For example, tourists want to enjoy themselves on the cheap, whereas locals want to make money from tourists. Many tourists become suspicious when they focus their attention on the commercialism of their tourism activities. However, their experiences may also become more meaningful if they look further behind the commercial screen. For instance, the Lonely Planet guide for the USA is helpful in this process: ‘Have a Nice Day’ For many visitors, this phrase epitomizes the superficiality of much social interaction in the USA. Especially in the service industries, niceness is a prerequisite, and staff are expected, even required to mouth vacuous corporate platitudes. Though this is sometimes grating for the visitor, it’s often worse for the workers, who may have to answer every call with words ‘Crescent Hotel, the legend continues…’ (Lonely Planet, 2002: 77). Similarly, drawing attention to differences between locals and tourists were reflected in the many conversations I had with fellow backpackers when I traveled around Southeast Asia. One of the issues we discussed concerned local poverty and the way we, as relatively wealthy tourists/travelers, gaze at and treat the host society. For instance, we boast about how we bargain with local shopkeepers, or feel annoyed by children wanting to polish our shoes for a nominal fee. To what extent are we helping the local economy? In an attempt to go native, are we merely treating the host society as just another adventure theme park? By thinking about the influence of tourism activities in the host society rather than just the tourism activities themselves – e.g. how tourists behave as wealthier people in an economically less-developed environment, how local residents pander to tourists’ whims and fancies – tourism experiences become more circumspect. Experiencescaping: the lure of the physical environment Thirdly, the physical environment and conditions surrounding the product may detract attention from the promoted tourism product. All our bodily senses are capable of alerting our minds to certain items and thoughts. The circumstances and environment surrounding the product may provide stimuli that are beyond the control of tourism product producers. Such stimuli distract, that is, shift people’s attention away from the tourism product proper. For instance, wet and windy

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Can-Seng Ooi conditions will distract walking tourists from the splendors of a destination. As discussed earlier, people do not only pay attention to attractive stimuli, they also pay attention to stimuli that bring about bodily discomfort and psychological distress (Prentice, 2001:33-52). For tourists coming from quieter places, New York is experienced as busy and noisy. Despite signs stating that motorists will be fined for unnecessary use of their horns, there is very little evidence that this rule is followed. While the noise of the traffic makes New York exciting, it is also annoying to many tourists who are unused to such hustle and bustle. Today, visual congruities, seamless movements and conducive atmospheres are constructed to enable visitors to enjoy an attraction’s contents without being distracted by the physical environment. The attention given to managing the physical environment contributes to the paradox of authentic tourism experiences. To many tourists seeking the authentic experience, this may not mean forgoing comfort and convenience. Tourists prefer, for instance, to enjoy a destination without encountering rude local behavior and bad weather conditions. The role that the physical environment plays in structuring tourists’ attention can also work in other ways. For example, Handler and Gable (Handler and Gable, 1997) examine Colonial Williamsburg, an outdoor history museum in the USA. Colonial Williamsburg attempts to be authentic; the houses are reconstructed according to the spirit of the colonial era, and attendants are in costumes. Handler and Gable observe that the littered but still clean streets and polite attendants do not allow the museum to approximate the true spirit of the period it represents. Handler and Gable state: Colonial Williamsburg was perhaps a dirtier and more democratic place than it had once been. Certainly, it enjoyed calling attention to those facets of itself in ways it had never done in the past. But despite the manure that signaled dramatic “change” in comparison with the earlier clean streets, Colonial Williamsburg, it seemed to us, was still a Republican Disneyland (Handler and Gable, 1997:220). The distracting physical environment can also be re-packaged as a tourism product. For instance, the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi in Vietnam has become very heavy over the years. There is also very little respect for traffic rules, as motorists, cyclists and pedestrians negotiate their way through the streets. I spoke to tourists who are very upset about the situation. On the other hand, some tourists see it as a

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A Theory of Tourism Experiences truly unique and authentic experience. The Lonely Planet guidebook for Vietnam helps tourists frame the situation in a more light-hearted way: Most Vietnamese cross the street slowly – very slowly – giving the motorbike drivers sufficient time to judge their position so they can pass on either side of you. They won’t stop or even slow down, but they will try to avoid hitting you. Just don’t make any sudden moves. Good luck (Lonely Planet, 2003: 159). The guide book also cites tourist Ron Settle’s experience, “Crossing the street in Saigon is an art. Move slowly and deliberately, never be indecisive or hesitant, unless you see a bus coming, then the above does not apply … RUN” (Lonely Planet, 2003: 159)! Experiencescaping: searching for the expected Fourthly, what a product tries to offer may be ignored because tourists have their own expectations and preconceptions. Tourists judge tourism products through their own observations and imaginations. Waller and Lea (1999) find that perception of authenticity is related to tourists’ preconceived images; the authenticity of the place is judged by tourists’ stereotypes of the destination. Similarly, McIntosh and Prentice’s (1999) study of visitors to three English heritage sites shows that tourists reaffirm their perception of authenticity when they consume tourism cultural products. Tourists notice what they expect and what they already know. It is a challenge to get tourists to pay attention to things that they have imagined wrongly. Viking museums in Scandinavia face the problem of re-educating visitors that Vikings did not wear horns on their helmets. However, tourists recognize Vikings because of the horns, and souvenir shops sell Viking figures with the horns. This causes difficulty for places such as the Ribe Viking Museum in Denmark, which has attempted to sell more accurately portrayed Viking figures, only to find out that those souvenirs are less attractive to tourists. Tourist demands may also lead to an authority transforming a destination. For instance, Singapore has revived its ethnic enclaves, including Chinatown and Little India, because tourists expect Singapore to be more oriental (Ooi, 2002). While some people argue that such blatant touristification of society is unacceptable, others question the usefulness of maintaining the culture-business dichotomy. Tourists are themselves attracted to and seek out what they expect. So, instead of competing against what tourists expect, tourism mediators 63

Can-Seng Ooi create attractions based on what tourists want to notice; tourist satisfaction becomes a motivation for some tourism mediators to transform the host society (see also Ek in this volume on the engineering of places). In the four arenas of attention competition, tourism experience emerges as an important dynamic. In order to succeed, tourism mediators must capture and direct people’s attention. But there are many potential distractions – conditions in the physical environment, the clash of social and economic contexts, the lure of other tourism products and people’s preconceptions. The table on the next page summarizes the various issues discussed above, and offers some strategies to sculpt the tourism experience product.

Lessons for the Tourism Industry The various approaches to studying tourism experiences, as mentioned in the second section, concentrate on tourists’ knowledge and their psychology. As the discussion above demonstrates, these approaches are important because tourists’ expectations, preconceptions and preferences will affect what tourists notice and how they interpret the product. In general, and to varying degrees, these approaches ignore the social context of tourism consumption, the responses to the physical environment and the competition between products. The attention structure framework in this article attempts to acknowledge the importance of tourists’ cognition and psychological make-up. It also acknowledges the existential nature of experiences and shows how experiences may diverge from what is planned because of different types of distractions. These distractions are not necessarily disruptive, but can be neutralized, packaged into the product or made into attractions themselves. What is considered an attraction or a distraction is negotiated, depending on how the element is framed and interpreted by tourists and tourism mediators.

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A Theory of Tourism Experiences Table 3:1 Summary of how attention competition arises during tourism experience consumption and an outline of strategies used to control tourists’ attention.

Competition between cultural products

Environment and amenities: Minimize psychological and physical distractions

Contexts: skepticism arising from tourism motive in activities

Preconceptions: Cognitive distractions and expectations

Tourists’ potential distractions • Tourists lack awareness of tourism products • Unaware of significance and details of products • Distraction from other products • Concerns with their personal needs: costs, food, accommodation, etc • Fear and insecurity • Environmental distraction: weather, traffic, physical conditions

Attention management strategy Attracting and keeping Appropriating tourists’ attention distractions • Advertising and • Generate marketing to raise excitement through awareness variety of products • Offer information • Combine • Accentuate selected different products into products a broader “supermarket” tourism product

• Commercial and tourism interests embedded in tourism activities • Modern packaging and presentation of historical products • Tourists have preconceived ideas • Tourists have false images • Tourists have unrealistic expectations

• Create a dynamic product by bringing contrasting elements and contexts together (e.g. Ribe Cathedral) • Engage tourists by making them think about their role in the host society

• Transparency about costs, and offering facilities and amenities. • Enhance sense of security, e.g. provide information for emergency help in guide books • Comfortable environment to eliminate or neutralize physical environmental distractions: air conditioned, well-kept environment, amenities and facilities (toilets, etc.) • Offer detailed information to incorporate different contexts into the product • Make tourists go native

• Distracting environment becomes part of the product, to communicate a particular message e.g. authentic adventures (crossing roads in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City)

• Control attention and make them notice things that will correct their misconceptions • Exaggerate selected sensory perceptions to mark desired experience

• Tap into their expectations and enhance the destination and product • Highlight misconceptions and story into the product experience.

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Can-Seng Ooi In the competition for attention, the dialogic negotiation between tourism products and other competing elements can generate interesting tourism experiences. The attention structure framework points to a fluid, dynamic and holistic way of understanding the emergence of experiences. Some practical points can also be highlighted. One, tourism mediators play a vital role in sculpting tourism experiences. They play the role of selecting and accentuating items for tourism consumption. As mentioned earlier, tourists visit a place for only a short period of time, lack local knowledge and are unlikely to invest much time and effort in getting to know a destination in great depth. Tourism mediators offer a shortcut by pointing out sights and sites that are interesting and significant. These mediators also educate tourists about various attractions, and thus sculpt tourism experiences. In essence, tourism mediators help to frame tourism experiences. Two, locally popular products and comfortable environments are not necessarily enough to generate engaging tourism experiences because tourists are subjected to distractions. Some distractions stem from the lack of local knowledge. For instance, appreciation of local art and history is often difficult without local background knowledge. Exhibition catalogues offer a bridge between a foreign tourist and the local exhibit, but reading the catalogues requires time and energy; many tourists do not either have that luxury or the desire to do this. Tourists will inevitably appreciate host cultures on their own terms. Tourism mediators should cater to tourists’ circumstances. The Beamish Museum in England, which offers a number of conserved houses in an open-air environment, allows visitors to appreciate their exhibits in a myriad of different ways. Visitors with local knowledge are able to relate the items to their local history, and those visitors without that knowledge learn not only about local history, but can also touch, play with and use many of the artifacts in the exhibited houses. The past comes alive for visitors. While information is available about the local history, this multi-sensory experience enlivens that history and literally lets them act out the past. Tourists have special needs and are subjected to distractions that differ from those of the locals. Their needs and circumstances must therefore be addressed if they are to have memorable and pleasant tourism experiences. Three, experiences can be invoked through various means – cognitively and through our five senses. Our senses can be stimulated to invoke memories. An example of this is the Ribe Viking Musuem in Denmark, where visitors experience the smell of dried fish as soon as they enter a re-constructed Viking fishing village. Furthermore, in order to invoke the experience to the full, the particular sensory marker 66

A Theory of Tourism Experiences needs to be exaggerated. For instance, a noise should be as loud as it needs to capture the attention of tourists, a sight must be bright and large enough to hold their gaze, and a story must be good enough to move people. Distractions such as pungent smells, filthy streets and loud noises stimulate our senses and draw our attention. Attractions should similarly contain elements that are conspicuous enough to overwhelm our senses, and thus draw our attention towards the product. Four, many tourism products can be split up into moments, or packages of experiences. For example, a traditional art museum allows visitors to walk through one gallery after another, and the appreciation of the exhibits is predominantly visual and cognitive. A mental appreciation of art is exciting, but if works of art are presented in a monotonous way, they may not hold the attention of many visitors. New ways of appreciating art need to be used, such as displaying selected works of art in a living room setting where people can relax and talk, or actors staging a scene from a painting and interacting with visitors. New and creative presentations may, of course, bring resistance from artists and art connoisseurs. But Hudson (1987) points out that an exhibit, such as an old painting or a piece of sculpture, often has an original functional setting such as in a church, a temple or a home, in which the object contributes to a mood of relaxation and contemplation. However, when it becomes an exhibit in a museum, it is planted into a “neutral” and unnatural atmosphere, where it has to compete for attention with many other works of art. In these circumstances, the emotions become anaesthetized, the intellect takes over and museums become “temples of scholarship” (Hudson, 1987:175). It is therefore debatable whether the conventional methods of presenting or framing cultural products reflect the spirit of the products. Regardless, a product is more likely to hold tourists’ attention if it offers a variety of experiential “highs”. Five, ignoring salient distractions in the packaging of a tourism product does not mean that tourists will not be distracted. For example, tourism authorities often ignore bad weather conditions in their promotion, even though tourists will undoubtedly be affected by the awful weather when they arrive. There are a number of ways to handle distractions, and mediators may have to rethink what constitutes a distraction. As already discussed, distractions can be neutralized, eliminated or turned into attractions. Offering shelters or proper equipment for people to move around a destination in bad weather is helpful. Highlighting misconceptions that tourists are likely to have and storying them into the product could generate interesting learning experiences for tourists. For example, many tourists imagine Singapore 67

Can-Seng Ooi to be a strict place, where people are severely punished for spitting and littering in public areas. As if to confirm this, tourists find souvenirs featuring such warning signs, while tour guides often explain that Singapore is not as strict as it is portrayed in the international mass media. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to spell out all the attention structure strategies, the principles behind the dialogic of distractions and attractions require us to rethink traditional genres of tourism products and experiences. How the product is framed and packaged affects whether it constitutes an attraction or distraction. Tourists, with their diverse backgrounds, will notice different things and have their own interpretations. However, if their attention is managed in the desired direction, it then becomes more likely that common and desirable experiences will be generated.

Conclusions Tourism mediators and operators serve the function of managing tourist behavior by offering them an appropriate environment in which to consume their products, relevant information with which to appreciate their products, convenient amenities for tourists to use and friendly services to make them feel welcome. Such mediators facilitate the consumption of tourism products in desired directions. The introduction to this chapter suggests that tourists constitute a diverse and unmanageable group of consumers. Many researchers point out that tourists have different experiences, even when doing the same thing in the same place. But mediators are able to craft tourism behavior because tourists are displaced from their normal social contexts and routines. Under the pressure of time and within the context of enjoying themselves, tourists become dependent on the assistance of tourism mediators. Although tourists will construct their own tourism experiences based on their backgrounds and interests, tourism experiences converge by tourism mediation. Such convergences are likely to take place if potential environmental, contextual and preconceptual distractions are sidelined, appropriated or eliminated. The crafting of tourism experiences entails managing distractions as well as building experiences through controlling tourists’ attention.

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4

Regional Experiencescapes as Geo-economic Ammunition RICHARD EK

European Cross-border Regions, Place Marketing and Geo-economic Warfare At least since the 1980s, the conduct of economic activities in the Western world has been substantially internationalized. It is no longer controversial to argue that the world economy is going or has gone through a global shift. For instance, Peter Dicken (2003) is firmly convinced that technological developments (particularly communication and transport technologies) and the growth of transnational companies have driven the world economy into a new phase of unsurpassed complexity in geographical scale and scope.18 Some scholars have argued that the importance of the local place will – if not 18

Similar conclusions have been made by, among others, Castells (1996) and Held et al. (1999). For pro-globalization writers, such as Ohmae (1996), the claimed globalization of economic life has rendered the nation state more or less powerless. However, Hirst & Thompson (1999) argue that “globalization” is a mirage; a cover that hides the fact that some influential states have increased their control of the world economy. For them, globalization and imperialism are processes that have more similarities than most globalization theorists acknowledge.

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Richard Ek wiped out altogether – be to some degree diminished under the relentless machinations of a forthcoming “global economy” and “global culture” (Featherstone, 1990; O’Brien, 1992). This has proved, however, to be a premature conclusion, and instead a more balanced view on the local-global dialectic has been developed – wearing the label of “glocalization” – which stresses the interdependent interplay between various spatial scales (not only the global and the local) constituted in a nested manner (Swyngedouw, 1992 and 1997; Robertson, 1995). This is particularly relevant in a European perspective. As one of the three dominating macro-regions in the world economy, Europe is greatly influenced by changes on a global scale. At the same time, the importance of the local level (place-specific economic and cultural characteristics as a source of competitiveness) has been manifested (Asheim, 1999; Malecki 2000). In addition, the increased and deepened integration of the European Union has had a major impact on political and economical decision-making conducted at other spatial levels (Jensen and Richardson, 2004). Finally, and particularly within the EU, the importance of the regional level has increased, both politically and economically. First of all, there has been an articulated ambition to create sub-national regions in order to fulfill (politically envisaged) functional needs, implement institutional restructuring and make democratic mobilization possible (Murphy, 1993; Keating, 1997; MacLeod, 1999 and 2001; Paasi, 2002). Secondly, the importance of the geographical proximity of institutional resources for economic competitiveness has been highlighted (Morgan, 1997; Maskell et al., 1998; Maskell and Malmberg, 1999, see also Amin, 1999; Amin and Thrift, 1999; Asheim and Isaksen, 2002). Globalization notwithstanding, the (primarily urban) region has become a central relational asset for distilling learning-based competitive advantage (Storper, 1995 and 1997; Asheim, 1997; Cooke and Morgan, 1998; for a critique, see Hudson, 1999; MacKinnon, Cumbers and Chapman, 2002), sometimes manifested as “new industrial spaces” (Scott, 1988 and 1998). This already complex picture of European space is further complicated by the appearance of cross-border regions, sometimes referred to as “Euro-regions”, “a more or less institutionalized collaboration between contiguous sub-national authorities across national borders” (Perkmann, 2002: 104, original in italics; MacLeod, 1999; Brenner, 2000). In order to enhance European competitiveness towards other economic macro-regions, such as NAFTA and 70

Regional Experiencescapes as Geo-economic Ammunition ASEAN/AFTA,19 EU structural policy took a decidedly strategic turn in the early 1990s. Numerous programs and initiatives were launched to encourage region-building across borders and promote transnational co-operation. The introduction of INTERREG has mainly had an impact on the developmental trajectory of most cross-border cooperation initiatives (Perkman, 1999 and 2003; Scott, 2002), including the Øresund Region (see below). This construction of new geographical scales20 and the loosening of national borders has initiated an intense competition among actors concerning the question of which scale level21 will ultimately become the new anchorage point in European political and economic life. Consensus has not yet been reached, and no scale level has yet won as dominant a position as that held by the nation state during the Fordist Era. The number of scales and scale-connected horizons of action is immense, but few of them will become institutionalized (Jessop, 2002). European regions, therefore, are not only competing economically with each other and with other regions and cities in the world economy, but also need to take strategic action in order to secure the institutional future of the regional level. The practice of developing and marketing regions therefore fulfils (at least) two functions. The first is the traditional one of attracting presumptive inhabitants, visitors/tourists and mobile international capital. The second is to manifest the regional level as a logical, or even “natural”, scale level for business, investments and visitors/tourists, etc. This second function is especially crucial for cross-border regions, since they need to challenge the antiquated and institutionalized spatial idea of sovereign territorial states screened off from each other by political borders.22 19

NAFTA, the North America Free Trade Agreement came into force in 1994, but can be traced back to the 1980s. ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations was established in 1967, AFTA, the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement came into being in 1992. 20 The concept of scale is often used in two ways. Firstly, scale can refer to the spatial scope, reach or extent of particular processes and/or horizons of actions. Secondly, scale can refer to specific delimited spaces (local, regional, national, global, etc.) (Perkmann and Sum, 2002). Here the term refers to the latter. 21 Both definitions of scale mentioned in the above footnote are implicated here. 22 However, the advocates of cross-border regions in Europe and North America (Perkmann and Sum, 2002) do not only have to challenge the spatial ontology of the territorial state per se. Since the institutionalization of the territorial state has been so successful, the state has become a container for societies and social life (Taylor, 1993; Agnew and Corbridge, 1995). Because of that, the political border between, say Sweden and Denmark, is actually more of a bureaucratic, economic

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Richard Ek The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how the construction of “regional experiencescapes”, are not only a strategy intended to attract visitors/tourists (a phenomena that will be described here in terms of “Place Wars”), but also a geo-economic weapon in an ongoing “spatial play” over the future of European functional space. Regional experiencescapes have been used in at least two wars (besides “Place Wars”) as “geo-economic ammunition”: in “Scale Wars” and “Sim Wars”. Acting as a kind of “temporary war correspondent”, I will therefore forward snapshots from these two wars as they take place in the Øresund Region,23 in order to illustrate tourism’s “Place Wars, “Scale Wars” and “Sim Wars” in general terms. The next section will deal with a few important concepts in this discussion/war reportage (”geo-economic warfare”, ”spatial play” and ”regional experiencescapes”). An overview of the attempts to institutionalize the Øresund Region is then followed by an exposure of ”Scale Wars” and ”Sim Wars” in sections four and five respectively. To conclude, a discussion is conducted about the creation of exclusive and simultaneous experiencescapes as an excluding practice. As in any war, there are “casualties”. The question I would like to raise here is, who are the “casualties” in these “Place Wars”, “Scale Wars” and “Sim Wars”?

and social barrier than, in a strict sense, the political one (“high politics”). According to the regional promoters, these kinds of barriers hinder integration. For instance, the two national social security systems are different and not harmonized to each other. 23 The frequent use of war metaphors in this chapter is in line with the practice of (place) marketing itself. According to Jon Goss (1995a and 1995b) the marketing discourse is replete with military (and very often spatial) metaphors such as “market mapping”, “target marketing”, “marketing terrain”, “market position” and “business intelligence”, systematically structured by “strategy” as a “structural metaphor” (Lakoff and Johnston, 1980:61). Using metaphors – especially spatial metaphors – as a semantic tool should, however, be done with caution, since they tend to assume that space is homogeneous and synonymous to distance (space as an absolute category, the traditional view of space as described by Descartes, Newton and Kant) (Pratt, 1992; Smith and Katz, 1993; Hillis, 1999). However, since the use of metaphors is inevitable because they are an integrated part of language, an analysis of the dominant metaphors in a discourse such as place marketing is necessary. There are plenty of semantic parallels between place marketing and the conduct and preparation of warfare, and this is something that could be investigated further.

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Regional Experiencescapes as Geo-economic Ammunition

Geo-economic Warfare, Spatial Play and Regional Experiencescapes Edward N. Luttwak coined the term ”Geo-economics” in an article in “The National Interest” back in 1990 (Luttwak, 1990; 1993a; 1993b and 1999). Like several other think-tank connected security intellectuals in the U.S. at that time (Fukuyama, 1989 and 1992; Huntington, 1993), Luttwak tried to foresee what might characterize world politics and the world economy after the end of the Cold War. He argued that geopolitical practices would diminish in importance and geo-economic practices would increase in magnitude. World politics, he argued, was about to be ruled by a new grammar, the grammar of commerce. Vital national economic interests would become more important to defense than traditional political ones, and economic priorities would influence a state’s foreign policies to a larger degree. For instance, a patent on technical innovations would become more important than maintaining an extensive diplomacy (Luttwak, 1990). Even if Luttwak’s thesis is flawed,24 it is a useful starting point. For Matthew Sparke, “geo-economics” becomes the overarching label for those practices and processes that, in different ways, challenge the supremacy of the nation state. The geo-economic discourse has been influential in different cross-border regional projects, as geo-economic practice aims at putting the cross-border region in an advantageous position in order to promote specific regional interests (Sparke, 1998 and 2002; Sparke and Lawson, 2003).25 But the increased rivalry and competition between regions – discursively framed within a geo-economic logic or grammar – is not only a tug-of-war for the attraction of wealthy and well-educated citizens, tourists, business visitors, investments and corporeal establishments, but is also a discursive struggle over the future organization of political and economic space in Europe. It is an attempt to materialize geographical visions about how Europe should be constituted and governed, or a “spatial play” to use the structuralist and semiotic Louis Marin’s concept (Marin, 1984 and 1993). 24

O’Tuathail (1998:107-109) argues that Luttwak’s thesis is flawed in its conceptualization of the geopolitics to geo-economics transition. Cold War geopolitics was also about geo-economics (not least through the economic interests of the military-industrial complex in the USA). Geopolitical conflicts still take place today, as “the end of the Cold War did not mark the end of geopolitics per se, merely the end of Cold War geopolitics” (O’Tuathail, 1998:108; see also O’Tuathail, 1996: 231-240). 25 Sparke’s case study concerns the region of Cascadia, with Vancouver and Seattle as urban centers.

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Richard Ek Marin discusses Thomas More’s “Utopia” as a “spatial play”, a future-oriented modeling of space and simultaneously an identityforming act/performance/behavior. For More, utopia is “…a category of social idealization dependent upon detailed organizational, legislative, administrative and educational imagination” (Davis, 1984:10). Utopist visions present, at least implicitly, a general picture of the future and, of society as a whole. In Marin’s semiotic reading of “Utopia”, its etymological roots are found in the Greek ou-topia and eu-topia (“no place” and “a good place”, respectively) (Marin, 1984:xv). A discursive space unfolds between these two meanings, developed from the tension or deferral of meaning within the concept of Utopia.26 This discursive space is inhabited by the “Neutral”, an underdetermined “blank element” that allows for the possibility of both stasis and change (Hetherington and Lee, 2000). Examples of blank figures include the joker in a game of cards, the number 0 in mathematics and the “/” in dualistic accounts in social theory (nature/culture etc.). Due to its ambiguous nature, the blank figure allows a “switching” between stasis and change, order and disorder and presence and absence. In the spatial play of the future of Europe, the Neutral expresses a discursive space of possible change within a present order – the order of the territorial state. In this discursive space, the visions of an economically resourceful Europe of regions, as eu-topia (a “good place” according to the advocates of the discourse “Europe of regions”) are visualized in policy plans, strategic planning documents, White Papers etc., as ou-topia (as physically non-existent mental projections), that is, as a “no place”.27 Situated between eu-topia and ou-topia, the Neutral is a state of passage, a discursive space of a possible alternate ordering that has not yet been decided or institutionalized. In this “European Neutral”, the previously mentioned intense competition concerning the spatial scale that should predominate, takes place. The Neutral, or discursive space, is always situated in time and space, and in the case of More, in the period of transition between Feudalism and modern Capitalism. The “European 26

The desire for a better world, or utopia (eu-topia), is a challenge to the present order of the world, but a challenge that only exists as ou-topia, an imaginary nonplace (Hetherington, 1998:133). 27 And also as abstract representations of space. Lefebvre (1991:99) labels architects, urbanists and planners as “doctors of space”, professions with the selfclaimed competence to diagnose a city’s problems and through visions, plans and strategic documents (that is representations of space) “cure them” of different “diseases” (social unrest, sanitation problems, housing deficiencies, unemployment etc.).

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Regional Experiencescapes as Geo-economic Ammunition Neutral” occurs in the period of transition between “high industrial modernity” and post-industrial hypermodernity” (Pred, 1995). The vision of a Europe of Regions is a space-ideological critique of the current political order (of the supremacy of the territorial state), itself ideologically linked to points of spatial and social change (Hetherington, 1997:66)28 and driven forward by different agents organized as regional regimes,29 or the generals of “regional forces” in geo-economic warfare. In different ways, these European regional regimes try to represent the region as a natural geographical order or entity. The region is marketed and branded for strategic target groups like tourists, corporate leaders, investors etc., either as something a priori, or as something quite new, but still “logical” (for instance a cross-border region with “outstanding possibilities”) from a market or commercial point of view. A region’s supply of business and pleasure/leisure possibilities, in the marketing of the region, is conceptualized as a unity, a regional experiencescape, with specific places of attraction that ought to be “invaded” by tourists and other visitors (theme-parks, spectacular shopping-malls or other attractions).

The Øresund Region As early as the 19th Century, plans were drafted for a physical connection over the Sound between Denmark and the south of Sweden (Ek and Hallin, 1996; Idvall, 1997; 1999 and 2000; Boye, 1999. However, the idea and vision of an integrated region first appeared in the late 1950s. In 1952, the Nordic Council was established in order to work towards further integration between the Nordic countries. The council recommended a physical link over Øresund, and the Swedish and the Danish governments consequently initiated several joint studies into the matter. At the same time, several local and regional actors in the Øresund region started to work for the realization of a fixed connection among other local actors, such as the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö in the south of the region, the city of Helsingborg in the north, and regional actors like Scania’s Regional 28

Several scholars have remarked on the neo-liberal character of the discourse of the “regionalization of Europe” (Amin and Tomaney, 1995; Brenner, 2000). Only a deregulation of state competencies and market adjusting processes can secure regional economic growth, led by the invincible hand rather than state policies. 29 “Regime” is a term in political science that describes an informal but nevertheless stable set of actors with access to institutional resources (the possibilities to set a political agenda), which makes it possible to preserve the decision-making capacity in, for instance, a city or a region (Stone, 1989).

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Richard Ek Planning Institute (Skånes regionplaneinstitut). Visions of a Nordic megalopolis (Gottmann, 1961),30 ÖreCity, an urban agglomeration of the former cities of Copenhagen, Malmö, Landskrona and Lund, flourished in planning documents, in newspapers and among planning theorists, geographers and urban scholars within academia (Ek and Hallin, 1996; Idvall, 1996; Ek, 2003). In these visions, a fixed connection in the south (between Malmö and Copenhagen) and another in the north (between Helsingør and Helsingborg) were included, but due to financial constraints it was decided that one connection had to suffice for the foreseeable future. In the conflict of interests that appeared between local actors in the south and the north, the southern “camp” dominated. When the northern camp referred to a national perspective, and stressed that a northern connection was the optimal from a Danish and a Swedish perspective (and a Nordic one), the southern camp argued that a southern connection was the most functional one from a regional perspective, since Malmö and Copenhagen together constituted the center of the “Nordic Megalopolis”. In this “scale war”, the regional imagination became successfully institutionalized at the end of the 1960s (Ek, 2003). However, the domestic policy situation in Sweden and Denmark prevented this vision from becoming a reality. In Sweden – a country that was strongly centralized politically – the central state lacked the will to finally agree to start building a fixed connection in the southern province. In Denmark, processes of political decentralization made it difficult to politically favor the capital city to such a large degree. Instead, a fixed link between the islands of Sjælland and Fyn was prioritized and decided upon. In addition, the oil crisis of 1973-1974 put heavy constraints on the economies of the two countries. Due to Danish membership in the EEC31 in 1973, Danish industry oriented itself away from the Swedish market and towards the German one (Boye, 1999:90). The political will thus evaporated during the 1970s, even if several investigations were initiated and new actors were created in order to support cross-border interaction.32 Local and regional actors continued to advocate a fixed link, but their voices were suppressed in a decade of enhanced environmental consciousness and economic stagflation. .

30

Swedish and Danish planners and civil servants followed the urban growth and metropolitan sprawl in North America at this time with keen interest, since they expected that what happened in North America would also happen in Europe, albeit with a time-delay of 15-20 years. 31 European Economic Community, forerunner to the European Union. 32 Öresundsgruppen (The Öresund Group) was founded in 1976 and Öresundskontakt (The Öresund Contact) in 1981 (Boye, 1999:90-91).

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Regional Experiencescapes as Geo-economic Ammunition In the 1980s, however, changed circumstances on a European level facilitated the “renaissance of the Øresund Region” (Tangkjær, 2000a: 105). In the mid 1980s, The European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), a very influential lobby group of leading industrialists, presented a set of measures that, in their opinion, were necessary to enhance European competitiveness. According to them, Europe needed to become “smaller”. National borders in Europe were institutional barriers that had to be reduced, and further investments in communication and transportation infrastructure prioritized. One of those “missing links” in European infrastructure, as pointed out by ERT, was the non-existent link over Øresund. In an era of rising neoliberalism, European politicians considered the ideas, visions and recommendations of ERT as being crucially important (Peters, 2003). Local and regional actors, such as the Chamber of Commerce of Southern Sweden, were inspired by the increased importance of the European level as a strategic framework for local and regional development. The regional Chamber of Commerce enrolled two highly influential scholars, Åke E. Andersson, Professor in Economics, and Christian Wichmann Mattheissen, Professor in Geography, and supported them to write books and reports about the future of the region in, and as a part of, the “new Europe” (Andersson, Holmberg and Andersson, 1989; Matthiessen and Andersson, 1993), and thus giving the discourse of the Øresund Region, as a part of the “Europe of Regions”, more legitimacy. For regional and local actors on the Swedish side, the idea of an integrated region directed their attention towards Scania’s geographical proximity to the European heartland, and its increasingly intertwined political and economic life (Ek, 2003: 68-82).33 The fixed link of a bridge to the “European continent” became a powerful symbol for a future where the Øresund Region stood out as the most economically competitive and resourceful region in northern Europe. On the Danish side, Copenhagen had been experiencing a severe financial crisis due to large emigration, high unemployment, high social welfare costs, and the shutdown of a substantial part of the city’s industry. In the search for a more exciting urban identity, the political actors of Copenhagen started to regard the city (in accordance with contemporary economic discourses) as a powerful European cluster (as the center of the Øresund Region) for the medical industry as well as for research and education (among other competing themes) (Boye, 1999; Tangkjær, 2000a). In the early 1990s, Copenhagen had attempted to play a more active role in order

33

Sweden became a member of the European Union in 1995.

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Richard Ek to advance its geo-economic position in the sudden and unexpected politically “opened” Baltic Sea area (Ek, 2003). During the 1990s, the institutionalization of the Øresund Region sped up and an abundance of organizations were established. Among the most important were the Øresund Committee (Öresundskomiteen, a political forum for local and regional politicians from both sides of the Sound), SAMS (Scandinavian Academy of Management Studies, a business economics think-tank), Medicon Valley Academy (a network organization which would facilitate the collaboration between educational actors and firms in the biomedical, biotechnological and pharmaceutical sectors), Copenhagen Capacity (a marketing organization working towards business and industry), Wonderful Copenhagen (a tourist marketing organization), The Øresund University (a network composed of universities in the region) and Øresund Science Park (a network organization for the various science parks in the region) (Boye, 1999:102-133; Tangkjær, 2000a:138-180 and 2000b). According to Christian Tangkjær (2000a:201-213), the establishment of different organizations could be said to follow an ”open house strategy” (every organization interested in “contributing to the integration” was welcome as long as they followed some basic “ground rules”, and, for instance, did not question the very vision of regional integration). This strategy was used to mobilize as much support for the vision as possible. This mobilization was often manifested through social arrangements, ceremonies and symbolic acts, stressing the belief in the collective vision of an integrated Øresund Region capable of economically competing with other urban agglomerations in northern Europe, such as Stockholm, Berlin, and Hamburg (Berg, 2000 and 2001). Parallel to the strategy of organizational mobilization, the search for a new regional identity was initiated. The actors involved started to market the region as a “hub of excellence” in the geo-economic postindustrial European economy. The marketing project, “Birth of a Region”, coordinated by the Öresund Committee, simultaneously became an identity-forming process. The result was the branding of the region as a “Human Capital”, stressing the humane and tolerate social climate of the region (with a well developed social security safety net, a good environment, and so on), a well-educated and diligent workforce and the geographical concentration of “life industries” (Ek, 2003:59-68). This brand/identity, was never successfully established amongst the region’s inhabitants, although the search for and the attempt to impose an Øresund identity on the population took other forms. Several projects, partly financed through INTERREG, were initiated in order to display the cultural and ethnic kinship between 78

Regional Experiencescapes as Geo-economic Ammunition Danes and Swedes in Scania. The region’s common history was asserted and embellished, thus putting a different slant on the more traditional and nationalistic Danish and Swedish history (Scania had been part of Denmark prior to 1658). Several projects were started in order to enhance the mutual language proficiency in Swedish and Danish, particularly among schoolchildren (see below), and The Øresund University established a center for Danish studies in Sweden, in order to increase knowledge about the Swedish “twin country”. The Øresund identity was presented as an inclusive, cross-border identity, in contrast with the excluding national identities of Sweden and Denmark. Through the use of maps and regional statistics, the Øresund Region was represented as a fact rather than a vision or dream, and the “Øresund citizen” was characterized as a well-off, mobile, postmodern cosmopolitan with a high degree of cultural capital and a larger curiosity about the world inherited from the Vikings and their interest in trade and travel (the common image of the Vikings as ravagers and warriors is quite misleading) (The City of Copenhagen and the City of Malmö, 1999).34 Finally, several cultural projects were initiated, including “Cultural Bridge 2000”, a joint project between cultural institutions such as exhibition halls, theaters, museums etc (Ek, 2003:184-221). Finally, in the year 2000, the bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen was completed. The inauguration was scrupulously produced to look good on TV, since the explicit goal was to receive thirty seconds of exposure on CNN (Berg, Linde-Laursen and Löfgren, 2002). The calculated political, economic and cultural integration has, however, not been fulfilled (according to the region’s architects). The Øresund Region has not become an integrated labor market and business life has not been amalgamated in the way it was planned and hoped. At least not yet.

“Scale Wars” The increased economic competition between cities and regions in Europe as well in the rest of the world has been discussed at length, as “place marketing” – as both practice and tool in an intensified economic competition among cities and regions (Ashworth and Voogd, 1990; Kearns and Philo, 1993; Gold and Ward, 1994; Smyth, 1994; Schöllermann, Perkins and Moore, 2000; Wu, 2000; Murray, 34

The fact that several hundred thousands of inhabitants in the region were excluded from this characterization never seemed to bother its creators, even though Copenhagen and Malmö are very multicultural cities.

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Richard Ek 2001; Doel and Hubbard, 2002; Watkins and Herbert, 2003), and more specifically in relation to investments and business (Sheppard, 2000; Ward, 2000; Molotch, 2002; Stubbs, Warnaby and Medway, 2002), and tourism (Buhalis, 2000; Bradley, Hall and Harrison, 2001; Cai, 2002). Place marketing, however, is not only a “Place Wars” tool or resource, in city and region rivalry over geo-economic lebensraum. Place marketing is also part of a regional attempt to implement the regional scale as the new pillar of strength in future European space. Place marketing (including the making, or remaking, packaging, branding and marketing of the geographical area/scale in question) is also a manifestation and representation of the regional scale as a “natural” and “logic” “entity” adjusted to the conditions of a “borderless” global economy (Ohmae, 1994 and 1996. For a critique, see Yeung, 1998 and 2002; Cameron and Palan, 2003). In order to present the Øresund region as attractive (and an implicitly “obvious” territorial entity) for tourists and other visitors, different promoting organizations in Scandinavia have used the discourse of the “Experience Economy” (Pine and Gilmore, 1999; see also the introductory chapter by O’Dell). The Øresund Region is an “experience-region”, adjusted to the desideratum of the self-conscious individualistic tourist in the “post-sightseeing society” (O’Dell, introductory chapter) and the well-educated, reflective employee. Copenhagen, as the self-evident center of the region, is consciously being marketed as the “experience-city” of northern Europe. According to Wonderful Copenhagen, it is necessary for Copenhagen – in order to be an international experience metropolis – to stage the city according to Pine and Gilmore‘s formula. This means staging its attractions in such a way that tourists will be able to “experience memorable experiences” (Wonderful Copenhagen, 2000). Copenhagen is promoted as a cultural city with an unprejudiced and humane social climate, a city of enjoyment and blithesomeness. The target group is, however, not just any tourist, but international “experience guests”, primarily interested in “high culture” attractions such as historical sights, design exhibitions and luxurious shopping malls like the recently built “Fisketorvet” and ”Fields” in Ørestaden. For Wonderful Copenhagen, business tourism is much more interesting (and lucrative) than “family tourism”, since families do not spend as much money as conference participants. Scania, on the other hand, has promoted itself as a destination for “extraordinary people”, and an “extraordinary place to visit and stay in”. While Copenhagen is presented as a highly urban destination for well educated, upper class people with a high cultural capital, Scania markets itself as a rural destination – albeit for

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Regional Experiencescapes as Geo-economic Ammunition similar visitors – with 60 golf courses and 68 castles (Skånes turistråd, 2001; Region Skåne Inward Investment, 2001; Position Skåne, 2003). In total, the Øresund region has something that Sweden and Denmark, as alternative spatial scales, do not have – a graspable experiencescape that offers experiences in urban as well as rural settings or stages, to use Pine and Gilmore’s metaphor. Visit a castle in Scania, play golf, create your own experience trail by participating in the Art Round in Österlen (introductory chapter by O’Dell), and then return to the metropolitan rhythms of the lights, sounds and smells of Copenhagen. Copenhagen is full of experiences, but Denmark is not. Scania is for the extraordinary tourist, while Sweden is for the ordinary one. However, this example is not the only snapshot of “Scale Wars” happening in contemporary Europe. In Lefebvre’s terms, this packaging of a region is part of the production of space; a representation of space that itself is a colonization of, or even warfare with, the lived spaces of everyday life, by abstract, conceptualized space (Lefebvre, 1991).35 According to Barke and Harrop (1994), the commercialization of society has resulted in geographical areas being packaged and promoted according to different target groups. Rather than being “realistic” (trying to catch the motley and heterogeneous characters of the place in question), these representations of space are rather mythical in character (Barthes, 1972). They are created by marketing organizations that behave like compulsive liars in their ambition to mediate an image in accordance with their own imagination of space that primarily stems from their belief of what is sellable and what is not. The representation of space becomes a hyper-reality, or a simulation (Baudrillard, 1983; Clarke, 1991) adjusted to the marketing principle of the day (Burgess and Wood, 1988; Watson, 1991; Goodwin, 1993; Stevenson, 1999). But in order to make this mythic representation as believable as possible, the general performance of the place’s inhabitants has to accord with the image being promoted (the map precedes the territory) (Baudrillard, 1983). “Place Wars” and “Scale Wars” are complemented by a warfare with the region’s own citizens.

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Lefebvre wanted to reveal how the production of social relationships had become a crucial part of the reproduction of the capitalist system, and how the production of (abstract) space was a part of capitalism’s accumulation strategies. For him, economic commercialization, political bureaucratization and territorialism had colonized people’s everyday life and reduced – even dispersed – people’s possibilities of making a living without being restricted by the machinations of capitalism.

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Richard Ek

“Sim Wars” The practice of place marketing is not only directed outwards towards tourists, investors and so on, but is also directed inwards, towards the population “in place”. Place marketing is, in this sense, also a disciplinary tool, aimed at making the population proud of its place (city or region). After all, in marketing philosophy, they are the “ambassadors of their place” (Kotler, Haider and Rein, 1993; Morgan, Pritchard and Pride, 2004). Place marketing is also aimed at legitimizing the place’s regime and those specific development strategies that the regime advocates and usually implements (Mitchell, 1996; Stevenson, 1999; McCann, 2001 and 2002). The eagerness to discipline and represent the citizen according to an overall image can be characterized as a practice of “governmentality”, based on the writings of Foucault (1991). For Foucault, governmentality is “the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security” (Foucault, 1991: 102).36 In the case of the Øresund Region, its regime has tried to convert and represent the region’s population so that they fit into the larger picture of economic globalization (the highly mobile, individualistic and self-aware consumer, and well-educated worker with an almost frenetic interest in culture, travel and sophisticated recreation/experiences). In order to legitimize the Øresund Region as a political and economic project per se, the regional regime has tried to implement a regional identity. It has tried to create an “Øresund citizen” with an Øresund identity, rather than a national, Swedish or Danish one. Particular interest has been directed towards the young, the “Øresund citizens of tomorrow” (through different projects, partly financed by INTERREG, for instance to increase language proficiency among schoolchildren, to encourage Danish and Swedish school classes to visit each other, and to offer role-play games regarding the future of the region to children in intermediate schools). Since the Øresund Region stretches over a Sound, it has been important for the project’s legitimacy that people actually travel over the Øresund Bridge. The Øresund citizen therefore ”needs” to be highly mobile, and not only fit into a general culture of 36

”Apparatuses of security” refer here to ”those institutions and practices concerned to defend, maintain and secure a national population and those that secure economic, demographic and social processes that are found to exist within that population” (Dean, 1999: 20).

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Regional Experiencescapes as Geo-economic Ammunition mobility (Castells, 1996; Urry, 2000; Kaufmann, 2002) in order to certify the necessity of the bridge and the region (Ek, 2003). A telling curiosity is that in computer simulations of the region’s future traffic system, created in the early and mid 1990s, the Øresund citizen was represented as an expressionless traveler waiting for and stepping on and off trains and metros, as a mobile zombie filling its primarily societal function in the spaces of flows.37 In this sense, the citizen is a metaphorical Sim of sorts, taken from the popular computer game and its different extensions, and steered by abstract machinations of an evasive power (the computer player or the regional regime). A highly promoted experiencescape in the Øresund Region was the housing exhibition Bo01 in Malmö, held during the summer of 2001 (and also a part of a larger urban regeneration project in the north western part of the city). The exhibition was presented as the “Future City”, an ecologically sustainable housing area with very exclusive, expensive and “intelligent” apartments (that is, equipped with an array of high-tech devices). The exhibition per se was marketed as an adventure/experience for the whole family. One apartment’s interior was decorated (according to its marketing material) after the motto “The Home – a carnival and a temple” and focused on sensual rather than functional aspects. As a narrative, its designers regarded the apartment as a series of experiences, with room for the intellect, the body, dreams, cultivation, nourishment and meetings (Åberg, 2002: 122). Even if Bo01 was heavily promoted, it was met by skepticism by many of the inhabitants of Malmö. In a city lacking cheap but adequate apartments, this was a new and very exclusive housing area/exhibition substantially financed and sponsored by public means. A great deal of prestige was invested in the project by the city’s political leadership. In several ways, the city’s leadership tried to persuade the inhabitants that the success of Bo01 was a matter of concern for the city and its citizens as a whole. A “Folkbildningsprojekt” (public education program) was started, including seminars, public debates and other activities. However, since the seminars were subject to an expensive entry fee, they were a public failure, and in the public debates it was never really possible to call into question the appropriateness of a housing area with the characteristics and exclusiveness of Bo01. The purpose of the “Folkbildningsprojektet” was to mediate and spread the exhibition’s messages and themes, rather than to discuss the choices 37

Of course this was largely due to the computer animation techniques used at that time. However, as images of the future citizen, these visualized visions nevertheless possessed a discursive power as spatial representations per se.

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Richard Ek per se. The public did not visit the exhibition in the large numbers expected, most probably due to the high entrance fee. After its closure late in the summer, the exhibition company went bankrupt and the city had to invest a large sum of public money (about 2.5 million dollars) in order to pay the (city owned) exhibition company’s debts. The leading manager of the bankrupt company expressed his frustration in a newspaper interview: “The citizens of Malmö have betrayed their own housing exhibition” (Ek, 2003).38 “The Sims” had showed their independence after all.

The Exclusive Experiencescape’s Excluding Tendency The most spectacular building in the former exhibition area of Bo01 is Turning Torso, a skyscraper due to be completed in 2005. It will have 54 levels and reach a height of 190 meters (Europe’s 19th highest). Designed by the famous Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava, it revolves around its 90 degree axis and imitates a twisted body with a visible spinal column. The apartments were calculated to be sold for an average of $6600/square meter. The most expensive apartment (at the top) was supposed to cost over 1.6 million dollars and have a monthly rental of $1200. However, in April 2004, only 10 of 152 apartments had been sold and HSB (the tenant-owner society) decided to make the Torso into a rental complex instead. A one hundred square meter apartment was calculated to have a monthly rental of $1800 (Westerberg, 2004a). The Turning Torso’s building cost was calculated at 130 million dollars (http://turningtorso.com), although in June 2004, the actual cost had risen by 120 million dollars, or $3000 for each member of HSB (Westerberg, 2004b), creating internal turmoil and leading to a vote of no confidence in the Board. Nevertheless, despite the economic difficulties, Turning Torso is still explicitly promoted as a spectacular building, a vision that will truly become a large-scale sculpture in the Øresund Region. For Malmö’s Mayor, it is the boldest project that Malmö has ever undertaken, and in his opinion “is a better landmark than a crane” (quoted in a local newspaper, SAMARK arkitektur och design 2003.11.22).39 Turning Torso is an experience, both for those fortunate 38

Following Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998), the visitors were as much a part of the exhibition as they were spectators, and when they did not turn up the exhibition became a total failure. 39 He refers to ”Kockumskranen”, a shipyard crane that for a long time was the leading symbol of Malmö’s industrial era. The crane was deconstructed in 2003 and shipped to a shipbuilding yard in Korea (see the chapter by Willim). Being a Social Democrat, his statement is rather controversial.

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Regional Experiencescapes as Geo-economic Ammunition enough to be able to afford to live there, and for tourists and other visitors. As a materially and symbolically crucial part of the urban regeneration in Malmö (see the chapter by Christersdotter), it includes views of Copenhagen, the Øresund Bridge and Copenhagen Airport. This part of the city increasingly turns its back away from the city’s eastern neighborhoods; the part of Malmö with a concentration of social degradation, high unemployment, and segregation.40 Turning Torso and the rest of the restructured waterfront is – at least as it is represented in all the existing marketing material – a metonym for Malmö. It is the face of the city. Malmö as a “Sim City”, however, is dependent upon its other face which the political regime of Malmö invokes through the trope of the “Sin City” (social unrest, societal exclusion, criminality, etc.).41 The construction of Malmö as a ”Sin City” is primarily done through the political regime’s request for increased electronic surveillance in specific “crime-related areas”, that is, the business streets which tourists usually visit when in town (Ivarsson, 2003.11.21). But Turning Torso is not only a phallic spatial representation42 of Sim City. In its very exclusiveness, it is also, a carefully patrolled area. Its entrance hall will be patrolled by a round-the-clock concierge, a friendly and service minded person ready to carry suitcases, order a cab, handle mail and even take out the garbage. He or she will, of course (something that is stressed in the marketing material), also guarantee that only residents and theirs guests are allowed to enter. When Malmö’s first skyscraper was built in the 1960s (at that time the highest residency building in Europe), the top floor was a restaurant that immediately became a popular favorite. In Turning Torso, the non-apartment sections are meant to be exclusive office spaces; showrooms for companies working with cosmetics and fashion.43 Even 40

Malmö is the city in Sweden with the highest percentage of children living in households below the nationally defined poverty line. A high concentration of these children live in the eastern part of the city, particularly in Rosengård, an economically and ethnically segregated district (Socialdepartementet, 2004). 41 With regard to ”Sim City” and ”Sin City”, see Lees & Demeritt’s study (1998) of different planning visions of Vancouver. 42 For Lefebvre (1991:285-288), abstract space consists of three elements or ”formants”: the geometric formant (Euclidean space defined by its homogeneity, a definition that guarantees its social and political utility), the optical or visual formant (Turning Torso is meant to be a visual landmark) and the phallic formant (metaphorically symbolizing force, male fertility and masculine violence). “Phallic erectility bestows a special status on the perpendicular, proclaiming phallocracy as the orientation of space, as the goal of the process – at once metaphoric and metonymic – which instigates this facet of spatial practice” (Lefebvre, 1991:287). 43 Bergstrand, 2003a.

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Richard Ek if it is possible to “experience” it from the outside, Turning Torso is above all an experience for the selected few (but nevertheless a metonym for many more, namely the inhabitants of Malmö and the Øresund Region). Turning Torso is an experiencescape for the mobile elite, for the untouchable tourists in the growing culture of mobility (Bauman, 1998), based on the logic of the “spaces of flow” (Castells, 1996). Close to the bridge and the airport, Turning Torso is an ideal for the transnational capitalist class (Sklair, 2001), or for anyone who can afford to live there. Turning Torso is, however, much more than a symbol for the exclusive experiencescapes of the transnational metropolitan region. It is also, in a symbolic sense, both a Panopticon and a Synopticon (Bauman, 1998). First of all, it is possible for the chosen few living in Turning Torso to look out across the regional landscape without being seen. From this vantage point high in the sky, the experiencescape of a culture of mobility unfolds on a regional scale. “All that matters” in the mobilityscape of the Øresund Region is clearly revealed from the Torso, the Øresund Bridge, Copenhagen Airport, Copenhagen, and the “retaken” urban waterfront of Malmö (once occupied by the easily forgotten industrial activities that brought material prosperity to the city’s inhabitants). But in a sense, Turning Torso is also a Synopticon, where the population is not only watched over by a few, but also a place in which the few are watched over by the population (Matheisen, 1997).44 Turning Torso is already observed, day and night, through web cameras and Internet technology. Every new flat that is constructed receives attention, and is applauded on net-based news bulletins and in regular newspapers. The inauguration of Turning Torso will probably be a spectacular event, since the importance of event management is part of the psyche of the region’s regime (Berg, Linde-Laursen and Löfgren, 2002; For a general discussion about events, see Yeoman et al, 2004). The Turning Torso will become a physical meeting point between the local practices of visitors and the inhabitants’ global/cosmopolitan (exclusive) way of life. It will also, however, be an excluding experiencescape. The concierge will see to that.

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By ”Synopticon”, Matheisen primarily means the global mass media and the intense observation of “celebrities”, but in a strictly principal way, his reasoning works here as well.

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Conclusion Space is produced, or more correctly, different spaces are produced, juxtaposed and overlap each other. Place marketing is a specific technique used to produce spaces, and as such, is more than just the promotion of a specific geographical area. It works in several different ways. Firstly, place marketing, through different demarcation practices, is a frame-making tool. Spaces are conceptualized as different areas on a specific spatial scale (the urban scale, regional scale etc.). Secondly, place marketing is a packaging technique, in which sets of representations are stressed on the behalf of others. Thirdly, place marketing is a kind of world-making, a course of action to make the world intelligible. In the place marketing discourse, economic competition between cities, regions and nations is taken for granted – a “fact” that is further institutionalized through the place marketing practice. But place marketing is not only spatial in character; it is also very much a temporal practice.45 Fourthly, place marketing is a set of discursive practices that changes societies over time. Places are re-conceptualized, re-structured, re-made, re-presented and re-marketed.46 As place marketing changes different places’ spatial character over time, it is a source of disagreement, conflict and power struggle between different interests. Metaphorically, this tension between stability/immutability and change/fickleness can be regarded as a spatial play, driven forward by the performances of identity-forming actors involved in the process of place marketing. In the spatial play that is directed towards the issue of which vision of the future will be realized, the question that needs to be asked is: whose future? As mentioned earlier, the Øresund Region promotes itself in different marketing materials as the “Human Capital”. The pictures included in this material are very selective, primarily showing a white business elite, young trendy people and scientists. From a marketing perspective, “humans” would seem to be a very narrowly defined category. Beyond this, it is important to bear in mind that the place marketing discourse is influenced by other political and economic discourses. Economic globalization as a geographical imagination is such a 45

It also includes the construction of history and historical identities as a phase in the exercise of asserting a place identity for the tourist destination in order to reflect on how distinct and special the destination is as compared with other destinations (Ooi, 2003; see also Lanfant, 1995). 46 This is a process which Willim elaborates upon in this book in relation to former industrial sites.

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Richard Ek discourse. Place marketing is regarded as an absolute necessity in a world in which competition is global rather than national. The neoliberal discourse’s emphasis on the necessity of an entrepreneurial approach greatly influences the choice of different development strategies within the place marketing discourse. The “regional renaissance” as an increasingly global discourse is advocated by consulting gurus like Kenichi Ohmae (1996). It has also been tremendously influential, not least in Europe, where the primacy of the nation state is challenged from “below” (by regions) and “above” (by the deepened European integration within the institutional framework of the European Union). In the Øresund region, the discourse of an evolving “Experience Economy” has colored the different place marketing strategies. The Øresund region is increasingly packaged and marketed as an “experience region”, a hyper-reality that is actually materializing as different experiencescapes within the region are constructed. For instance, in the marketing campaign towards exclusive cruise tourists, Copenhagen and Malmö are promoted as the only area in the Baltic Sea where it is possible to visit two countries in the same day (in the Øresund region, you get two countries for the price [in time] of one). Finally, the packaging of regional experiencescapes is a “double colonization”. First, it works to colonize the definition and meaning of “experiences”. Since experiences, in the place-marketing context, are commercialized, the experience per se becomes integrated with the comprehensive logic of the Consumer Society (in Lefebvre’s [1991] terms, the colonization of the spaces of everyday life by capitalist abstract space). As a tourist visiting the Øresund region, you are invited to experience a plethora of arranged urban and rural experiences. They are not free, though. Watching birds in a zoo in Copenhagen is an experience, but watching birds in a forest in Scania is not – unless you pay and participate in an arranged tour with a guide who takes you along an experience trail (see the introductory chapter by O’Dell) that highlights not only the flora and fauna, but also historical and cultural narratives connected to the forest in question. Second, the packaging of regional experiencescapes colonizes the definition and meaning of “experience places” (experiencescapes is more of an analytical term elaborated upon in this book than an established term within the place marketing discourse). The predilection to create exclusive experiencescapes with an in-built excluding tendency, changes the conditions and the possibilities for keeping public spaces open for paying visitors and (economically and culturally) resourceful inhabitants alike. Gentrification processes do not necessarily only affect the housing accommodations available in 88

Regional Experiencescapes as Geo-economic Ammunition cities. In addition, a city or region’s supply of attractions and entertainment opportunities also runs the risk of undergoing a process of “experience gentrification”. To the extent that this occurs, Hannigan’s (1998; see also Eisinger, 2000) argument that many cities in the western world are evolving into entertainment-reservoirs for upmarket visitors and inhabitants is increasingly substantiated – in the Øresund region as in other city-regions of the world. As in any kind of warfare, there are “casualties”. Who are the “casualties” in “Place Wars”, “Scale Wars” and “Sim Wars”? Who are the “elite forces” and who constitute “canon fodder”? To what cost are the regional experiencescapes “invaded” and “occupied” by well-to-do tourists and other visitors? Metaphorically speaking, the trans-national capitalist class forms the “elite forces”. The upper classes are especially served by the creation of exclusive and excluding experiencescapes, such as the Turning Torso. Wealthy tourists and business visitors are also privileged in the contemporary warfare between places in the western world. People who are marginalized and deprived of their places when parts of the cities are themed (into exclusive experiencescapes with different profiles) and tamed at the same time (Chang, 2000)47 are the “canon fodder” of the geoeconomic warfare of urban (and rural for that matter) tourism planning. In a sense, this “canon-fodder” also become the “casualties”, of the places, or “battle-fields” of “Place Wars”, “Scale Wars” and “Sim Wars”. At the same time as places are re-conceptualized, restructured, re-made, re-presented and re-marketed in order to fit into the urban regime generals’ strategic battle plans, they are stripped of their de facto public characters. Economic exclusiveness and public inclusiveness are not necessarily impossible, but are very difficult to combine. In the worst scenario, the uttermost causality of geoeconomic warfare is democracy itself (as democracy is conceptualized in the western world, as the rights of citizens to influence processes that affect their everyday lives not only through electoral systems, but through the possibility of playing a role as participators in different place development processes). As a result, what I am arguing here is that the consequences of geo-economic warfare must be measured, not only in economic terms – as is usually the case – but also in civic and democratic terms. 47

Chang (2000) explores the ‘thematic development’ of Singapore’s Little India Historic District, which was redeveloped as a historic district in 1989. The taming process had three dimensions: a decline in traditional Indian-owned retail outlets and activities (activity), the transformation from a place of residence into a retail attraction (community) and a dimming of its Indian cultural identity (identity).

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5

Mobile Dreams MARIA CHRISTERSDOTTER

Lernacken, situated just outside Malmö where the Øresund Bridge takes off and lands, is not a very nice place to be a cold Saturday in January. Waves splash against ice-glazed cairns and a cold wind lashes salty water against the panoramic windows of the fancy Øresundpavilion that hosted an exhibition of the building of the bridge three years prior to its grand opening in summer 2000. From the terrace you can hear the remote sound of cars driving back and forth on the bridge in the distance. The mud and ruffled turfs do not reveal anything of the grand plans and visions resting on someone’s desk further up country, in the city. However dull and plain it may seem, this is an experiencescape in the making. This article focuses on the early stages of a hotel’s biography; the visions and plans that precede the actual, physical hotel and that hopefully will remain after geographical interference and economic and structural engineering. In focusing on this stage in which things are about to happen, the text depicts a hotel at a conceptual level, as something about to happen. The article describes the actors involved in the project, the plans, the many twists and turns involved in the building of a hotel and the uncertainty as to whether the project would be realized. The plan is to turn the above-mentioned pavilion into an exclusive hotel designed by the world-famous architect, Frank Gehry. The article describes how this imaginary hotel can be used as an interpretative tool

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Maria Christersdotter in an understanding of its cultural and societal context. The visions seem to be characterized by an interesting interplay of practice and dreams that turn the planned hotel into an arena of cultural production that, together with other avant-garde design-projects in the area, fits into the city-branding of Malmö. The planned hotel is, just like the region, still in the making, which is why it is interesting to see how the construction of the hotel corresponds to the construction of the region48 (see e.g. Ek, 2003; Berg, Linde-Laursen and Löfgren, 2000 and 2002). As I see it, the most interesting aspect is not the building proprietor’s or the architect’s view of the project, but how the city will benefit from the hotel. Why does the city of Malmö, which will neither pay for nor gain from the venture, want an exclusive designer hotel to be built? In order to answer this question, the article begins by presenting the background to the project and then goes on to briefly describe the city’s past and the conditions that made the project possible. The section that follows discusses design as a tool for the city’s interests and also describes the symbolic power of the imaginary hotel. The text then goes on to focus on the textualization of space by describing the hotel in terms of the narratives told by representatives of the municipality – narratives in which the hotel and the other designprojects seem to become metaphors for the new Malmö. Finally, the chapter concludes by discussing the hotel in relation to issues of transit and mobility.

An Experiencescape in the Making A few years ago, the City-Planning Office in Malmö was on the lookout for interested parties that could develop a concept to attractively make use of the so-called Øresund-pavilion – an amphitheatre-shaped building that had hosted an exhibition of the building of the Øresund Bridge. The exhibition was temporary and the pavilion’s future use was uncertain. The exhibition closed soon after the official opening of the bridge and the city of Malmö took the pavilion over from Swedab, the company that built the bridge and ran the exhibition. Since then, several ideas and plans for the pavilion’s future have been put forward, which include turning it into a theatre, hotel, spa or conference center. At present, a company called L-Kastellet runs a restaurant and conference-venture in the building. The search for interested parties reached the Norwegian building proprietor, Arthur Buchardt, who 48

The binational Øresund Region is, according to Berg, Linde-Laursen & Löfgren, generally assumed to include the Swedish province of Scania and the north-eastern part of the Danish island of Zealand across the strait of Øresund (2000:11).

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Mobile Dreams launched the idea of constructing a rather small but exclusive hotel at Lernacken to incorporate the pavilion. The hotel was envisaged as a complement to another of Buchardt’s multimillion dollar projects: Scandinavian Tower, a giant hotel of almost 900 rooms, which was to be designed by the Swedish architect, Gert Wingårdh. Even though Scandinavian Tower was envisaged as capturing the lion’s share of the market, Buchardt saw a need for a smaller hotel to meet the needs of tourists looking for small-scale and exclusive accommodations. Buchardt had been to Bilbao and been impressed by the Guggenheim Museum, designed by world famous American architect, Frank Gehry. As Buchardt liked what he saw, he naturally wanted the commission of designing the hotel to go to Gehry. Christer Larsson, Malmö city’s architect, explains what happened: And so he thought, well then, I’ll give Frank a call. He gave Frank a call and we went over. Or rather, we estimated the value of the idea here in the city first. We thought it was a brilliant idea and that it suited us very well. And so we said OK. But I mean… It’s a kind of cross between all the ideas that the city has had for what the Øresund-pavilion could be used for and Arthur’s idea for the project (interview with Christer Larsson). Just before Christmas 2002, Gehry was invited to Malmö to view the site for the potential hotel and meet with representatives of the city. The local newspaper, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, carried an enthusiastic report about how the star had taken quite a fancy to the city, and compared it to Bilbao, another old working-class town in a state of change. In an eye-catching headline the newspaper announced that Gehry regarded Malmö as “the best-kept secret of Europe” (Rehnquist, 2003). In February 2003, a seven-strong group of municipal politicians and building-directors went to Los Angeles to pay a return visit and meet Gehry in his hometown to confirm his interest. The meeting with the architect seems to have been promising: He’s been here to have a look at the area. He thinks it’s a fantastic place and a real point of anchorage for Sweden, with the bridge and everything. He thinks that’s interesting. (…) He says that Malmö is a very beautiful city. (…) He considers it a fascinating commission, and sees some parallels to Bilbao. That is, when they really turned Bilbao into a brand by using his museum. I mean, that’s been a massive success and the whole

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Maria Christersdotter town has benefited enormously from tourism and so on (Interview with Christer Larsson). Comparison with Bilbao plays an important role in the narratives surrounding this project: both are industrial-based harbor cities that have faced hard times. An important factor for change in Bilbao was the Guggenheim Museum, built in 1997 and followed by an increased tourism trade, which grounded the city’s new prosperity. The municipal people’s narratives reflect the hope that Malmö will change in the same successful way as Bilbao. The juxtaposition of Bilbao thus works to strengthen the self-confidence of Malmö’s promoters and the making of their new city brand. By comparing Malmö to Bilbao, it seems realistic to place an order for an extraordinary design with a famous architect like Frank Gehry: if they can, why can’t we? The meeting with Gehry in Los Angeles seems to have been positive: the architect confirmed his interest, and the next step was for him and Arthur Buchardt to agree on the economic conditions. The municipality did not interfere in those discussions: “we can only say that we as a city support Arthur in his project-idea and that it is in line with the city’s strategy” (interview with Christer Larsson). The municipality’s role was to render it possible and create opportunities for the project’s implementation. At an early stage it was discovered that an important obstacle was access to the area from the bridge. A precondition for the realization of the project was the construction of access ramps from the highway, although the National Road Administration raised objections against the suggestion. However, after discussions between the group, the Streets and Traffic Department of Malmö and the National Road Administration, an “absolutely acceptable solution”, as Christer Larsson put it, was agreed upon. Since the hotel was to occupy part of the shoreline protection area, the municipality and the county administrative board demanded that parts of the building be available to the general public. This implied that a public purpose had to be combined with the ordinary hotel business. Buchardt and the municipality were interested in establishing an art museum of Scandinavian design where Malmö’s collections of contemporary art could be displayed. This would, according to city architect Christer Larsson, also be in line with the hotel’s image: I mean, there are many ways of connecting and strengthening the hotel’s image as incredibly exclusive. (…) I can imagine that people at that level (the intended target group) are generally

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Mobile Dreams interested in art too. (…) So if some giant enterprise is looking for a site for its, well, inter-company-meeting or whatever, they might book the entire hotel. It’s quite secluded, being some distance from the city. So I guess that’s his idea. Gehry jumped at it anyway, and so have we. It’s a fantastic location. Just where the bridge lands you’ll have a landmark, which is this building, which is rather extraordinary and even exclusive when you consider the architecture and design and so on (interview with Christer Larsson). Within the hotel world, art is often viewed as a sign of exclusivity and cultural capital. In this context, art is an effective way of proclaiming a hotel’s status, which is why many hotels employ their own arts manager to take charge of the hotel’s exhibitions, book temporary exhibition artists and so on. The importance of an art-section in the hotel at Lernacken is therefore understandable because it would signal the hotel’s exclusivity. Preconditions for the hotel were thus settled. The next step, in the late autumn of 2003, was to make a new plan and for Buchardt to find an operator, probably among the big chains. But by the New Year, Buchardt had decided to give up his hotel-projects. The events of 9/11 had brought hard times to the hotel industry. The plans for a hotel at Lernacken were taken over by another of the arena’s actors: the company L-Kastellet running the restaurant in the pavilion. In July 2004, Sydsvenska Dagbladet reported that the company had plans to turn the building into a safeguarded luxury hotel with at least 300 rooms. The potential architect was still Frank Gehry. The area’s proximity to Copenhagen’s international airport, Kastrup, and the isolated location made the hotel suitable for political top-level meetings, claimed the manager, Jens Junert, in the article (Ljungberg, 2004). L-Kastellet also had plans to establish some kind of high-class culture venture in connection with the hotel – such as a branch of a famous art museum – and wanted to develop the project in collaboration with representatives of the municipality. Once again, reference to the Bilbao-wonder was made. “Just think of what the Guggenheim did for Bilbao”, writes Junert in a letter to the municipal board, and claims that the previous managers of art museums in Malmö would be able to help with the arrangement of such an establishment.

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A New Malmö For some actors the region should be an international bridgehead, a launching pad toward the future and the world (Berg and Löfgren, 2000:17). Narratives of the history of Malmö, told in connection with the interviews I conducted, describe the post-war period and the decades up to the 1960s as times marked by prosperity. The shipping, manufacturing and textile industries gave a firm foundation to the city’s economy and plans for an Øresund-connection started to grow. In the 1970’s, however, the shipping industry ran into problems and, together with the textile industry, was forced to close down. A considerable number of jobs were lost as a result. The so called “green wave” swept many middle class families – who contributed to the tax revenue – from the city to the country in a movement that embraced some 35,000 people during a period of five to six years. The fact that the depression coincided with the arrival of a large number of immigrants meant that these new citizens experienced great difficulties in getting into the labor market. This situation had to be alleviated by social allowances, which in turn led to a strain on the municipality’s economy. All this naturally created a feeling of hopelessness and desperation. But what is even more important is that the depression also helped to kill the optimism and belief in the possibilities of a change to something positive. Malmö’s Urban Development Manager, Christer Persson, describes it as a grey period in which a damper was put on the whole city – on the municipality work as well as the business trade. Hard times held all building work back, and the city became full of what Christer Persson called “bomb-holes”; unoccupied sites where no one wanted to invest in development because of the lack of belief in the future. During the eighties Malmö was paralyzed. An important turning point came in 1991, however, when Denmark and Sweden came to an agreement on a connection over the Sound. As plans to build the Øresund Bridge developed, a general feeling of optimism about Malmö’s future also grew. As Christer Persson phrased it, ”Somehow everyone went around expecting that if that decision is made, then it’s possible to make changes. And little by little I guess some of the belief in the future returned” (Interview with Christer Persson). Another positive change came in 1995, when the Swedish government initiated a municipal equalization system, which meant that towns experiencing high unemployment, like Malmö, would be

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Mobile Dreams compensated in order to help rebuild the city’s economy. The grant made it possible to invest and develop different parts of the municipal work and economy. With the promise of better times and the possibility of change, the municipality started to discuss its visions and goals for the development of Malmö in a number of different fields: culture, urban planning, environment, economy, education, the labor market and social issues. Discussions led to the creation of a university college, the first students starting their studies in 1997. In addition, a structural change occurred in that the large and traditional companies disappeared and small companies started up. Together with a number of investments in infrastructure, such as the bridge, new highways, rail services, a university, a casino and massive construction investments in the two development areas of Western Harbor and Hyllie49, this created a new stability in the region – according to Christer Persson. Despite that, the municipality has not succeeded in raising the employment rate, which is still below the national average. According to municipal leaders, however, Malmö is, doing well and the situation is described in terms of a new feeling of stability and optimism. The city architect, Christer Larsson, maintains that the hard times contributed to a kind of pioneering spirit that still seems to characterize the municipal work. The city has invested heavily in cooperative projects where industry and trade work together with the Real Estate Department, with the aim of trying to attract and create good conditions for the establishment of new companies in Malmö. According to the city architect, all this has led to a sense of engagement and a feeling of togetherness: I think that, on the whole, the residents of Malmö are very committed. The politicians are also very committed to developmental issues. I guess it has something to do with the fact that Malmö has gone through this acid test and economic meltdown, as they call it. That is, when everything just falls apart. That naturally develops a kind of spirit of growth, or whatever you want to call it. I can imagine that there might also be a lack of thoughtfulness in being too go-ahead (Interview with Christer Larsson).

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This is where the new designer projects are, and were, being built: the Scandinavian Tower hotel designed by the Swedish architect Gert Wingårdh in Hyllie, and the residential block Turning Torso designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava in Western Harbor.

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De Signs Why is a group of politicians so interested in having an exclusive design-hotel built in Malmö? The narrative tales of Malmö told during my interviews illustrate a movement from darkness to light, from success to misfortune and back to success; a classic story of progress. They portray a city that has seen trouble, misery and despair at first hand, that has gone through the acid test and won through to a new and better self-confidence. The initiatives of the new design-projects should therefore be seen in the light of this struggle. They are both the reason for and consequence of this self-confidence and subsequent change of identity. Christer Larsson claims that the new architectural visions should be regarded as a sign of openness that he regards as significant for Malmö, as well as a sign of progress and prosperity: There are architectural, town-building dreams of high quality in our city planning. (…) Malmö must be an interesting place to work and live in. (…) In Malmö we plan differently, I think, in comparison to other big cities. That is to say, we work more with basic policies and strategies than detailed control, because strategies create an open flow of ideas. Scandinavian Tower is an example of that. (…) It’s the same with Gehry’s project. So I think one can say that we’re different in that respect. But we are rather explicit when it comes to quality. That is, we pass the projects through the eye of a needle, so to speak, in discussions concerning quality. (…) Well, urban development is a strategy … a factor of progress and success. (…) For the development of the city as well as development of the economy. I think we’ve got a great respect for that” (interview with Christer Larsson). As an actor, you need access to the right tools in order to interpret your context and know what connotations certain phenomena give (see Hansen 2003:158). In the case of the Malmö-politicians, their reading of their context and the spirit of the times indicate that a design-hotel is a good way of making Malmö hip; it is a trend-booster and a tool for their purposes. In short, it is what the hotel does to the city that is important. Christer Persson also believes that the new design projects are characteristic of new times in Malmö and the city’s new identity: I guess that getting some of those big projects going expresses this new identity of ours, and a little bolder and more positive attitude towards what’s possible in the city, seen from the perspective of the future. But then, of course, once this kind of project gets 98

Mobile Dreams going, it contributes to the identity building too, strengthens it even more. (…) And then of course we are criticized for starting projects that are too advanced and for having megalomania and all that, so that has to be handled too. (…) Scandinavian Tower, Turning Torso, and now Frank Gehry’s hotel-project; somehow they’re characteristics of the new times. Not only when you look at Malmö, but also if you look at other cities in Europe, culture and design are essential parts of the development, and have become value-creators as never before. (…) So it’s a completely new situation, (…) the thinking is very different today. So precisely this production of value with culture and design somehow seems like a new component in the discussion about corporate development, and about what’s good for regions and cities in order to enable them to develop positively (Interview with Christer Persson). According to Christer Persson, it is evident from both the trade and the cityscape that an increasing number of residents work in the IT and academic sectors, which changes the atmosphere of the city. Designprojects, such as the hotel, mark this change and fit into the city’s new pattern of a different kind of cultural life with its new cafés, theatres, restaurants and a university. As such, design-hotels can be regarded as fantasies that have been put into social practice. The planned hotel at Lernacken is a hotelfantasy, as design-hotels tend to be: fantasies in form and design that are nonetheless real and concrete, allowing you to move inside them. But this specific hotel is also a fantasy as in dream or vision: the fantasy of the new Malmö that is evolving and beginning to materialize. Design and architecture thus become important tools for the realization of regional visions and for drawing financially strong individuals and companies to the region and the city. James Clifford talks of a fixation of cultures in that you fixate yourself by means of certain symbols (Clifford, 1997:43). Frank Gehry’s hotel is such a fixative symbol; that is, a statement. It is supposed to mark the advent of a new era or a new phase of interest. “I guess it’s an expression of wanting to be something else in that you don’t want to be the old worker’s town anymore, but a town characterized by information, knowledge; other things that are somehow carriers of development” (Interview with Christer Persson). The language of design that marks the new construction projects of Malmö is part of a global expression and therefore not exclusive to Malmö. The fact that Malmö has made this language its own can be seen as an indication of the city’s new self-confidence. By using a

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Maria Christersdotter symbolic language and a global grammar in the shape of a designhotel, Malmö takes part of the world and endeavors to establish itself as an actor on the world stage. Using symbols in the creation of the region is a frequently used practice, as will be discussed in the following section.

A War Between Symbols If you look upon it in terms of democracy, you can easily say that this is not the first project the residents of Malmö have in mind. (…) I’m certain of that. But yet I believe that we have some support among the citizens of Malmö to create symbols for the new Malmö. So in that sense it becomes a symbol for the new Malmö. (…) But then you’ll have to see it as being transformed through the democratic organization and through us” (interview with Christer Larsson). The case of the Gehry-hotel shows how symbols can be as strong as the real thing. So far, a symbol is all that exists: there is no actual hotel, even though its symbolic value is strong. Jean Baudrillard (Baudrillard, 1994) speaks of such a simulacrum; a hyper-reality without origin or reality, or a model that precedes reality. In this hyperreality, simulation blurs the distinction between reality and imagination so that signs of the real become a substitute for the real. Values are thus incarnated in icons, which is why an imaginary hotel can symbolize the city’s transformation: Partly, it can be the vision of everything going on in Malmö; a signal so to speak, that ‘you’re entering an interesting part’, or that its’ an interesting city. (…) The vision of the transformation of the region, the conversion. (…) An expression of the success of the city, in so far as that exists. But I think it’s an important vision, it’s a signal. It says that ‘something’s going on here. You can count on us’ (interview with Christer Larsson). Larsson’s words allude to another issue; the symbolic warfare embedded in the project. On the one hand, the hotel is criticized for being a symbol of inequality, a playground for rich people and a monument depicting increasing social gaps. On the other hand, some people claim that the symbols for a new Malmö, such as the hotel, create growth for the city in terms of tourism and drawing attention to Malmö. In a column in the local newspaper, the journalist Mikael 100

Mobile Dreams Bergstrand criticizes the city of Malmö for catering for an elite rather than for the city’s increasing number of homeless people: There’ll be many hotels and many hotel rooms. Expensive hotels and expensive hotel-bills. But isn’t the municipality used to the latter when it comes to paying temporary living space for the city’s homeless junkies? (…) When reality looks the way it does, it’s easy to stumble into its path and see patterns, connections and relations in a city where the gaps have never been as large as now. (…) Every individual can influence his or her situation; even a junkie. But it takes the right support, several chances and last but not least, the most basic and a matter of course: a place to live. (2003b). According to Christer Larsson, however, this is a somewhat simplified picture of the situation. He claims that the design-projects draw attention away from the ordinary city planning: It seems to me that sometimes, in the discussion, it’s all, ‘Malmö only builds for the rich’, but that’s not the case. (…) A lot is being built for others too. But then again, you can’t build for the poor. Or rather, people with limited means. (…) Because the regulations make it far too expensive, with financing and taxes etc. (…) So it’s a simplified view to say that Malmö only builds for the rich, because the current system doesn’t allow for anything else (interview with Christer Larsson). The project’s advocates claim that a hotel of this sort will put Malmö on the map and draw attention to the city. People interested in architecture and design are expected to come and see Gehry’s creation and fashionistas with the right amount of cash will come to stay at the hotel. In its association with glamour and exclusivity, as well as an increase in income due to the tourism trade, the hotel is expected to bestow an upgraded status and better prosperity on the city. Since it is an ordinary commercial project, no economic support will be forthcoming on the municipality’s behalf. Even though it is not the case that money is taken from the poor for the benefit of the rich, critics point out that it seems rather immoral for the municipality to be engaged in such an exclusive enterprise rather than attending to the large number of homeless people. An “immoral” building of luxury hotels is contrasted to a “moral” building of houses. Even though it has not yet been built, the hotel seems tainted by injustice. Opposition to 101

Maria Christersdotter the hotel appears to be grounded in a suspicion that the hotel will be a playground for the elite and a fear that the common person – despite the “public part” – will not feel at home in the hotel and will thus not go there. This might have to do with the way that an exclusive hotel expresses something that is somehow bigger than the individual; that is, perfection as perfect as no human being can be. The entrance of a hotel can often exert power, in that it constitutes a selective process and disciplines the guest. By means of this hyped, beautiful, perfect setting, the hotel informs the visitor which group of people it turns to and aligns with. Somehow, it seems to be a question of belonging: who belongs to the hotel? To whom does the hotel belong? Who fits in and who has the right to be there? Who has the right to the shore that is being built on? In some respect the entrance of a hotel can be compared to a nation’s border: a zone where the social category of “stranger” is created and where identities are assigned and adopted, maintained and rejected (see Povrzanović Frykman, 2003). For those with an admission ticket and belonging to the right group, the border crossing is smooth and frictionless, just like a revolving door. But for those who do not fit in, the actual border and the crossing of it are evident: Can I come in and do I belong here? And if the hotel does succeed in its ambition to become a true public place, will it then lose its character? Is it exclusive and cool if anybody can go there? To Christer Larsson, it is important that the hotel is solitaire50 and a signal, but not a monument. There is an interesting underlying conflict with regard to monuments and symbols. In the discussion about the city’s new design projects, they are often described as monuments of The New Malmö. But Christer Larsson does not want to use the word “monument”. He wants the buildings to be seen as symbols and not monuments, which in his opinion express power and make statements rather than acknowledging something of the past that has now disappeared: Monuments are not… sympathetic in the same way, I think. (…) It’s not supposed to be a monument to the architect or anything like that, it’s supposed to be a symbol. Wherever the distinction between symbol and monument is drawn, but you know… to me it’s different, a symbol for the place, the city. A monument commemorates something bygone, but a symbol represents something in progress. (…) You know, the Unknown Soldier and that sort of thing. That’s all about monuments. (…) But then, symbols can also become monuments as time goes by. (…) You 50

In this context, a building set apart and not surrounded by other buildings.

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Mobile Dreams know, monuments are oppressive, but symbols are inspiring. That’s what I think anyway (Interview with Christer Larsson). The concept of fetishism is useful to an understanding of the symbolic significance of the Gehry-hotel. Just like a fetish, the hotel is charged with hopes and dreams, and the promise of a new identity for the city. Roy Ellen describes fetishism as a way for the human being to influence higher powers to comply with her/his desires (Ellen, 1987:214). According to Ellen, characteristic to the fetish is the concretization of abstractions and “an ambiguous relationship between control of object by people and of people by object” (Ellen, 1987:219). By condensing the meaning or cultural value of a single item, something abstract can be symbolized by – and associated with – something concrete, such as an object. A fetish is thus an objectified concept, something small and concrete that, through a process of objectification, embodies a larger, more abstract context. Ellen points out the interesting fact that fetishes are metonymic: one part of something substitutes for the whole (Ellen, 1987:222f.). It is, for example, often parts of saints that are fetishes, rather than the totality of them. Furthermore, through fetishism, objectified ideas become commodities and are thereby imbued with an inherent economic value. In this sense, the hotel at Lernacken seems to be a concretization of the ambitions and visions of the municipality of Malmö: the dreams of a brighter future are condensed into designer projects. The project is marked by a process of objectification in which a play between abstraction and concretization takes place: an abstract idea and vision will be objectified in a hotel, which in itself is thought to become a symbol for something non-physical; that is, the city’s new image. In looking at the hotel as a concept, you can see how it also “thingifies” social relationships such as hierarchies: in some cases as concrete as the location of the fanciest suites in the penthouse and the kitchen in the cellar, in others just by being a house and a business built on the concept of masters and servants. This specific hotel will also, like many of its kind, embody cosmopolitan connections and represent a broader context by its associations to a global language of design. This is partly due to the international clientele likely to stay at the hotel, and partly to the new “league” that the city is entering by way of the design projects that put Malmö “on the map”.

Hotales The French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, speaks of the house as a tool for dreaming – something to dream with (Bachelard, 1994). 103

Maria Christersdotter Materiality produces dreams. Things, like hotels, thus become actors with the power to speak and seduce; they do something to us. The luxury hotel is dreamable because it invites us to daydream: not only because it is a luxury and escapism, but also, according to Bachelard, because it is a house with all the house’s dream qualities. It speaks to the guest’s imagination. The hotel’s ability to induce dreams is perhaps most evident in its discourse-creation: in being a frequently used setting for dramatic and poetic events. In popular cultural expressions, such as films, literature and music, it is shown as evoking dreams. But besides this poetic and dramatic potential for fictional use, the planned hotel by Gehry already has, at a visionary and conceptual level, the potential to create dreams and feed the imagination51. I see the design-hotel phenomenon as a promise. Just as the physical, completed hotel is a promise of a glamorous and carefree existence, far from the troubles of everyday life, this unfinished hotel takes the form of a promise of Malmö’s new possibilities in terms of the symbolic capital that constitutes the hotel. In this early stage of the hotel’s biography, the visions that are to be materialized in the building are themselves symbolic. Per Olof Berg and Orvar Löfgren describe the visions of Øresund as a drive toward metropolitanization; to provide the region with metropolitan flair and “to give the region a competitive edge” (Berg and Löfgren, 2000:12). This is also evident from my interviews, when the new Malmö is narrated as a cosmopolitan context suitable for a framing of this kind of hotel. Seeing the hotel plans and the stories surrounding it (in newspaper articles and my interviews) as text, I would like to read these narratives as versions of different facets of reality. People’s narratives are not absolute representations of a reality, but rather descriptions of how language is a tool for an understanding of the world: we live in a world of narratives that constitute our perspectives (Hansen, 2003:150). One of the most striking qualities of a narrative is its logical following of a successive order in which one event leads to and conditions the next (see Sennett, 1998:83). The historiographies of Malmö in my interviews are examples of such narratives, in which the Malmö of today is a logical consequence of previous events and periods in the city’s past. The plans and visions are themselves narratives, reflecting their particular version of what Malmö was, is, and will be: The whole setting that’s been created has more of the cosmopolitan – on a small scale – pattern or setting or whatever 51

This poetic imagination is shown to be an important and necessary part of the building of the Øresund Region (c.f. Berg, Linde-Laursen and Löfgren, 2000).

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Mobile Dreams word you prefer. Accepting such a venture, on the part of the city, is, I think, really exciting. When someone wants to invest in such an advanced project (the Gehry-designed hotel) that stands out and is spectacular. (…) It fits in. It may mean that you don’t question the project so much, but rather think of the value that it adds to Malmö. It puts Malmö more explicitly on the map. And it probably also implies that more people are attracted to this place, so you become much more proud to be a resident of Malmö. Companies can say ‘here we have a building by Calatrava, Turning Torso, in one of our developing areas, and over there we have a hotel designed by Frank Gehry’; of course, if you can say that when meeting your business contacts or in other contexts discussing culture and such, … it carries a lot of weight (interview with Christer Persson). By including some details and excluding others, and thereby sculpting their narratives, the voices in my interviews can influence the listener and convince them of the new projects’ splendid qualities. There is thus a connection between the narrative and the relationship between teller and listener: “Stories delicately bring the listener around to the teller’s way of seeing the world” (Lorimer, 2003:119). By highlighting “telling details” to make the listener think or feel a certain way, the teller can transmit certain values to the listener and direct the listener’s feelings and opinions by including certain details in their narrative expression. Experience is naturally an individual affair, although, as Francine Lorimer says, “certain details can strongly suggest a certain experiential reality. And by bringing the details of an event to an audience, one can encourage others to experience the same event in the way that the teller did” (Lorimer, 2003:120). According to Lorimer, the narrative itself or way that an event is described can constitute the event. This is why on a conceptual level a hotel can still have symbolic significance: the hotel’s materiality has storytelling properties within itself. To Alan Feldman, the narrative is a textualization of body, space and power as symbolic systems: “Narratives are enacted as well as written. (…) Narrativity can be invested in material artefacts and relations that have a storytelling capacity of their own” (Feldman, 1991:14). The not-yet-realized hotel’s symbolic power is thus connected to this inherent narrative capacity: by telling a story of Malmö past and present it becomes a symbol of the striving for change. These visions and historiographies are narratives and indissolubly connected to the hotel; they are built into the hotel, just as the narrative ability is transmitted to the hotel.

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Maria Christersdotter But once the hotel is finished, the hotel communicates the new Malmö to the visitor, and another story of Malmö is told. By seeing the hotel as text, the narratives surrounding it can be described as hotales: the tales surrounding the dream-building of the region, condensed in design-projects such as this hotel. These hotales, intended as an imaginary experiencescape that will charge the Øresund region with positive values, are grounded in the hotel’s role as symbol and icon. According to Michel Foucault (1993:16), almost every society has important narratives that are told and repeated and that contribute to the production of discourses. The hotel as discourse also reproduces itself in narratives. The discourse that focuses upon the luxury hotel as a symbol of change is useful for a number of actors in Malmö. Through the use of this discourse, a new narrative of Malmö as a cool and updated city is created: If we could get a creation by Gehry here, (…) something that’s really spectacular, that people come to look at, then of course, that is something tremendously exciting for Malmö, (…) provided it’s correctly marketed of course. (…) You’ll have a building designed by him, in that interesting location, with the bridge outside, and… I have no idea what his plans are, but he can design such fantastic creations that it goes without saying that it’ll be of great significance (interview with Christer Persson). It is a tale of success that becomes visible in the hotales: the hotel is a statement of the city’s good fortune. In a similar manner, the Øresund Bridge was also described as the key to the new times (see e.g. Berg, Linde-Laursen and Löfgren 2002). The pavilion that once introduced visitors to the ongoing building of the bridge will be integrated into one of the symbols of the new Malmö. In that sense, the connection between bridge and success is once again repeated.

Transit and Mobility There is an interesting degree of mobility in this hotel-project: dreaming of the Malmö of tomorrow heading towards a bright future is corresponded by the hotel’s location by the bridgehead and facing the waterfront and the skyline of Copenhagen on the other side of the Sound. James Clifford describes global cosmopolitan centers such as Paris as hotels: places of departures and arrivals characterized by an ongoing interplay between dwelling and traveling (Clifford, 1997:30).

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Mobile Dreams He sees the hotel as transit; an arena for rootlessness and an image of the postmodern culture. This seems to be one of the most evident characteristics of great urban centers; not merely being centers, but also places of transit or spaces where flows take place. This striving for flows is visible in the Øresund region: there seems to be, on the municipality’s behalf, a longing for people who move back and forth across the bridge, people who live in one country and work in the other and become Øresund citizens at heart and in practice. By aspiring to take part of a cosmopolitan discourse and formulating these mobile dreams and visions, Malmö becomes entwined in this process of dwelling-in-traveling and traveling-in-dwelling. In Malmö’s case, this is achieved via a transfer and conflation of meaning. A sense of region and community is turned inside out as the place-bound city and region are suddenly aligned with the mobility and flexibility associated with global cosmopolitan centers like Paris, via large-scale construction projects in the form of hotels and the border-transgressing bridge. By accentuating and branding the city with the help of a hotel designed by a famous architect, its actual locality becomes more flexible. The boundaries constituted by community and region and creating an inside and an outside are being transgressed, dissolved and maintained at the same time. “Putting Malmö on the map” implies recognition of Malmö as Malmö at the very same time that it is turned into something completely different than before it was put on the map. The ambition is not to try to retain an old culture, but to try to be something different. The planned hotel is thus characterized by an intertwining of local and global processes. The local aspect involves its presence in terms of its importance to the city and the region, the municipality’s involvement in the project, the location by the bridgehead and in the building where the bridge exhibition was held. It is a project of political as well as economic interest. But at the same time, it is not likely that the hotel will – at least not visually – be a reminder of its local context. While local anchorage is possible by the prospective establishment of a museum of contemporary local design in connection with the hotel, it is really meant to be a hotel that belongs to another, more global, category. By its connections to hip places around the world, or its membership of some global community, the aim is that Malmö will, as the quotes show, also gain access to this other, global, world of trends. Jonathan Friedman, however, sees no contradiction in a simultaneous existence of local and global processes, and suggests a view of the local as, “a structure of the global (…). Couldn’t it be that the local is a relation of interlocality, thus not a cultural representation but a social and cultural practice within a larger arena, that

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Maria Christersdotter boundedness is a fundamental structure of all global arenas” (Friedman, 2002:31)? Ash Amin (1997:129) also sees the global as being constantly intertwined with the local: globalization as an extension of social relations in time and space. The local, national and global are thus seen as interdependent spheres that influence each other: “new forms of local cultural identity and self-expression, are casually bound up with globalizing processes” (Giddens, 1996:367-8, in Amin, 1997:123). In other words, the Gehry-hotel is not typical for Øresund/Scania/Malmö, but is typical for a certain cosmopolitan eliteculture; a minor, privileged, global group for which the world is small (see e.g. Friedman, 2002; Bauman, 1998). It is through this group that the important connection between hotels and mobility becomes evident. The hope of Malmö’s city planners is that the hotel’s transitcharacter will attract capital-strong individuals; people who are on the move even when they temporarily stand still. According to Richard Sennett, this mobility is – in the age of new capitalism – a sign of success. Immobility is thus taken as a sign of failure: “to stay put is to be left out” (Sennett, 1998:87). According to Zygmunt Bauman, it is “the ‘access to global mobility’ which has been raised to the topmost rank among the stratifying factors” (Bauman, 1998:87). In other words, the distinction between rich and poor is based on their mobility and the freedom to choose where they want to be. The difference between them is that the privileged (like tourists) move because of an attraction to something, while the underprivileged (vagabonds of a sort) move because of rejection. A world without vagabonds is a utopia for a society of tourists (see Bauman, 1998). The hotel is such a utopia in that its visitors are never vagabonds. This is central to the hotel’s fetishistic power. As a symbol of careless, smooth mobility, the hotel attracts this cosmopolitan group of Baumanian tourists. Many of the design-projects in Malmö are, in fact, veritable metaphors of mobility: one of the more flagrant characteristics common to the bridge, the skyscraper Scandinavian Tower, the Turning Torso twisting its way upwards and the Gehry-hotel as a transit-hall for travelers is their ability to represent and embody motion.

Conclusion Places not only are, they happen. And it is because they happen they lend themselves so well to narration, whether as history or as a story (Casey, 1996:27, in Mathiesen Hjemdahl, 2003:131).

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Mobile Dreams Edward Casey sees place as an event, and all experiences as implaced: “we are not only in places but of them” (Casey, in Mathiesen Hjemdahl, 2003:131). The planned hotel at the bridgehead shows how a place that is still at a visionary stage can also function as a tool for thinking and experiencing. The experience, the sense of place, is something active. It is something that people do. With their expectations, the municipal politicians in Malmö are active actors in this creation of an experiencescape. This article has aimed at exploring the hotel-project in terms of an imaginary experiencescape or fantasy that is about to be put into practice. It focuses upon how the planned hotel’s exclusiveness and connection to a famous architect creates an aura, which is meant to influence the Øresund region and Malmö in a positive way. This intertextuality or relationship between the hotel on one the hand and architect and region on the other, where the references to trend, luxury and style act as tools for making the region appear trendy and creative, appears in this context as some kind of conjuring trick, where the municipality’s acquisition of symbolic capital in the shape of an exclusive hotel beside the bridgehead is meant to raise the city’s status. While the Øresund Bridge links the two countries of Sweden and Denmark together, it also links the region to a larger and more global context. The Gehry-hotel links the region to a cosmopolitan context of glamour. By its very nature as a hotel, it awakens certain associations in the minds of both the actors involved in the city planning and the people observing it from outside. There is thus a relation between 1) the hotel as a concept, 2) the dreams of a new Malmö and 3) the location by the bridgehead as the entrance to the region and the country. All three are marked by a mobility that reflects the current times and the changes that take place within the region. According to Gaston Bachelard (1994), vast views, such as those facing the hotel by the bridgehead, feed the imagination and make the mind fly. The ambitious plans for a hotel at Lernacken opens the inner landscape of the imagination to an imaginative experiencescape that stretches over the Øresund horizon and that the guests might one day gaze at. The location beside the waterfront that faces the horizon seems to be rather poetic and culturally productive in itself. According to Bachelard’s way of thinking, it opens up the imagination and has the capability to evolve dreams. The regional dreams that have been illustrated in this essay are shown to be just as present and tangible components in the building of this experiencescape as any sketches, bricks or stones.

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Nostalgiascapes: The Renaissance of Danish Countryside Inns

SZILVIA GYIMÓTHY

After three decades of struggling for survival, the Danish roadside kro (kro is the Danish word for inn) is once again experiencing a boom in visitor numbers (Erhvervsbladet, 2004). This is not a consequence of a large-scale reconceptualization: the kro as an accommodation product still focuses on images of bygone hospitality and old world charm. The reportedly “unique atmosphere” and “ancient inn virtues” are conveyed by idyllic, pastoral interiors and traditional rural meals. The role of the kro as a social gathering place is equally important: it offers a traditional scene to mark family events, or entertainment in forms of summer balls and the like. Interior décor or product portfolios may change, but the essence of conviviality and warm personal service remains. Countryside inns are becoming more aware of their classic strengths, and use arguments like simplicity and stability to position themselves against global franchised hotel chains. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct representations and consumption of Danish countryside inns in order to appreciate their role as experiencescapes. The inn is a particular metaphorical meeting ground for guests, innkeepers and rural communities, offering a sense of belonging at a national, class and private/family level. These levels are connoted by patriotic nostalgia, popular culture and references to “home”. It is argued that post-modern consumption of the countryside 111

Szilvia Gyimóthy is no longer focused on values of a single national culture/history, neither is it a sole representation for the taste of the lower (or rural) class. It is possible to trace an eclectic use of European rural symbols in current Danish inn products, which may suggest that collective definitions of community and ways of belonging are important elements in nostalgic consumption.

Outlining the Kro Nostalgiascape Etymologically, nostalgia is rooted in the Greek nostos (return home) + algos (pain). This explains the original meaning of nostalgia as a pathological personal emotion. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines nostalgia as “the sense of acute homesickness” (Soanes, 2003). In everyday language, however, another meaning is more prevalent; nostalgia is a “sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past” (Soanes, ibid). Since the beginning of the nineties, market researchers have begun to turn their interest towards consumers’ nostalgic feelings about objects and situations that have either disappeared or are no longer common. The field of consumer studies coins definitions that are inspired by the second (non-pathological) meaning of the word. For example, Holbrook defines nostalgia as a “preference” (Holbrook, 1993:104) or later, as a “positive attitude” towards earlier times (Holbrook and Schindler, 1994). Authors do not seem to have any universal agreement on the temporal dimension of nostalgic stimuli: according to Davis (1979), nostalgia can only be evoked by personal (lived) experiences, while Holbrook (1993:103) argues that one could equally respond to stimuli conveyed by secondary sources (through films, literature or other narratives). In other words, empathic projections enable us to (re-) experience a bygone era, irrespective of whether it is through personal or collective memories. Christina Goulding reviews the nostalgia epidemic that hit the tourism industry at the end of the last millennium, and argues that nostalgia has become a part of the postmodern condition (Goulding, 2001:586). She stresses the arbitrariness of the remembering process, claiming that nostalgia is a “selective recall of the past”, rather than just affective memory (Goulding, 2001). Nostalgic preferences say a great deal about affective consumption patterns in general, revealing personal connections towards objects or places, as well as individual or collective identity building processes. Consumers can identify nostalgically with places, people or things from yesteryear with the help of existential or aesthetic stimuli – while at the same time distancing themselves from current situations, objects and 112

Nostalgiascapes development. Hence, together with positive or bittersweet feelings about the past, nostalgia may also include negative emotions, such as a melancholic awareness of passing time or the experience of alienation or rootlessness in the present (cf. Goulding, 2001). Bryan Turner regards the nostalgic paradigm as a “fundamental condition of human estrangement” (Turner, 1987:150), and identifies its four major dimensions. These are all mournful and melancholic: a sense of historical decline, loss of moral certainty, the disappearance of individual freedom and a loss of simplicity and emotional spontaneity. Nostalgic narratives of the “golden days” of the past can be sentimental and pathos-filled as well as ironic or sorrowful reflections on the present. Nostalgic representations always draw on the past, although the motives for what is chosen to be represented and what is not, are a product of the contemporary. As Gabriel notes, “nostalgia is a state arising out of present conditions as much as out of the past itself” (Gabriel, 1993:121). Tourist attractions, such as open-air museums, re-enactment centers and mediaeval restaurants, all thrive on a strategically stylized past, and reinterpret or even re-route historical meanings (cf. Goldman and Papson, 1994). The designers of these experiencescapes remodel the “wild and untamed” past into a coherent (and conflict-free) thematic narrative to fit actual consumer ideals. It is important to point out that these nostalgic experiencescapes or nostalgiascapes may only work to full effect (e.g. evoke a yearning for the past that results in the purchase of memorabilia or other additional economic investments) if visitors develop a cognitive or emotional attachment to the place, era or people within the topical context. Identifying nostalgically with anything in the past requires at least some basic previous knowledge or familiarity with the subject. Consumers must have a common interpretive frame of reference in order to effectively decipher and act amidst the signs and symbols of nostalgic experiencescapes. When marketers claim that “inns embody Danish nostalgia” in tourist ads, they anticipate that guests will make mental shortcuts to mythological images of weary travelers in stagecoaches, Breughel-esque peasant celebrations and chatty and rosy-cheeked wenches serving steaming delicacies. Thus, nostalgia is not only about longing, but also belonging. Munro (1998) notes that belonging implies a “rootedness in the past”. In the case of Danish inns, numerous images of collective memory exist in the form of stories, cinematic descriptions and folksongs, all of which denote the historical rootedness of a special accommodation concept. This raises a number of questions as to the role that nostalgiascapes play in supporting a sense of belonging today. Which aspects of collective memories are turned into experiencescapes, and how are 113

Szilvia Gyimóthy these meanings used and emphasized in actual redefinitions of collective identities (such as nationality, class or kinship)? In order to illuminate the themes behind the inn nostalgiascapes, I draw on a number of different data sources. These include interviews with guests, managers and distributors, as well as printed and webbased advertising material. Furthermore, I also consulted representations of inns in Danish literature, epics, paintings and films. A mythology-oriented semiotic and linguistic analysis (Echtner, 1999; Silverman, 1983; Randazzo, 1995) of these sources illuminated hidden aspects of the concept “nostalgiascapes”. I will present these findings according to three levels of identity constructions or belonging (national, social class, and private), each bearing different nostalgic stimuli in collective memories.

Patriotic Nostalgia: The Kro as a Representation of Danishness Danish Inn Holidays: (The place) where Denmark is loveliest52 The post-war view of rural Denmark is heavily loaded with patriotism, and the perception of Danishness is closely associated with stereotyped rural symbols. Among them we find images of roadside inns with thatched-roofs and half-timbered frames. In the fifties, the Danish kro featured in several lystspil – a cinematic genre in Denmark at that time (e.g. “Three Men Find an Inn”, or “The Daughter of the Innkeeper”)53 – as well as in the romantic novels of Morten Korch. These works drew on the countryside as a rose-tinted coulisse for popular comedies that included a large village character gallery, with classic typecast supporting actors, such as the country postman, the jovial innkeeper and his cheerful family. In cinematic representations, inns are always placed in an idyllic landscape of fields of sunflowers, rolling hills and an intense blue summer sky. Often the surroundings are rounded off with the obligatory Dannebrog (Danish national flag), songbirds and sounds from a farm. Inns have arguably become a symbol for Danishness in the post-war period. This is hardly surprising, as until the eighties, the slogan was sharp and succinct: “Danish Inns: This is Denmark!” (although this probably didn’t mean very much to nonnative guests). Even today, Danish guests associate inns with the Danish countryside and include the natural flora and fauna as an iconic cliché: 52 53

Dansk Kroferie: Hvor Danmark er smukkest. Slogan from 1979. Original titles: Tre finder en kro and Kroejerens datter

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Nostalgiascapes I think the kro is typically Danish, like a cottage idyll at the end of a narrow, winding road (…). Of course, there are lots of other things that are Danish, but I always think of just this stuff, the larks and things, you know; this hackneyed picture of Denmark (Interview with a female guest at Tyrstrup Kro, August 2002). The idealization of the agricultural rural society and its connections with patriotism in fiction echoes the analytical frame of Linde-Laursen (1991), who described three central notions characterizing the development of Danish national identity since the mid 1800s: peasants, family-firms and democracy (1991:42). He argues that the symbolic values of these elements dominated the Danish self-image long into modernity (probably up to achieving EC-membership in 1972). Smallscale local patriotism is still strong in the Danish countryside and is materialized through the combination of concepts of hygge and community. Hygge is a central concept in the Danish self-image. Translated as conviviality or coziness, it can be used to describe traditional architectural style and interior lighting, as well as intimate social gatherings. The latter probably inspired the authors of the Xenophobes’ Guide to the Danes (Harris et al., 1999) to interpret hygge as “social nirvana” – a state of unpretentious gratification evoked by pleasant surroundings and all-embracing informality. Innkeepers often defined their “hostmanship” (term coined by Gunnarsson and Blohm, 2003) in terms of a facilitating role, i.e. by making the guests feel at ease in the informal inn environment. This could materialize as a “smart and witty comment combined with a wink of the eye”, as one innkeeper put it.54 Danish inns are seen as the institutionalization of hygge by innkeepers and guests alike. Owner-couples are referred to as krofadder (kro-Dad) or kromutter (kro-Mum), which reinforces associations of parent-roles and family homes. By identifying with “places for everyone”, or by accommodating “The Family of Denmark”, the kro claims to represent another Danish value: a sense of democratic togetherness, irrespective of social class. They embrace not only “suits” but also “overalls”, most notably workmen and master craftsmen; a pluralist ideal that appeals to their main clientele of older, middle class people. For many informants, the democratic community ideal implied being surrounded by (local) people of a lower social class without feeling completely out of place, 54

I had the chance of experiencing this facilitation, when a waiter in Aarslev Kro served an oversized wienersnitzel with the words “Have good fight” instead of the more formal “Good appetite”.

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Szilvia Gyimóthy which they dealt with in two different ways. Some acknowledged the situation by boldly approaching the locals in their “lair” or deliberately going to the inn in grubby/leisure clothes to “slum it.” Other guests (typically foreigners or golf tourists) could maintain a spatial and psychological distance from the kro-gemeinschaft, by dining in the more select restaurant. Democracy in terms of the kro means segregated facilities, where the taproom (skænkestuen or slyngelstuen) is physically separated from the more refined dining room. At several locations, innkeepers decided to stop accommodating local drinkers altogether. As the owner of Rold Gammel Kro claimed: I don’t believe in a mixed establishment being both a pub and a hotel. No, we won’t be serving any more “blålys” [a strong Danish beer, typically drunk by countryside lads] here! Pinball machines and card or dice-playing locals are relegated to the taproom – itself becoming more of a rarity during the nineties. Some traveling workmen I interviewed regretted this as they felt out of place in an elegant restaurant in their working clothes, and instead preferred to eat their dinner with the staff in the kitchen or in their rooms. However, dividing different classes of guests (societas and communitas) in terms of “clean” and “dirty” areas not only marginalizes certain groups, but also deprives the inns of their role as a ritualized sociospace where strangers of different social strata can mingle. The physical servicescape of Danish inns is becoming fragmented; only allowing admittance to certain affluent customer segments. It is hard to spot a nostalgic sense of togetherness (or a sense of community in its warm-glow and all-inclusive sense) among traveling businessmen devouring their dinner-for-one in a solemn, refurbished dining hall. At Céleste – a Provencal style kro-restaurant named after its divine gourmet meals – I observed the solitary dining of four guests, all seated at a respectable distance from each other and looking at each others’ backs. They consumed a three-course meal in solemn silence and in less than thirty-five minutes. The service was flawless, polite, effective, and reduced to a minimalized script of disembodied service experiences. The waiter re-enacted the relevant installments of restaurant dining with each guest (menu selection, tasting of the wine and requesting comments) in strikingly similar phrases and manners. Despite these guests physically sharing the dining experiencescape in time and space, there was no dialogue or socialization with each other – they were mentally isolated and alone. The disappearance of genuine social relationships is reminiscent of Max Weber’s iron cage metaphor of seeing individuals as cog-wheels 116

Nostalgiascapes in social processes (cf. Bryman, 1987). This functional disconnectedness is also underlined in a number of technology-based service encounters, such as personalized messages popping up on the bedroom television screen. Some inns are developing into something that Semprini calls the “cocoon-prison hotel” (Semprini, 1992:26), in their aspiration to attract the higher social classes. While the “rural province” restaurant concept reinterprets the inn nostalgiascape as a perfect coulisse in order to match present market demands, the intensity of social interactions between strangers (during ordinary workdays) seems to fade away. Most Danes still regard countryside inns as folkeeje (people’s property). Understood as a patriotic/national value, this term suits the democratic community perspective (inns are for everyone). However, this is not enough to explain why today’s consumers identify nostalgically with this particular type of accommodation rather than with the fine and traditional Danish manor houses (Danske Herregårder). One plausible explanation is that inns also carry and mix past and present cues of Danish popular culture. In the next section I will proceed to unlock representations of lower middle class taste through writings and narratives about feasts and family rituals held at inns.

Popular Culture: The Kro as a Representation of Lower Class Taste Festive, folksy and fun.55 Thanks to historical roots going back to medieval times, inns have established an image as places for feasts and social gatherings. This is well documented in Danish literature and epic writings. The Golden Age56 theater prima donna, Louise Heiberg (1892), writes in her memoirs about: ”Sang, Glæde, Dans og Lystighed paa en Kro” (Song, Joy, Dance and Merriment in a Kro), while composer Holger Drachman’s lyrics reveal that kro balls were socially accepted arenas in which to meet a spouse (Drachmann, 1875): But if there’s dance in the kro, 55

“Festlig, folkelig, fornøjelig”. A cliché used for Danish inns by several informants. 56 The Golden Age refers to the Danish romantic period between 1800-1850, characterized by cultural wealth and prominent artists and philosophers, including H.C. Andersen and S. Kierkegaard among others.

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Szilvia Gyimóthy hey hop, my dear, I spring in ankle shoes and silky vest. And I have a date with the girl to dance with me all night long and next day I will bring a ring to her finger57 The folksy image of inns remains to this day, although the form of feasts has changed. In the nineteen-twenties, Herlev Kro boasted summer balls with soloist performances that were popular among Copenhageners. These were sensationally modern at the time, as the inner garden was equipped with heating, electric lights, a fountain and later a bowling alley. In the seventies, inns housed many popular “lørdagsdans” (Saturday night dance), when a small orchestra or a keyboard player played melodies from the so-called DanskTop genre (easy listening folksy songs in Danish). As one of the guests explained: When people think about an inn, they think of a Saturday night dance, a rusty keyboard-player singing Three White Doves or the songs of Jodle Birge or Birthe Kjær (Interview with a male guest at Mikkelborg Kro, August 2002). During the eighties and nineties, inns lent their coulisses to the Sommerrevyer (Summer Revues); a special form of theatre uniting satire and musical parodies. This form of light-hearted entertainment combined with eating out (still popular in the provinces) primarily attracted a local audience and second-home visitors, although it seems as though the Summer Revue has lost its market in recent years. Nowadays, inns flirt with finding new forms of entertainment to accompany their weekend menus, and some, like stand-up comedy shows (Dåselatteren/canned laughter) draw full houses. Being historic socioscapes, inns have a linking value (Aubert-Gamet and Cova, 1999:37), which means that they facilitate and nurture particular forms of social interaction among hosts and guests. Inns can be seen as ‘common places’ of societal ritualization (Noschis, 1984), and their particular semi-public service arenas are privileged natural points of contact between guests and locals. Inns simultaneously represent a substitute, an extension and an antithesis of “home”. The krostue (taproom), bissekamre or slyngelstue (the rough or scoundrels’ saloon) are established “places for communality”, encouraging ritualized interactions, such as card and dice playing, storytelling, and 57

”Men er der Dans i Byens Kro/Hej hop, min Tro, /I Ankelsko/Og Silkevest jeg springer./Og Stævne har jeg Pigen sat/Til Dans med mig den hele Nat/Og næste Dag jeg bringer /En Ring til hendes Finger”

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Nostalgiascapes generally involving contact and conversations with unfamiliar people. The kro nostalgiascape (especially during feasts and weekend events) still connote a social free space or an anonymous playground removed from the codes of conduct of home. In this indulgencescape, “you can get drunk or picked up – without having to worry about your friends, bosses, exes or currents seeing you” (“The Stranger’s Guide to Hotel Bars” cited in Lashley & Morrison, 2003:37). Inns represent the taste of the lower middle classes, not only in the entertainment forms they offer, but also in their furnishings and menu suggestions. The aesthetic dimension of gleaming copper pots, paintings of the Brølende Kronhjort (The Roaring Deer) or Madame Blå kitchenware, drums up notions of the old-fashioned. One informant went so far as to call the combination of solid oak tables, thick soft carpets and flowery wallpaper “downright tasteless” – whereas it reminded others of their grandma’s house. The decor is too dark and old-fashioned for modern tastes, and many of those informants bred and brought up with light and simple Scandinavian design could not imagine creating a kro interior at home. On the other hand, visiting a kro was likened to time travel; recalling childhood memories of visiting relatives in the countryside. Clasping to the oldworld style as something of a relic, most guests demanded that the strictly rural theme and atmosphere of Danish inns be maintained. Modernization of the buildings was a constant object of critique: Guest: It was cozier before. Interviewer: OK, what is it that has taken away the cozy atmosphere? Guest: Well, the ones who had the place before, she did a lot of things with dried flowers and that kind of thing, and the bar was a little bit different, and there was a small reception area. Now they have repainted to make it a bit lighter. It was a bit muted before, so it has become a little bit different. Interviewer: Yes. And now it is not as cozy? Guest: Yes, it is still cozy, but not like before, it was somewhat different then. It was a little bit warmer. The colors are a little too cold now, yes. It has taken some of the warmth away, you might say (Interview with a female guest at Billum Kro, August 2002). Notions of kromad (kro-food) are also an embodiment of popular Danish taste in food. This was described as delicious and wholesome typical Danish country fare, prepared daily from fresh ingredients. Guests listed several food processing methods that are nowadays only

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Szilvia Gyimóthy practiced by the elderly in the countryside. A younger female guest recounted her immediate associations: “Things like elderberries are preserved and bottled and meals are prepared from ingredients straight from the ground”. On the other hand, kro-food was regarded as too heavy and fatty for everyday, or even for frequent consumption. Slogans like “Spis dig glad i Grethes mad!” (Indulge in Grethe’s food) witness to the hedonist argument of kro advertisements, and guests pointed to the Tuborg poster “Thirsty Man” as the most fitting brand personality for Danish inns (Johns & Gyimóthy, 2003). Although it is seen as a repository of Danish values, the inn also has an otherness that sets it apart from modern life. There is a tension between the ideological, carefree appeal of countryside lifestyle and today’s healthconscious nutrition practices. The massification and internationalization of Danish tourism consumption led to a widening of the gap between these solid and stable ideals and guests’ preferences. Inspired by charter trips with tour operators like Spies or Tjaereborg in the seventies and eighties, the Danish working and middle classes have begun to endorse ‘exotic’ culinary specialties from the Mediterranean. Crackled pork, parsley sauce and caramelized potatoes were out, while sangria, olive oil, tzatziki and Italian bread have marched into private kitchens. Innkeepers were quick to follow suit, and renewed their restaurant concepts with new elements, inspired by dishes from Italy, France and Spain. In a similar way, the interior of the krostue is changing. At many places these are upgraded to restaurant status and refurbished to evoke rural France or Italy (preferably Tuscany). Hand-written recipes in French adorn the walls and the table is laid with rustic pottery decorated with olive leaves. The menu matches the surroundings perfectly. Recently I was served olive tapenade as hors-d’oeuvres, followed by tournedos aux morelles with steamed carrots, pommes ballentine and walnut-filled pears for dessert. Although inns are in the process of “snobbing up”, it seems that fine and diversified products do not always match the preferences of different guest segments (see above). The disappearance or segregation of the lower classes takes a great deal of the attraction away for the leisure customer from the middle classes. Many of these people come to the inns to “snob down” and to observe or even participate in the everyday aspects of a rural gathering place (“being a peasant for a day”). There is a great attraction in idealizing life in the countryside, but segregated facilities, changes of menu and wine cards often get in the way of this playful populism. So how can innkeepers remain loyal to their “roots” without having to worry about new developments making their product “too elegant”? 120

Nostalgiascapes (Clearly, the Danish schlager, “Three White Doves”, does not match with tournedos aux morelles in the same concept). But the challenge is not simply to balance the new with the traditional, Danish with international or societas and communitas. As one innkeeper noted, the quest is to keep pace with the latest trends without overshooting the taste of the middle classes: We mustn’t go to the other extreme either. It should always be possible to offer old-fashioned Danish food of beef with soft onions and shooting star (a lunch meal based on fish). We shouldn’t scare people by being too fine and too French. The level should not be too high, despite the fine carpets in the restaurant. It would be a mistake to become too pretentious (Interview with the owner of Sallingsund Kro, April 2003) Nostalgic consumption is not only about declaring and exposing preferences of taste in order to mark our belonging to a certain social class (cf. Bourdieu 1979) Curiously, those guests admitting to being fans of fusion cooking and to having functional and light furnishings at home, were often searching for the opposite experiencescapes while on holiday. Similar to summer cottages, the inn is a nostalgic space free from modern trends of aesthetic style-remakes: kitsch, vintage, traditional and solid styles (both in furniture and cooking) are acceptable here. However, this temporary “snobbing down” behavior of slumming it, reflected in inverted menu or music preferences, is not only about “proletarian snobbism” or flirting with popular culture. Arguably, they tell us about the consumers’ need to return to their rural roots and to define those places as “home”. As one innkeeper explained: If you’re out 170 days a year you don’t feel like eating fine dishes and tenderloin every day. You just want to relax, hygge and get a beer, and there are also others who order a biksemad (Danish hash with fried eggs) (Interview with the manager of Aarslev Kro, April 2003). In regarding inns as metaphors of home, it is possible to infer that consumers do not only want to slum it and assume a rural identity for a day. Another plausible explanation is that guests want to be themselves, rather than having to live up to any role expectations and role identities (cf. Goffman, 2000). The longing for a mental “home” characterized by rural naivety, leisure and tranquility in a hectic

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Szilvia Gyimóthy everyday life has been recognized by inns and other countryside sociospaces as a market demand. The contemporary success of Danish inns may be accounted to their eclectic and pluralist approach to redefining themselves as extensions of a private sphere like home.

Ways of Belonging: The Kro as a Representation of Home Danish Inn Holidays: Your home when you’re out!58 Hotels and inns are typical extensions of the home in that they have been providing shelter, food and protection for the ‘weary wayfarer’ since the beginning of commercial hospitality. The concept of nodal refuges and watering holes scattered around the countryside reinforces connotations of the “home” in an increasingly mobile world. For example, soliditet (stability and reliability) was an important value that informants attached to Danish inns, through frequent comments about the “good, genuine middle classes”, “master craftsmen” and “familiarity”. One Danish respondent summed up the value system particularly well: Guest: (a kro means) good genuine Danish food and maybe a glass of beer, and where it is possible to spend the night. It’s home, and soundness. Interviewer: What is sound, the food? Guest: Yes, the food, but also the decor and the style.... The table setting must be of a certain standard, the service must be genuine; sensible, you see, not the fancy Copenhagen hotel quality or D'Angleterre quality, but genuine... raw materials... and prepared with care... and they should know what they are talking about (Interview with a male guest at Herløv Kro, August 2002). The above lines echo the slogan of Holiday Inn’s (“No surprises”!) and point to a safe, well-worn world in which guests know “what is what”. Beyond the demands of Danishness and traditional atmosphere, the sense of a familiar place seems crucial for guests. This could be reinforced by the small scale of these establishments, where guests could reasonably expect to be greeted personally and recognized again. 58

(Dansk Kroferie: ”Dit hjem når du er kørt ud!). This is a slogan with a double meaning, and has been in use since 2002. It can also be interpreted as: “Your home, when you are worn out”.

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Nostalgiascapes

The advantage of having such a small staff is the personal style. There is a guy or a lady you recognize from the day before and they remember your face when they greet you in the morning: ‘Hello, here you come again’. Or there is this kro-Dad pottering around and telling jokes (Interview with a male guest at Græsted Kro, August 2002). As inns (at least in their idealized form) are family-run, for many respondents they provided a familiar, informal atmosphere. In addition to this, but perhaps also as a consequence of it, guests could expect individual treatment, since in principle they would be quickly recognized and their needs assessed. (“The innkeeper and his wife have some kind of ability to realize [that] there is a stranger here!”) This corresponded with the generally held picture of the friendly, jovial innkeeper and was also supported by actual instances of kindness and excellent service that guests said they had received. Familiarity was also underlined in the way that innkeepers (deliberately or accidentally) unveiled fragments of their private domain. For example, guests developed a feel for the place by noticing the innkeeper’s dog sitting in the reception area, or the host family’s children doing their homework at the bar. Others (typically working craftsmen) were sometimes invited to join a barbecue party after the restaurant had closed. These encounters in the ‘back parlor’ were not staged for the sake of the guests, and host-guests roles were more reminiscent of a private party than of a commercial hospitality situation (Lashley and Morrison, 2000). This recalls Noschis’ (1984) notion of ‘extensions of the home’, where a part of private space is extended into the public space. Extensions of the home have the capacity to simultaneously protect and expose the intimacy of an individual and can thus potentially re-route a sense of belonging to an idealized community. Another important finding was the ideal of having time or living life in the slow lane. Rather than being irritated over longer waiting times, guests could enjoy South Jutland’s pace of life at an inn. Quality of life is, in this case, defined in terms of a utopic mañana-land, and the latest inn advertisements endorse the art of slowness. This is the place where meals are prepared (taking the time it takes), according to authentic recipes, the place where guests have time for each other, and where the hosts take their time to explain about the local history. Danish inns are not the only concepts built around the antithesis of speed and instant solutions, however. Slow food, slow cities (Cittá Slow) and recently,

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Szilvia Gyimóthy slow travel all worship the scarcest of goods in the hypermodern society: time. The postmodern consumption of rural nostalgiascapes goes beyond both national and class identities. Rural nostalgiascapes are today reorganized into a coherent collection of signs for tradition, continuity and gemeinsschaft (see Allon, 2000), which can also be deciphered along the private/personal sphere. Being simple and reliable accommodation in the countryside, Danish inns are well-used symbols of a larger “home” concept: connoting Denmark, childhood memories and also signifying the private domain. This implies that inns are capable of prompting selective memories of the past, regardless of the visitor’s cultural origin. A cozy thatched roofed Danish inn, serving the kro-Dad’s Æbleflæsk (Fried Apple and Bacon), signifies some form of reliable countryside authenticity for Danish, Italian and American guests alike – although the number and nature of deciphered signs may differ among individual consumers. An important competitive argument of this accommodation product is to maintain some sort of an impression of home – whose epithets are more important than its location. “Home” is defined in terms of timelessness, stability, safety and community, and postmodern consumers look for signs to confirm an imaginary return to home. As commodified nostalgiascapes, inns profit by maintaining illusions of familiarity, idyll and permanency – despite the countryside having long ceased to exhibit many of these aspects.59 Being homesick for the rural is connected to an alienation from today’s mobile society, and it is well identifiable in the proliferation of commodified “slow” and “stable” products. The renaissance of Danish inns may point towards a yearning for some sort of idealized fixed point contrasted to an increasingly fluid and fragmented world as well as to the degree of alienation and disorientation in the present.

Conclusions Danish inns are historical commercial accommodation establishments. An analysis of various aspects of the use and consumption of the kro may provide us with an understanding of nostalgiascapes as a particular form of experiencescape. Whether deliberately designed or not, nostalgiascapes are used as common denominators inherited from the past to guide present social practices. Based on arguments of 59

For example, Lanchester reports from a disenchanted British countryside of unfriendly and atomised rural communities being fragmented by commuting and asocial newcomers (Lanchester, 2004).

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Nostalgiascapes authenticity, genuineness and tradition, inns are particular metaphorical meeting grounds for guests, innkeepers and rural communities, offering a sense of belonging together. While much of the leisure experience is likened to a liminoid, ritualized quest for the Other and the unknown nostalgic consumption celebrates the familiar and the known and reinforces kinship (cf. Prentice, 2004). In the case of inns, this affiliation can be expressed at a national, class and private/family level. In the past fifty years, the positioning of this hospitality product has undergone major symbolic shifts, depending on a deliberate selection of the inns’ cultural history that supported dominant preferences of belonging and togetherness. In modernity, rural nostalgia romanticized the Danish countryside as a patriotic (national) symbol. Kros, together with selected flora or fauna species, have become a cliché for Danishness, paying homage to pre-modern agricultural society. The countryside as nostalgiascape materialized national collective memories in post-war Denmark, including definitions of democracy, hygge (conviviality) and small family firms. It was possible to identify elements of Danish popular culture throughout the study, and furthermore to see that the identity-building process is closely connected with idealizing the taste and consumption patterns of the agricultural working class. In embodying the ideals of a mythical bygone age, inns have become a romantic object of consumption for leisure travelers, who indulge in temporary role switching and inversions of preferences. Inns are public spaces that demonstrate an illusory stationary rural habitus. Each building block in their experiencescape – the interior decor, social gatherings and menus – can be popularized and commodified to satisfy the yearnings of the urban middle class. Today, inns are mostly positioned as nostalgic countryside “homes” for mobile consumers, idealized in terms of contrasts against fast cosmopolitanism and emphasizing the virtues of slowness, stability, security and community. Although it is possible to draw a chronology based on the changing thematic emphasis in marketing efforts (from patriotic nostalgia and popular culture to references to “home”), it is argued that guests may refer to all three aspects simultaneously, depending on which is meaningful for them or which evokes bittersweet or ironic sentiments. This arbitrariness implies that guests are far less critical when assessing the symbolic coherence of the inn experiencescape than interior stylists would expect. Consider the easygoing guest comments on the Thai-inspired furnishings at Herløv Kro: I: Did you see that there was a Thai-woman standing in the entrance hall? Have you seen her? 125

Szilvia Gyimóthy R: Yah, the small statue? Yeah. I: What do you think of that in a Danish hotel? R: I assume that it has some personal significance to the management. I: And there are little elephants around! R: They have a tendency to go with Thai-women! Elephants have a tendency to go with Thai-women in a decor (Interview with two male guests, August 2002). Experiencescapes are metaphorical commercial landscapes of social interactions. They are designed by meticulously selected sensory cues and material props to maintain the illusion of an imagined world. All these hints are streamlined to prompt yearnings on the part of the customer, and can thus be regarded as direct or symbolic objects of consumption. The abundance of merchandise to be found in museum shops or concept cafés is a materialization of these yearnings and a result of careful selection. A narrow path of orthodoxy prescribes what the concept can bear, and one small deviation from the hyper-real narrative or a topical mismatch can easily break the impression of authenticity (for instance, actors in an historic re-enactment must not wear watches or glasses). On the other hand, nostalgiascapes have a history as genuine “wild” places (like Attfield’s “wild things” [2000]), and do not have to rely on harmonized commercial cues to make emotional connections with a variety of social groupings. An inn might, but does not have to highlight material evidences from the Danish Golden Age or romanticized rural communities, because the linkage is already resident in polyphonic (non-commercial) narratives. Nostalgiascapes can be advertised as “untamed”. Should innkeepers decide to design thematic packages, they have much greater freedom to choose and interchange cues around different levels of belonging (national, class or private) for their concept. Compared to many other forms of experiencescapes, nostalgiascapes have a more robust and sound symbolic construction. They can bear a plurality of prompts, allowing an eclectic iconic use of Danish interior design, Tuscan gastronomy or oriental hospitality. Even if they are inconsistent and inauthentic in contrast to professionally orchestrated, thematic concepts, these can be read, like the owner’s individual palm, as an invitation to consumers to share personal preferences and history. The less that the kro and other nostalgiascapes care about being faithful to a single interpretation of their heritage, the more genuine they might be perceived.

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7

Management Strategies and the Need for Fun TOM O’DELL

Serious play is about improvising with the unanticipated in ways that create new value. Any tools, technologies, techniques, or toys that let people improve how they play seriously with uncertainty is guaranteed to improve the quality of innovation (Schrage, 2000:2). Revulsion against bureaucratic routine and pursuit of flexibility has produced new structures of power and control, rather than created the conditions which set us free (Sennett, 1998:47). Within much of academia, work and play constitute two spheres of daily life that are all too often framed and studied separately from one another.60 Perpetuating the degree to which these two fields continue 60

I am aware that this division is not airtight. However, it is at least partially reflected in the manner in which work and play have been defined as subjects of study. On one side of the equation we find an institutionalized investigation of work in such research fields as working life studies, the anthropology of work, and in much of the research that is conducted within business administration. On the other side of the equation we find forms of play being investigated in tourism research and leisure studies. Obviously, there is scholarship being done on both sides of the divide that transcends the distinction I am making here (and some of

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Tom O’Dell to be treated as analytically distinct, we find deep-rooted perceptions of the value of each field in facilitating our understanding of the processes, relationships and problems associated with daily life. As Nigel Thrift points out, play “…is regarded as peripheral to the real business of life, at best adding a little oil to the wheels of social structure, at worst a trivial distraction” (1997:146). Work is aligned with the serious side of life as something that we need to understand, and something that deserves scholarly attention. Play, in contrast, belongs to the realm of the frivolous, the relaxed and the joy-filled. It too may be a field of investigation that is interesting to interrogate, but as some have argued (Fainstein and Judd, 1999), it is easily dismissed as a less important field of study than work. At the very least, work and play are usually understood to be qualitatively different and separate. In the argument that follows, I would like to point to some of the ways in which the two are linked and entwined. In order to do this, I shall take a night of bowling as a point of departure. Here, the chapter begins by describing a specific bowling hall, Big Bowl, and looks at how this venue has been transformed in recent years and drawn into the folds of the experience economy. The text then goes on to show how this and other entertainment arenas are being incorporated into the management strategies of businesses located in both the private and public sectors. Finally, the chapter concludes by pointing to the significance of new formalized forms of play as mechanisms of employer control that extend beyond the traditional boundaries of the working place, and into arenas long associated with the private lives of employees.

Making Reservations for Experiences In starting I should point out that, as an ethnologist who grew up in the United States, I never associated bowling allies with anything that could at first glance be connected with the Experience Economy. In the United States, bowling has traditionally been a working-class phenomenon. Speak to Americans about bowling and one rapidly enters a smoke filled world in which people rent worn out, dirty red and white shoes. It is a world filled with the woody sounds of rolling balls and tumbling pins. And in many ways, it seems to have been a world that has held itself just beyond the hygienic reach of modernity – this research is cited below), but this work is not indicative of the majority of research currently being conducted around the themes of work and play. I am here arguing for a need to rethink the work/play distinction.

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Management Strategies and The Need for Fun bathrooms which most people have tried to avoid, overflowing ashtrays on the scoring desk (itself plastered with graffiti), and those rental shoes…whose feet have they been on, and do you really want to know? And thus the shock on a recent evening, as my wife and I and a mutual friend of ours stood on the sidewalk outside of Big Bowl in Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, and encountered a long line of people waiting to get into the bowling alley. Listening to these people talking, it became apparent that they came from the same place of work, although many of them had taken time to tidy themselves up. The scent of freshly applied perfume and after-shave filled the air around us. Many of the women appeared to have just applied a fresh layer of make-up, and a number of the men seemed to have similarly spent more than a few moments in front of the mirror. Upon entering Big Bowl we were met by a neatly dressed hostess in the entrance who took care of our jackets for a small fee. The walls around us were paneled in dark wood. A host wearing a blazer and tie led the group in front of us down a flight of steps to the bowling alley, and we followed. The bowling alley itself was dark, lit only by purplish “black lights”. I am not a very good bowler, but the darkness of the alley made things even more difficult. It was absolutely impossible to see the hash marks on the lane that one would usually use to aim the ball. Disco lights, directed at the area from which you throw the ball, swirled in tact with the loud music, further distracting me. And a bit later, just as I was about to throw a ball, smoke was pumped into the alley making it completely impossible to see the pins. Unable to bowl, people laughed, had a drink, and waited for the smoke to dissipate. All the while, the score was kept automatically by a computer, and was displayed on a television screen just above our seats. Computer generated videos played on the screen whenever someone threw a strike or hit a tough shot. (One video, for example, showed an animated bowling ball dive-bombing on a hang glider and knocking down a bunch of pins located at the bottom of a canyon). On the far right hand side of the bowling alley a staircase led up to a restaurant. Seven or eight pool tables were arranged in the area just in front of the steps. The area just in front of the bowling lanes was taken up by a card table (a Big Bowl hostess was taking bets and dealing the cards for a hand of 21), a bar serving beer and drinks, and a number of tables at which people drank, talked and laughed. In another secluded corner of the alley, a special arcade room was filled with slot machines, air hockey tables, and large video games in which two to four people could compete against one another in downhill skiing and car racing. 129

Tom O’Dell

Techniques of Experiencescaping It was obvious that much more than bowling was going on here. Big Bowl had been completely revamped since I had last bowled there a few years earlier. At that time the venue was simply an ordinary, neat and clean bowling alley. Now, it seemed as though Big Bowl had undergone a metamorphosis and become a disco, restaurant, gambling hall, billiard room, arcade and pub all rolled into one. It had, in short, become an experience center. But the attempt to turn a night of bowling into an experience (something which is very ephemeral) had a very concrete and material base to it. The intentionally constructed components around which this experience was (hoped) to be organized could be found in the purple lighting, loud music, flashing and swirling disco lights, smoke, alcohol, television screens, arcade games, video images, food and card tables – all of which functioned in tandem to create a sense of excitement and exhilaration. A sense of privilege and exclusivity was accentuated in the venue by the dark wooden paneled walls, the tidy and trim clothing worn by the staff and the wall- to-wall carpeting that softened each step the guests took on their way to their designated alley. The screening process conducted at the door every evening further heightened this sense of exclusivity: only individuals who clothed themselves “neatly,” and those who met the age requirements (23 for women, 25 for men) were allowed admittance. The materiality of the evening was even spatially organized via the juxtaposition of several very different entertainment forms that, when put together, produced a slightly different experience than that which is ordinarily associated with a night of bowling. What Big Bowl offers is something that in Sweden has come to be called, “disco-bowling.” While disco-bowling might be an entertainment form that is currently more popular in Scandinavia than in many other parts of the world, it is part of a larger global phenomenon that celebrates hybridity and actively mixes entertainment forms. This is part of the same phenomenon which has led Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks to join forces with Sega Enterprises Ltd., Universal Studios, and former executives from Disney and Atari Games Corp. Together, these Goliaths of the entertainment world have formed Sega GameWorks LLC (the name itself is a hybrid) which is developing into a chain of entertainment centers combining upscale food and dining with cinematic visuals, arcade games, and the thrill of sports. As a feature article in Fast Company explained: The future is not exactly movies, and its not exactly games…These guys have taken the next sports bar and future rock show and

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Management Strategies and The Need for Fun have created…some kind of fusion – something different, something that starts with old and familiar elements and then makes something new and fresh and fundamentally other….It’s all hybrid, fusion, transformation – the morphing of the future of entertainment (Burr, 2000:253). At first glance it is tempting to describe places such as GameWorks and Big Bowl as hybrid localities producing entertainment forms that are enthusiastically called “cross-overs” in the literature. In reality, however, Big Bowl (and its brethren) is more of a smorgasbord than a hybrid. The concept of hybridity, after all, has origins in biological theory, and refers to the process by which two different species (x and y) can be mated to produce an offspring which is neither identical to x or y, nor completely indistinguishable from x or y. The product is something new, but also something familiar.61 In hybridity, similarities and differences penetrate one another in a way that makes them inseparable. At Big Bowl, entertainment opportunities are not really intertwined in this way but they are rather juxtaposed in an additive form. That is, Big Bowl offers a multitude of open scripts with which people can orient their evening. In this sense Big Bowl does not actually produce experiences, but the framework around which very different experiences can be constructed. Within business administration, this additive element of the Experience Economy is referred to as mass customization.62 Rather than offering customers a standardized product, the trick is to provide a series of units or modules that people can mix and match as they please and thus become the producers of their own experiences. This reflects the catch 22 aspect of the Experience Economy. Businesses may want to package and sell “great experiences”, but in the end, “great experiences” are very personal phenomena. And indeed, if packaged too strongly, the intended experience can seem hollow. However, the additive element of mass customization reflects only one of the cultural processes at work behind the experiences generated at Big Bowl. The manner in which people relate to the diverse material surroundings of the bowling alley also establishes the grounds for very different experiences. For example, the competition offered around the bowling, the video games and the billiard tables cull the potential for immersion in the experience, producing the effect of “making time

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See Bhabha, 1990; Friedman, 1998; Young, 1995 for different perspectives and criticisms of the concept of hybridity 62 Pine and Gilmore, 1999:72.

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Tom O’Dell fly”.63 Alcohol, food and loud music provide the grounds for an altered bio-physical experience – which is also an aspect of a roller coaster ride or a good horror movie, even if the experience is produced in a very different way. The eager chatter of the people waiting in the entrance to Big Bowl, and the laughter heard amongst the various groups actually bowling, attest to the fact that, for many, this is a social experience.

Context over Liminality We could continue in this manner and further dissect the different potential forms of experiences offered during the course of an evening. However, my intention here is twofold – although I will deal with the second point a little later. Firstly, in discussing the Experience Economy, we need to be aware of the complex way in which experiences are interwoven with one another. It is tempting to view experiences as phenomena that are definable in time – that have a clear beginning and end (Löfgren, 1999: 95; Mossberg, 2001:3). However, it might also be argued that experiences are not always phenomena that we enter by crossing a well-defined threshold. Instead, many experiences seem to take the form of processes that we find ourselves in or realize that we have been in. This is not to say that symbolic borders and boundaries do not exist, but that experiences in which we become immersed are made up of multiple beginnings, endings and border crossings. In this vein, a night at Big Bowl might begin at a distant place of work as employees eat lunch and talk about the coming evening, and continue later as these same people change clothes, apply make-up, after-shave and perfume, stand in a queue outside the bowling alley, get a drink etc. The evening’s experience is organized around a series of symbolic bridges that lift the event to a plane that is more than an ordinary aspect of daily life, but that is nevertheless even linked to the realm of everyday life. Rather than simply applying a theoretical framework reminiscent of Victor Turner’s work on rit de passage, and defining “experiences” in contrast to the normal rhythm of daily life – a common tendency found in tourism research (cf. Tresidder, 1999) – or in terms of “disjunctures” (cf. Fornäs, 2001:377), we need to fully appreciate the interplay between the ordinary and the 63

With regard to music and dance, a similar experience of immersion is often expressed in terms of flow (cf. Ronström, 1992), or “having found the groove”. This is even a quality that people often search for in video games and other virtual experiences, or may even arise out of travel-related adventures that can themselves prove difficult to express verbally (cf. Andersson, 1998:218ff.).

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Management Strategies and The Need for Fun extraordinary (Bassett and Wilbert, 1999). Obviously experiences are much more than a simple continuation of everyday life. At present, however, there is an all too strong tendency in the literature to emphasize processes of disjuncture while simultaneously not seriously considering the issue of continuity. In the end, the cultural dynamics of a night at Big Bowl might be seen as being derived from the way in which the ordinary and extraordinary continuously telescope into one another rather than the manner in which the experience is defined in contrast to everyday life. Exemplifying this, Erik, an employee at a pharmaceutical company in Lund, Sweden, explained how he had won the competition of his company’s night out at Big Bowl. He did not win by being the best bowler, but by the fact that the company’s secretary had drawn up a random schedule by which each bowled frame would be multiplied by a different and varying factor. At the end of the night, Erik found that he had bowled the best in the frames bearing the highest multiplier. “So I can display this trophy in my room at work until someone else wins it next year!” he tells me with a laugh. Erik is not a great bowler. In fact there were a number of people who “really” had higher scores at the end of the night than Erik, but the trophy in his room attests to the manner in which his night of bowling was linked to a secretary’s activities earlier in the day, and the fact that the company organizes an annual bowling night. The trophy marks the coming of another bowling night, and another chance – not to win (chance will determine that), but to laugh with colleagues, and participate in a small lottery – the prize of which is a trophy which someone will have in their office for a year. Erik’s story – coupled with the activities occurring at Big Bowl every night – reflects the manner in which a night at Big Bowl is culturally organized around the knowledge and experiences that people have obtained elsewhere (with the possible exception of the actual bowling). The organization of the lottery, the awarding of the trophy, the computer animated graphics, the arcade games, the billiards and the game of 21, all build upon experiences that Erik and other people have either developed at home or in association with friends in other entertainment arenas. In this sense, daily routines provide the grounds on which the exceptional is generated. To a large extent, people learn the ropes of “experiencing” through their daily consumption patterns. The study of the Experience Economy is still a relatively new subject and we should be wary of biases that we are already imposing upon our field of investigation. An emphasis on rupture and cultural disjuncture is, for example, partially reinforced by the manner in which we direct the focus of our study. Thus far, the experience economy has 133

Tom O’Dell been defined almost exclusively as something that happens outside the home. It is a public phenomenon, and here the metaphors we have used to label the phenomenon we are exploring may be steering our thinking too much. Whether we are talking about “the Experience Economy”, “the market for experiences”, or “the experience industry,” (a common expression in Sweden) we are using metaphors that stand in contrast to the domestic and private spheres. There exits a need to develop a better understanding of the linkage that exists between the public and private sphere of the Experience Economy. A closer examination of this inter-linkage may prove to be extremely useful in understanding how trends develop, and how people develop the competences that limit or enable their participation in various forms of experiences. For example, as alluded to above, an important aspect of this process involves the management of time. The truly successful experience is not simply something in which we become engulfed in the present (although this is an important aspect of the experience that I shall touch upon). Experiences are anticipated, dreamed about, and longed for. This is the experience as future. After the fact, experiences are reflected upon, and can be converted into nostalgia, and once again longed after. From the production side of this equation, we see an accelerating need for companies to reinvent themselves and their products. This is all part of a larger cultural economy – global in scope – in which a night of bowling becomes a “hybrid experience”, the local movie cinema is refurbished and reborn as an entertainment center with a café and lounge, the old concept of the shopping mall is repackaged as a form of experience center at the Mall of America, and an inexpensive dinner becomes a thematized experience at the Hard Rock Café (cf. Hannigan, 1998). Simultaneously, the metaphors used to describe these experiences have an increasingly shorter shelf life: “better” becomes “faster”, or “wilder”, or “more intense”, or “more personal” as companies compete for consumer attention. Consumers themselves are consciously aware of these shifts and trends – in Sweden, paintball, the alternative trend of the early 1990s, is in the years after the millenium hopelessly unfashionable, while go-carting is in again. In this sense, experiences are in a constant state of revision, and a process of becoming which transcends both space and time (but which is also anchored in them). Implicit in all this is the realization of the second point I wish to emphasize here. While the subjective element of experiences are extremely important, experiences and the emotions tied to them are not simply personal impressions (psychologically internal to us), but are also social constructions that people talk about and continuously 134

Management Strategies and The Need for Fun reframe. As Arlie Russel Hochschild points out, “emotions always involve the body, but they are not sealed biological events” (2003:125). Consequently, laughter has a tendency to be projected upwards in social hierarchies, as people are more likely to laugh (longer and harder) at the jokes of their superiors than those of their subordinates. In contrast to this, anger and frustration have trajectories that take them more frequently down social hierarchies, as these emotions are directed at subordinates (Hochschild, 2003). As an experiencescape, Big Bowl strives to create a friendly atmosphere that evokes emotions and feelings such as exhilaration, glee and enthusiasm. One of the brochures distributed by the bowling hall, and specifically directed at employers and their businesses, even claims that “bowling together with your work mates or clientele is an outstanding way to get to know one another better and strengthen a sense of togetherness” (Big Bowl Brochure, 2004). In this sense, the experiences offered by Big Bowl can even be understood in terms of the production of feelings of trust and community. However, as forms of commercialized emotions and feelings, these experiences are explicitly expected to transcend the bounds of the individual and operate on the plane of the social – bringing people together. The experiences of personal enjoyment and enthusiastic glee that one finds at Big Bowl are part of this process. Interestingly, employers have become increasingly aware of the team building, social potential of this aspect of the experience economy, and are incorporating it into their managerial strategies.

Experience as Gift Exchange Cognizant of this developing market, Big Bowl has invested heavily in its attempt to promote itself as a place in which businesses can hold conferences, Christmas parties, and other morale building fun activities for their personnel. Big Bowl advertises extensively throughout the Malmö area, and employs sales people who quickly follow-up any inquiries generated by their advertising. In addition, their brochures eagerly promote the advantages that Big Bowl can provide companies looking for appropriate conference facilities: Tired of long boring conferences? Why not combine productivity with pleasure? Conference, meals, and bowling provide the day with a suitable mix of seriousness and fun…Big Bowl offers those of you who want to provide your fellow employees a different conference experience a custom designed event, constructed

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Tom O’Dell entirely to meet your company’s needs (Big Bowl Brochure, 2004). In order to fulfill its promises, Big Bowl has invested in the furnishing and provisioning of conference rooms of different shapes and sizes. It has also put together a series of package deals offering a wide and varying assortments of activities intended to attract businesses and promote a team building atmosphere. The strategy seems to be working. Employers are investing in the potential power of the Big Bowl experience. To take a single example, on one evening I observed the people of “Computer Associates” bowling together in a large group at one end of the bowling alley. Employees had been given “CA” T-shirts, but they had also been given their employer’s time – after hours – in which they could mingle, play and have fun. As the employees bowled, they also bought drinks and food and spoke in increasingly loud tones as the evening progressed. They laughed and made jokes as their comrades threw gutter balls, and cheered and applauded when they made the tough shots. In this sense, the entire experience of the evening was composed of a series of exchanges that took the form of small gifts that continuously brought people closer together. Writing during the first half of the 20th century, French sociologist Marcel Mauss developed the theory of the gift, and ever since then we have conceptualized gift-giving in terms of the movement of material culture and its social consequences (cf. Appadurai, 1986; Godelier, 1999). In essence, Mauss argued that there was no such thing as a free gift. Gift exchange worked to create and maintain social relations between individuals and groups of individuals, and involved three distinct social interactions (Mauss, 1990). Gifts are given; they are received; and finally, in order for a gift exchange to be complete, it must eventually be reciprocated. Each of these three aspects of the gift is culturally charged, and together they play an important role in the development and maintenance of social relationships. In viewing the evening at Big Bowl as described above through the theoretical prism established by Mauss, it is possible to learn a bit more about one of the important driving motors of the Experience Economy while simultaneously updating and expanding upon Mauss’ work. In the case at hand, the “CA” T-shirts are an example of the most obvious and traditional form of gift: an object given by an employer to its personnel for the purpose of building team spirit. However, the laughter, the applause and the jovial banter also have the potential to function as small gifts which these people give to one another. The fact that someone took the time to book the bowling hall 136

Management Strategies and The Need for Fun for the night is another gift, as are the smaller voluntary services these people do for one another (one person collects money from a number of other people and goes to the bar to buy beer, another looks for a better bowling ball for the group, etc.). These exchanges do not involve material objects, but are generated through a series of small activities, services, and acknowledgements that these people perform for one another. Taken separately, each exchange may be rather insignificant, but when placed together they constitute a vital component in the net of social relations out of which the experience of the evening is generated. It is this continuous process of gift giving that provides an important source of social and cultural vibrancy to the evening’s activities. In this sense, mass customization, as it is implemented at Big Bowl, does much more than give individuals freedom of choice. It provides a background against which groups of individuals can make small offerings to one another. In the economic literature, mass customization is often metaphorically likened to providing consumers with an assortment of Legos or modules that they can combine according to their own needs (cf. Pine and Gilmore, 1999:73). At Big Bowl, these modules can be likened to small altars from which individuals do not simply take what they need or want, but at which they make offerings to one another. The cultural dynamics of the evening are not simply formed through the interaction between the individual and the “module”, but more importantly through the confirmation that people give one another during the course of the night. While experiences are themselves not actually material objects, cultural processes which have long been viewed as being bound to the transfer of material things (gifts) are working – through the more ephemeral exchange of services and through other social interactions – to create the atmosphere in which we can contribute to one another’s experiences.

WorkPlay I don’t actually like going to all these Christmas parties. But when it’s the company party…you just have to go. (A disgruntled reflection from a white-collar employee during the Holiday Season). However, the power of the gift works only as long as it is acknowledged. While gift giving in the traditional sense is dependent upon the transfer of material objects, the combined power of sight and communication are the keys to the power of the experiential gift. Paul

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Tom O’Dell Snoddy, one of the founders of GameWorks, poignantly gets right to the heart of the issue when describing why he believes GameWorks has been so successful. GameWorks is not about the game that you are playing. It’s about linking experiences, linking my experience to everyone else’s experiences. Playing a video game at home, you play by yourself. Nobody knows, nobody cares. You play and then you turn it off. Now compare that limited experience to the options that are available in GameWork’s go-cart ride. A simple video game would be about you and the go-carts. At GameWorks, Snoddy explains, the go-carts ‘are about you and the people around you. You’re on stage. You’re being watched, evaluated. Other people are wondering if they can drive as well as you can. The best score of all time is up there, and you judge your performance based on it. When a race ends, and a record time goes up, you hear cheering and shouting, and the winner is seen and known’ (Burr, 2000:258). While GameWorks and Big Bowl might be described as playgrounds for adults, the experience of immersion generated in these places is, to a large extent, dependent upon similar social mechanisms as those identified by Michel Foucault in connection with the micro processes of power (1978 and 1979). Competitive tension is generated through the ability of participants to observe one another while simultaneously measuring and comparing one another’s achievements, or lack of them. The highly visible posting of scores, the physical arrangement of the room which allows the gamers to be observed easily, the cheering (or derisive laughter) which attracts and focuses public attention, are all critical aspects of the experience’s construction – this is what “links” them, to use Snoddy’s words. These ways of measuring one’s progress in comparison to that of others is a continuously ongoing aspect of daily life, and could be dismissed as “business as usual”, except for the fact that what we see at Big Bowl is – at least in part – just that. Business. Employers are using places such as Big Bowl – traditional arenas of play – as a means of furthering their business goals. Once again Big Bowl is not alone, but rather indicative of a larger tendency found in society. Silja Lines, for example, markets itself in the following way: Take a break from work. 138

Management Strategies and The Need for Fun Two day conferences to Helsinki from 1,495 Swedish crowns per person. Leave the office behind you and have a conference on the Baltic Sea instead. A change of environment is always good for morale at work. You have plenty of time for productivity and pleasure. And all the while the group is gathered together (Silja Line advertisement, 2001:C2). For only 385 crowns/person you can have your conference on one of Viking Lines ships and enjoy “breakfast in the Food Garden, coffee and a magnificent Viking Buffet with beer, wine and much more.” (Viking Lines Advertisement, 2001). Another example is OmniSky’s Palm V™ which offers “Email to go” and the assurance that: 10 hour workdays aren’t so bad if you get to choose which 10…(With OmniSky’s handhelds) you can rearrange your day and work when you want, where you want…Work more. Work less. Either way, work smarter (OmniSky, 2001). If you do not know what a handheld is, do not panic, as there are plenty of mobile telephones that promise the similar experience of spending the afternoons at the beach, while remaining connected to your job. In these types of advertisements, we find renewed strategies and efforts to build team spirit and loyalty in the working place that derive from the blurring of the border between work and play. This reflects an ongoing shift in managerial thinking (Löfgren, 2001; Willim, 2001).64 Tom Peters, one of the more widely known, self-proclaimed prophets of the once “New Economy,” argues intensely that one of the most important keys to success for businesses today lies in the degree to which employees perceive their jobs and places of work as being fun (1994). Echoing Peters’ line of argumentation, Rolf Jensen, Director of The Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, predicts that in the 21st century we will see the demise of the concept of work as we know it – in its place we will be left with something he calls “hard fun.” It will be “fun in the sense that it will be edifying, playful, engaging. In other words we are moving away from work as noble sacrifice. But make no mistake about it….it will be hard fun because it will demand commitment” (1999:118). Behind the philosophy of fun lies a conviction that people who have fun are more likely to remain at their 64

However, as Gunnel Andersdotter (2001) points out, this is even a strategy that employees increasingly expect of their employers.

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Tom O’Dell present jobs than search for new ones; while at work they will be more creative, and thereby more productive. And finally, the more people are able to play and improvise, the more likely they are to develop new and successful innovations in the future (Schrage, 1999). In short, the fusion of work and play into WorkPlay intimately links the experience economy to questions concerning the means of production and the manner in which people’s livelihoods are materialized.65 For the employees of Computer Associates, the night at Big Bowl is, to some extent, a night of play. They bowl, they drink, they laugh and tell jokes, but at a certain level they are still at work and under the watchful eye of their employer. This, and other evenings like it, is “serious play.” It doesn’t make any difference if the night’s activities are initiated and organized by the employer or the employees; they find themselves playing in a symbolically charged arena in which the structures of daily working life and those of play continue to telescope into one another. An employee who drinks too much, plays too competitively, makes a pass at a work mate, or complains too much about not being at home with the family, runs the risk of facing the consequences and potential sanctions at work the following day. In this way, the spread of WorkPlay as a growing cultural arena in daily life serves to formalize leisure practices in new ways. It enwraps certain forms of play in new structures of control, and represents an infringement of places of work into the sphere of private life. It links arenas of play, leisure and entertainment to the materiality of the pay check, and thereby, to the materiality of providing for one’s self and one’s family.66 And whilst the spokespeople of the New Economy emphasized the benefits that can be derived from WorkPlay, including the fact that it supposedly makes places of work more enjoyable, this is not necessarily a win-win situation in which both employers and employees benefit equally. 65

Here it should be noted that the Experience Economy is dependent upon a large pool of low-paid laborers in the form of waiters and waitresses, cashiers, cleaning personnel, etc (cf. Thrift, 2000). Unfortunately, in the present context I am unable to develop this issue further. See O’Dell 2005 a & b for a more extensive critical discussion of the cultural and economic contexts in which service-providers work. 66 It should be noted that the bridging of the work/play distinction is not an entirely new phenomenon. In Sweden, employers have actively sponsored sporting activities as a means of promoting better health (cf. Lundin, 1992). Throughout much of the twentieth century, this was seen as a means of combating practices of alcoholic consumption that were perceived as being counter-productive to the effectiveness of the workplace. What is new is the intensity with which work is being framed as an activity that should be fun, and the growing wealth of products and services which are being offered to help transform work into something fun.

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Management Strategies and The Need for Fun For example, while Tom Peters presents himself as a fun-loving guy who wears baseball caps and T-shirts to work, despises dress codes, and advises managers to loosen up and turn their places of work into fun and “zany” arenas of activity, he also propagates the power which managers can ascertain by appearing generous. And he likens managerial generosity to the practice of potlatching found at the turn of the 20th century among tribes of Kwakiutl Indians along the Canadian Pacific coast: Potlatch is the ancient practice of overwhelming a person with gifts. In some tribes, people literally gave away all their wealth – and their status rose proportionately. Guess what: It still works. Continuous generosity creates an aura of altruism. More crudely, it ain’t a bad idea to maintain a positive “balance of favors” with a large number of people. I’ll be honest: It’s precisely what I try to do. Hey, it’s nice to have a big stash of chips to call in when “the time comes” – and the time does come (Peters, 1994:30). Once again, as Mauss pointed out, there is no such thing as a free gift. Generosity is power. For this reason, employer sponsored excursions into the Experience Economy (whether we are talking about bowling, the annual Christmas party, or a two day conference held on one of Silja Lines ships) may be perceived by many people as a fun way to spend time, but there is nothing innocent about it. The experiences tied to WorkPlay conceal within their folds a debt to be repaid which can be defined in many different ways: loyalty, creativity, social cohesion, productivity etc. The degree to which employers explicitly expect to collect (with interest) upon these debts varies. However, these investments in WorkPlay do point to an underlying awareness of the ability of the Experience Economy to influence and form social relationships. In this sense, experiences connect people. Indeed, this is exactly the experience that is being sold by companies such as OmniSky or any of the mobile telephone companies. The flexibility and freedom they offer (at least in their advertisements) is that of being able to choose when to work and when to “play.”67 This is often framed in terms of the flexibility to choose not to be at work, although 67

Liselotte Lyngsø of the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies refers to the ability to do this as “time ownership.” And she claims that the ability to flexibly determine one’s working hours will be the defining factor between the new upper and working classes (in Schwarz, 2001-2). This may be so, but as I am arguing, it is also possible that greater flexibility can potentially have the effect of hampering our ability to control our time.

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Tom O’Dell this flexibility also implies the contrary. Via these types of telecommunications product you are never away from work – you can take your work with you, or are always accessible to your place of work. The Potlatch has been transformed. However, the technologies and material items we have discussed here (from bowling balls to telephones) are not necessarily the primary objects of exchange that are in motion. Time is also being exchanged: the employer’s time now for the later exchange of the employee’s time and commitment. In part, services are being exchanged: the booking of the bowling night, the organization of an alternative scoring system and the buying of drinks. And, in part, a social commitment to one another’s experiences is being exchanged. Perhaps the greatest power of the Experience Economy lies in the degree to which it is freed from the sensation of burden associated with work. The fact that it is fun, and therefore appears to be innocent, makes its strings of attachment via WorkPlay all the more treacherous. Viewing the experience economy against this background points to the fact that if we are to understand gift-giving in late-modernity, we need to understand both its material and immaterial forms. To the extent that people value “experiences” in contemporary society, they are very dependent upon one another in the creation of them. It may not be possible to actually exchange experiences, but it seems that a great deal of effort is being expended as people work (often unconsciously) to generate the dynamic atmosphere in which their experiences unfold. At the same time, they enter a web of obligations and social relations for which they have to take responsibility. Through this economy, they commit themselves to helping one another, and in the process build and strengthen friendships. In the end, these same social mechanisms are set in motion by places of work as they invoke strategies of WorkPlay. In this case, however, the gift is also laden with two other components. Firstly, it bears with it a debt of increased productivity to be paid back at a later date. This is more than just an obligation to maintain a relationship (one of the primary dynamic social mechanisms usually understood to be involved in gift giving); it is an exchange that bears indenturing qualities that the receiver has little option but to accept. And secondly, it extends the social relations and obligations of work beyond the working place, in this case representing a further extension of the power of employers over the daily lives of their personnel. In this sense, Big Bowl and an increasing number of venues like it in the Experience Economy, defy any simple classification that reduces them to isolated places of leisure, entertainment or play – removed 142

Management Strategies and The Need for Fun from the ordinary context of daily life. For the vast majority of people, one can observe at Big Bowl on any given evening, this is a place of fun. And most of the people I have spoken to perceive and experience Big Bowl in exactly this way. It is a venue of leisure that they enjoy visiting. It makes for a good night out. However, Big Bowl and its brethren in the experience economy are also spaces of production (cf. Lefebvre, 1991:212) that (primarily) employ low-paid personnel who are assigned the task of facilitating the enjoyment of others. In addition to this, and as I have been emphasizing here, these are also spaces of production that employers and business managers are increasingly turning to in their efforts to increase efficiency, creativity and economic performance within their ranks. And in this sense, they have to be understood as more than just arenas of leisure consumption. They are also strategically conceived, designed and consumed places that are used with the intention of facilitating work. Obviously, the issue of how an evening of bowling might be conceived, perceived or experienced is a slippery matter. But it is exactly for this reason that we need to view it from many different directions at once. To be sure, experiences do have a subjective and individually bound component to them; but the Experience Economy is being driven by more than individual needs or a pure desire for economic gains. It involves elements of fun as well as social structures of power. Beneath the facade of ephemeral experience we can discern a very material world full of cultural, social and political interaction that is still in need of study. This is a world that bridges traditional cleavages found in such dichotomies as work and play, individual and collective experience, and the sphere of daily life versus that of the exceptional. Here I am not denying the existence of disjuncture, or its relevance to an understanding of the Experience Economy. I am, however, arguing for the need to better understand the Experience Economy in a manner that seriously considers issues of continuity and process. Without this, we run the risk of mystifying the study of experience by locking it in a position of innocent liminality.

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Promoting the Known and the Unknown of Cities and City Regions SØREN HENNING JENSEN

Deep transformations have taken place in large cities within the last twenty to thirty years that have had a major impact upon the shaping of a new spatial order (Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998). To an increasing degree, globalization is now studied in relation to cities and regions (Marcuse & van Kempen, 2000). The cities of Western Europe and North America compete on the basis of services and information rather than industry. In particular, this new global division of labor has challenged Western cities to seek out new commercial opportunities in order to secure economic and social welfare. One consequence of this has been that cities are increasingly promoting themselves as dense experiencscapes: that is, finite spaces where experiences are in abundance. Some cities are highly visible and symbolically defined through aspects of their physical attributes, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben etc. while others are more metaphorically delineated through slogans like “the big apple” or “the city of cities”. Other cities require tourists to venture into their experiencescapes to discover the many facets of the city and, in lieu of a single powerful symbol, promote themselves as a hitherto unknown experiences. As Pine and Gilmore argue (1999), the demand for experiences is rising as a result of people having reached a point of 145

Søren Henning Jensen materialistic saturation. Increasingly, people want to pay to feel something rather than to have something. For the individual, the value of experiences occurs through emotions and remembrances, and potentially by contributing to knowledge about onesself and identity creation. For those firms and cities that produce and enact experiences, the value of experiences is instead created through the beneficial economic effects they are presumed to generate. The marketing of experiences has become essential to making cities attractive, and in that way, attracting visitors (van den Berg et al., 2003). In the new spatial order, one of the key transformations taking place is that cities are increasingly competing with one another vis-à-vis the hosting and staging of events and through the construction of competitive experience portfolios (van den Berg et al., 2003 ibid.). The objective of this chapter is to analyze the manner in which the realm of experience can be utilized as a strategic tool for urban and regional competition for attracting tourists and businesses. To facilitate this, a specific concept – or rather set of concepts – are introduced to illustrate how experiences can be operationalized and used for marketing purposes: the known and the unknown. It is claimed that by using the tension between the two, cities and regions can be described in terms of the experiences they hold, or the experiences they promise to hold. As such, the chosen approach can help us to understand how experiencescapes can be used strategically by the organizations responsible for promoting the city or region for touristic purposes. By highligthing some aspects (the known) and hinting at others (the unknown), organizations can describe fascinating and promising experiencescapes.68 But in order to use this approach in a manner that makes sense, it is necessary to explain the logic behind using the known and the unknown. First of all, however, I will present the empirical material upon which the discussion is based, which is taken from the home pages of two of Copenhagen’s most important tourism organizations.

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This chapter can be seen as taking a slightly different slant on the “place-wars” and “scale wars” described by Ek (in this volume). While Ek discusses the manner in which regional competition can be likened to a state of warfare, this text is more directed towards investigating a specific “strategy” used in “place wars”.

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Empirical Data and Analysis Copenhagen Capacity defines itself as: The official investment agency of Greater Copenhagen – the capital region of Denmark – set up to promote Copenhagen to potential corporate investors and to assist companies in establishing an organization in Copenhagen. Our services are free of charge (www.copcap.dk). This organization is primarily aimed at attracting new businesses to the city and region of Copenhagen and is, as such, a highly relevant player. The other organization, Wonderful Copenhagen, is the single most important player in the tourism industry, and the oldest Danish interest organization working in regional competition. Wonderful Copenhagen, defines itself as: The official tourist organization of the Greater Copenhagen area. Wonderful Copenhagen® has its roots back in 1887 when Copenhagen’s first tourist organization was established. Today Wonderful Copenhagen® is the official convention and visitors bureau of Greater Copenhagen, dealing with all aspects of Copenhagen as a tourist and travel destination: marketing, promotion, product development, strategic planning, information, PR, brochures, statistics, tourist information office, analysis etc. (www.woco.dk). The organization is aimed at tourism in its traditional form. As can be seen from the quote, they are heavily involved in developing and using different tools to help promote the city and region of Copenhagen. The Internet presentations of these two organizations are interesting because they constitute an ideal forum through which experiences can be conveyed. They are ideal because they are themselves capable of delivering small-scale experiences via their use of different media, texts, images and sounds. When combined, these sources of information have the potential to create a vivid image of the locality promoted. In addition to this, the Internet has the advantage of providing instant access to a wide array of destinations. The websites of these organizations can be understood as interactive maps of the experiencescapes defined by the cities and city regions.

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Søren Henning Jensen This is evident from the images and video presentations used to describe the city on both www.woco.dk and www.copcap.dk. In this sense, the websites are themselves miniature experiencescapes. But as miniatures, they are also limited. The city has too many nuances and places to experience to ever be covered by a website. The number of choices is very limited on a website, as the emphasis is on presenting the city in a special (and always positive) way. In addition to this, the information on the home page is aimed at the most plausible needs of the potential consumer. For example, the Wonderful Copenhagen home page primarily contains information related to leisure experiences, while that of Copenhagen Capacity mainly includes business information. The images, the text and the pictures on the web pages, as well as the interactive tools they offer, are a means of steering the expectations of the potential consumer so they know what kinds of experiences to expect – and where to find them. This also shows the potency of these web pages in that they present an image of the city as the organizations want others to see it, and they invoke “known” and “unknown” elements of the city in order to manage or steer the viewer’s expectations. Before venturing deeper into the analysis, however, let us first define what is meant by the “known” and the “unknown”, and consider how the tension between them can be used analytically to describe urban experiencescapes.

Cities as Known and Unknown Elements Italo Calvino’s book, Invisible Cities (1972), is a marvelous collection of imagined cities in imagined regions, each of which is surprising. Calvino uses an intriguing mix of known and unknown elements in describing the cities. The known elements are used to make the reader recognize the image of the city and to think that they know that kind of city. The unknown elements are used to surprise, or even shock the reader, when it becomes obvious that recognition did not take place after all, because the known elements were combined in a new and surprising way that at times created a surreal urban image. The reader is lured into thinking that s/he knows the city, only to realize that the city s/he recognized was not the city that was described. The strength of the book is that it highlights the effects that cities have on travelers, as well as the somewhat mystical character of the cities themselves. In this essay, Copenhagen will be used as an example to show the manner in which the potential of both the mystical (that which is somewhat unknown) and seemingly well known qualities that surround cities and

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Promoting The Known and The Unknown of Cities and City Regions city regions are invoked as a means of operationalizing the Experience Economy. As a tool of place marketing, the unknown must either have elements that can be hinted at or vague images that can be conjured up in the mind of the consumer if it is to have an attractive effect. This can be accomplished through ambiguous concepts such as “exotic”, “unexplored”, “charming”, “unexpected,” or via promises of specific experiences unique to the place in question, such as a certain atmosphere that can only be known and experienced by going to the actual spatial location. In many ways, the unknown is what makes the city unique and sets it apart from other cities. Having said this, the known/unknown should not be seen as a pure dichotomy. The reason for this is that if something is completely unknown it can hardly be used to promote anything. So that which is “unknown” might also be understood in terms of that which is “unexperienced”, “unrealized”, “surprising” or in some way, unexpected. What is important to know is that we are dealing with ambiguous concepts (Koselleck, 1982, 1985). In essence, the tension between known and unknown is a subjective way of categorizing experiences in the urban space and it is exactly this tension – the way the known and the unknown relate to each other – that is of relevance here. While the two are forever separated, they are simultaneously parts of the same. They exclude the other and are, at the same time, defined by one another. The relationship and the tensions are dynamic. The unknown can become known once it has been experienced, just as the known can be forgotten and unknown. The known has the quality that it can be evaluated and compared, but at the same time it is also final and does not hold any further potential. The unknown, however, is the potential. The tension between the two thus surpasses any simplistic duality by its ever-changing character. Italo Calvino has stated that the stories in the book Invisible Cities are organized around the two themes of “memory” and “desire”. This could be seen as a parallel to the known and the unknown in itself, but more importantly, it shows that the descriptions of the cities are thought of as a tension between two concepts. It shows that cities, as experiencescapes, can be visualized via the tension between two ambiguous concepts.

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Søren Henning Jensen

Exploring the Known and Unknown in the Urban Experiencescape In “selling” cities and regions, whether for tourism or business, the institutions responsible for promoting the place in question has to undertake the task of attracting customers through a combination of known and appreciated elements, and the promise of positive unknown elements. This is the experience to be sold, and this means that the strategy of the marketing approach must encompass signals that convey this message or promise. Due to general isomorphic tendencies (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), there seems to be a high degree of convergence as cities tend to offer a wide range of the same characteristics (Ohmae, 1996). This is also reflected in Wonderful Copenhagen’s promotion of Copenhagen, as illustrated by this description: But this is no living museum. Copenhagen is a vibrant, modern city whose fascinating past coexists with the very latest trends in architecture, design and fashion. This is, after all, one of the world’s great design capitals, a status that is reflected in its dynamic new buildings and stunning shops (www.woco.dk). The list of cities that can be described as vibrant and modern, where the latest trends in architecture and fashion coexist with the past, is long and can equally well include London, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam or Berlin. Through such a formulation, Copenhagen is thus slotted into a specific category of attractive European capitals, and the potential visitor is given a first glimpse of the experiencescape. It also highlights the globalization aspect, as the underlying message is that Copenhagen has as much to offer in terms of experiences as any other European capital.69 The approach used by Copenhagen Capacity is different, however, as they do not hint at the fact that Copenhagen has as much to offer as any other European city – that fact is stated outright on the first page of the website:

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For a wider discussion of the significance that some cities place on aligning themselves with highly succesful counterparts in the global community, see Chritersdotter’s contribution to this volume.

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Promoting The Known and The Unknown of Cities and City Regions Copenhagen – North European City of the Future Copenhagen was a clear winner among the North European cities in fDi (foreign direct investments) Magazine’s European Cities and Regions of the Future 2004. Copenhagen is the most attractive metropolis in northern Europe, according to a comprehensive survey of leading cities throughout Europe under the title European City of the Future by fDi Magazine, published by the Financial Times Group (www.copcap.dk)! This is further elaborated under the heading, “Cooperation”, where numbers and facts clearly state the attractiveness of the capital: Copenhagen is the most important growth centre for international companies. At the beginning of 2004, more than 2,100 foreign owned companies were located in Copenhagen – an increase of more than 21% since 1999. About 40,000 expatriates from North America, Europe and Scandinavia are today living in Copenhagen, creating an international community atmosphere in the city (www.copcap.dk). A major aspect of the Experience Economy is the high degree of subjectivism. Value is experienced rather than measured in a traditional way, thus being made highly subjective and, as such, a social construction (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). To some extent, value has always been socially constructed, but the difference is that value doesn’t relate so much to the product or service in itself, but to how it is experienced. Functionality is thus no longer a focal point, and differentiation does not only apply to the actual products and services, but also to the consumer’s perception of the experience. In relation to Copenhagen, this means that the two organizations not only present some of the possible experiences the city holds, but also the way they should be experienced. While styles and images of Wonderful Copenhagen linger as a result of a website that includes lots of pictures and video clips of the city and uses the known and the unknown to show a span of experiences, the impact of Copenhagen Capacity is very direct. There are fewer pictures and more numbers and facts – presented as firm facts that leave little scope for savoring or lingering. For them the aim is to reduce ambiguity, rather than try to use that ambiguity to promote the city. 151

Søren Henning Jensen In both cases it is a question of trying to link the imagined city to the experienced city in a manner that will give the most favorable impression to the target group, whether it be tourists or businesses. There will always be a difference between the described city and the experienced city, however. The challenge lies in controlling, limiting and managing these discrepancies. The following excerpt from Invisible Cities illustrates the difference in the described and experienced city in relation to the known and the unknown very well: From now on, I’ll describe the cities to you,” the Khan had said, “in your journeys you will see if they exist.” But the cities visited by Marco Polo were always different from those thought of by the emperor. “And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all cities can be deduced,” Kublai said. “It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.” “I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others,” Marco answered. “It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities, which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real (Calvino, 1972:69). The quote shows the ambiguity that is embedded in any city or experiencescape and in any representation of it. It also highlights the existence of the generic or known elements of the city: the idea that there is a core that can be identified as “city”. Both Marco Polo and Kublai Khan describe a model city, which is the sum of all cities or the essence of the city. Any real city will, they argue, be a variation of the model city, unique but also relating to the essential city. To some extent the two organizations, Wonderful Copenhagen and Copenhagen Capacity, are doing the same as Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. By using the Internet to present the city of Copenhagen, they are creating model cities of their own by invoking globally recognized core features of modern metropolises. The aim of the two organizations is to create the most desirable image of the city by creating a virtual experiencescape, which is a 152

Promoting The Known and The Unknown of Cities and City Regions positive representation of the specific variations of the city that the organization wants to promote. As an integral means of doing this, they invoke representations that are heavily influenced by the spatial dimension of the city. Let us therefore view the city and the two miniature experiencescapes (the two home pages) as spatial entities, in order to see which insights are revealed.

Cities as Spatial Entities Cities and regions are stretched out and embedded in space and are quite incapable of being taken out of that context. As a consequence, they can be understood as spatial entities that have increasingly been attributed a central role as units of analysis when studying economic behavior; beyond this, they have also often been considered more flexible than nation states (Ohame, 1995; Castells, 1998). Thus cities are, to some extent, being redefined by the social sciences with an emphasis on space as a central organizing concept. While the spatial dimension is central to the understanding of cities and regions as experiencescapes, it is equally important for understanding cities as defined in terms of the known and the unknown. The manner in which this can work in practice is illustrated by a quote from Wonderful Copenhagen’s website which reads, “The surrounding water, Danish architecture, innovative design and a royal touch. Copenhagen and its surroundings has so much to offer” (www.woco.dk)! Apart from relating to the spatial representation of the city, the quote also relates to the tension between the known and the unknown. The spatial dimension is important as cities, by definition, are defined by space. In a marketing approach this gives rise to challenges, as space can be difficult to express in words. Consequently, it is necessary to create images in the mind of the potential consumer, so that consumers form their own spatial idea of the city, carefully guided by the information offered on the websites. This is done by hinting at information, rather than directly describing the city. In addition to known elements (water, architecture, design or the aspect of royalty), a lot of unknown factors can also convey a positive, alluring image of the city. How is it innovative? What does “Danish architecture” really mean and how is the royal touch applied – indeed what is a royal touch? While the promise that “Copenhagen and its surroundings has so much to offer!” is very direct and followed by an exclamation point, what this means in more concrete terms is open to be experienced.

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Søren Henning Jensen Similarly, another quote asserts that: “Furthermore, this is a city that presents its myriad attractions against a waterside backdrop that helps make it of one of the most beautiful cities in northern Europe” (www.woco.dk). The tourist is offered rather concrete information in a very suggestive form, which puts the emphasis on the spatial dimensions. The water and the myriad of attractions appear almost like a giant maze, where every route the tourist takes will lead to yet another attraction – an experience. In this way, getting back to the known and unknown, the experiencescape delineated by the website can be seen as a number of known points mapping out the overall topography, whose pinnacles are there to be seen and recognized: the shopping, the museums and the architecture. Some distinct areas are then pointed out so that they can be discovered in greater detail. Between these are a number of unknown elements, but due to the visual presentation and the carefully chosen vague yet positive text, the unknown now seems attractive. At one level the city stands out as more recognizable. It is something known and there are more alluring experiences to be had. As if to reinforce this phenomenon, the same home page has a single picture showing the water and a blurred panorama of the old part of town across the water. But more interestingly, there is a link beneath the text that takes the web tourist to a page with four distinct areas: • • • •

Design and architecture Art at all times Royal Denmark The Waterfront. (www.woco.dk).

Each area includes a picture in toned down colors which is accompanied by a short description. Behind these are further guides and links to areas that are also enhanced by appetizers in the form of toned down, yet appealing photographs vaguely relating to the areas in question. The idea seems clear and the effect is quite tangible. The known aspects are shown together with an outline of what can be expected. But at the same time it becomes obvious that the real experience is not on the website itself, but can only result from a visit. This is further implied by the way the spatial element is played on in the text and the pictures. There is a progression through the layers of the website, and more is revealed about each area with every layer – while more unknown aspects are hinted at. Let us concentrate on the 154

Promoting The Known and The Unknown of Cities and City Regions spatial element for now, since it seems to play an important role with regard to both the known and the unknown, and to the city as an experiencescape. The spatial element is also included in the Copenhagen Capacity home page, by introducing “COPENHAGEN LOCATIONS” (http://www.locations.copcap.com/), an interactive tool, which can be used to pinpoint the location of an office. The interactive tool starts with the overall map of the Greater Copenhagen area and can be finetuned to show a photograph of a chosen street. As such, it can be seen as a tool with which to handle and reduce spatial complexity by visualizing exact locations from a large-scale map. Again the difference between the two approaches is evident. For tourist purposes, the spatial element is used to show the positive vastness of the city and the span of the experiencescape is stretched out between the known and the unknown. In this regard, Wonderful Copenhagen gently emphasizes that the experiences of Copenhagen and the region will only unfold over time, thus implying a lengthy stay. In contrast, the situation is almost the opposite for Copenhagen Capacity, which presents the business environment. They too want to show the vastness, but in a different way. The vastness is at first an unknown quantity, but they make the vastness – the spatial element – manageable by introducing the interactive tool that makes it easy to navigate the space when looking for a suitable location.

The Experience Economy as a Cognitive Shift While it is intuitively known that knowledge is important in creating and producing goods and services (Penrose, 1959), it was not until recently that it became apparent that the concept of experiences could help to extract value from products and services. Thus the development of the Experience Economy is also a cognitive shift. The implication of this is that economic understanding is governed by time as well as space. At different points in time, different economic logics describe how value is created; beyond this, however, they also help define what major competitive arenas are deemed to be of relevance. The shift in time does not mean that each period perfectly follows the next. Several economic perspectives or paradigms can co-exist, although in different spaces and sectors. Related to the two organizations and their websites used in the analysis, it is clear that even though they are using the logic and assumptions of the Experience Economy as described by Pine and

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Søren Henning Jensen Gilmore (1999) to promote the region, this does not signify a break with the economy of goods and services. Wonderful Copenhagen promotes an industry that relies on high quality goods and services to deliver the desired experiences. For Copenhagen Capacity, it is evident that the experiencescape they present to potential investors is also made up of organizations and companies producing a wide range of goods and services. Both scenarios are typical for the types of organizations they represent. Looking at the website for Copenhagen Capacity, however, it is clear that the organization strives to make as much as possible “known” about Copenhagen – this is meant to be an experiencescape that is reassuringly manageable and non-threatening, if not completely familiar. The front page is crammed with facts that underline how well suited the city and region is for doing business. The website is dedicated to providing facts about every aspect of the city and region that could possibly be of interest to potential investors. Business news, facts and figures, and perhaps the most interesting aspect of all, a function where Denmark can be compared with countries like Sweden, France, the UK, Belgium and the USA on dimensions ranging from cost of living to quality of life. This is a much more explicit version of the implicit comparison with other capitals that is used by Wonderful Copenhagen. The data is listed on the web page under the heading ‘resources’: A collection of data for your use : • Practical information, useful contacts and links • Databases and benchmarking tools • A library of publications, maps and case stories (www.copcap.dk). It seems that the website goes to great lengths to avoid any elements of the unknown in the experiencescape they want to show to those companies contemplating doing business in the region, as has been shown throughout the text. Wonderful Copenhagen, on the other hand, draws a picturesque, although vague, picture of a capital that is on a par with every other European capital. There are many facts on their website as well, although these are not nearly as exhaustive as Copenhagen Capacity, and are presented differently. To some extent, the phrase that immediately catches the eye on the front page of the website, “Copenhagen – Living is easy” (www.woco.dk), shows that they want 156

Promoting The Known and The Unknown of Cities and City Regions the city to be perceived as a carefree metropolis. It further shows the stark difference between the two approaches used to attract tourists and businesses. Together, the excerpts from the two websites show some of the potential of the Experience Economy, as well as the role the Internet plays in creating experiencescapes. Both organizations are obviously actively engaged in showing the image they feel best represents the kind of experiences they want to promote. The city is the same for tourists or businesses; its physicality has not changed because of the Internet or the emergence of the Experience Economy. What has changed is that the organizations now work actively to promote the city and region as recognizable and attractive experiencescapes, showing them as they want their primary target groups to see them. An interesting observation in this regard is the fact that most of the pictures on the two web pages do not have any people in them, and some of the pictures that do depict people have blurred them out to some extent. This is especially true for Wonderful Copenhagen in the four categories mentioned on page 154 where there is a person in the pictures that accompany Royal Denmark (a Royal guard) and The Waterfront (5 young men in swimming trunks). In both pictures, the person (or people) is placed in the lower left hand side of the picture and does not take up much space. In addition, their faces are obscured. Copenhagen Capacity has chosen a careful strategy in which the pictures accompanying the pages related to business – such as the location or information about how to get started – lack any images of people. In contrast, the pages related to living in Copenhagen show pictures of people whose faces are fully visible. Again this underlines the different approaches of the two organizations. Wonderful Copenhagen is purposely vague in the way it presents people in the pictures; they are faceless individuals who could be absolutely anybody. In many regards, they are symbols rather than actual persons. The tourists viewing the pictures can imagine themselves as the young men in swimming trunks, and can put any face on the Royal Guard. Wonderful Copenhagen is more clear cut in that only those pages with a personal theme, such as “living in Copenhagen”, contain images of clearly visible people with faces. There is to be no ambiguity or vagueness here.

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Bringing Experiences into Urban Competition If experiences are partly defined by the expectations of the consumer, it logically follows that experience defined as a combination of the known and the unknown must be managed by emphasizing the known and signaling (or hinting at) the unknown in a manner that generates positive expectations in the mind of the consumer. John Hannigan’s Fantasy City (1998) takes an interesting look at urban development and the renaissance that many cities have undergone. His focus is on the city as a class-bound place that strives to offer middle-class consumers a vast pool of potential experiences and consumption possibilities. Though experiences are clearly a topic of interest for his study, it is not a topic that is developed in relation to the discourse on the Experience Economy. Instead, Hannigan primarily works to highlight the revival of the city in itself, examining the possible problems as well as the potential for new urban development. In the context of my argument, however, an interesting perspective that Hannigan develops is the focus on risk-free mass entertainment, which he links to a discussion of the McDonaldization of urban consumption, drawing upon George Ritzer. In essence, Hannigan argues that urban tourism is (and has long been) oriented towards attractions and sites that can be defined in terms of the known rather than the unknown. As an example, Hannigan mentions the hotel chain Holiday Inn’s commercials that promise “no surprises”. Even more relevant to this text is the following quote from Ritzer: mass-marketed tourist resorts such as Club Med offer a large selection of routinized activities in interchangeable exotic settings where a guest can stay without having to venture into the unknown and unpredictable environs… (in Hannigan, 1998:.82). In the fantasy city, experiences are almost entirely based on that which is known and predictable. In this context, the formula for success is based upon the risk free experience. If Hannigan is correct in his assumptions, it would seem probable that marketing efforts to promote cities are almost exclusively based on the known – the risk free.70 My

70

Although beyond the scope of this study, the degree to which this is true or is not true, more generally is an issue which should be checked empirically when looking into the messages and signals used by urban organizations and institutions.

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Promoting The Known and The Unknown of Cities and City Regions argument, however, indicates that the situation is rather more complex.71

Conclusion This article sets out to investigate assumptions concerning the connection between the Experience Economy and urban competition. The assumption was that urban experiences could be problematized through an analysis of the images and representations invoked to conjure up impressions of that which is known and unknown in a given place, and where any city is a distinct combination of the two. Inspiration for this came from Italio Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Obviously, the city seen as an experiencescape – a spatial entity defined by both experiences and the metaphorical framework of the Experience Economy – is highly suggestive and subjective. I argue that this necessitates and substantiates an approach that critically explores the manner in which cities are marketed (towards tourism and business) as unique constellations of the known and the unknown. It would seem that it is not the known and unknown as entities in and of themselves that are used to promote the city on the websites in question, but rather the tension between them: the ephemeral experiences that exist in the vaguely defined space between the known and the unknown. For tourism, the known is used to signal a type of city by using formulations that relate to and conjure up images of many other cities and the quality of experiences produced in them. At the same time, the unknown is used purposefully and positively, and also somewhat vaguely in alluding to less standardized qualities of cities. As a result, an experiencescape unfolds as the tourist browses through the web pages of Wonderful Copenhagen. It is an experiencescape that is on a par with any other European Capital, but at the same time unique. The experiencescape is created by keeping the known and unknown separate, but at the same time tightly connected and interrelated. It is created between the known and unknown. The picture is different for the attraction of businesses. Here it is more a question of turning the unknown into the known. This is done by carefully choosing the most important (and potentially problematic) 71

It should also be noted that while efforts to make cities appear and feel risk free may sound innocent enough, it is worth remembering that the concept of “risk free experiences” might not be so unproblematic as it sounds at first. Among other things, it is important to reflect upon the question of for whom the experiences are risk free? As Ek indicates in his contribution to this volume, the promotion of regions on the basis of experiences also carries the risk of facilitating processes of social exclusion and marginalization.

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Søren Henning Jensen unknown factors that could affect a potential business investment – factors that are unknown to potential investors – and converting them into known factors via pictures, texts, figures and interactive maps. Again it is the tension between the known and the unknown that is being used, although the relationship between them is different. Here the tension is worked in a manner that reduces and almost eliminates the unknown, by identifying it and making it known, and also making it comparable with other known areas. The result is a carefully mapped experiencescape without any blank spaces that creates a situation in which interesting spaces for future investments can easily be identified and experienced. This is almost the opposite of the strategy employed by Wonderful Copenhagen. In short, the tension between the known and the unknown can be seen as a productive way of describing urban and regional experiencescapes. In addition to this, an examination of this tension can help us understand how the same space – the same city – can be described and presented in very different ways, and how this is affected by the goals of the organization describing it, as well as the kind of experiencescape they want to promote in the minds of potential consumers.

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190

Index Abbey, Edward, 37 Abrahams, Roger, 51 Aesthetic detachment, 47 Aesthetic stimuli, 112 Aestheticization, 41-42, 44, 49, 50 AFTA, 71 Alienation, 38, 113, 124 Amsterdam, 37, 150 Andersson, Åke E, 77 Appadurai, Arjun, 16-18, 136 Arbitrariness: selective recall of the past, 112, 125 Architecture, 39, 44, 95, 99, 101, 150, 153, 154 Art Factory, 46, 49 ASEAN, 71 Attention competition for, 55-57 external-pull factor, 57 human attention structure, 55 internal-push factor, 57 managing tourists’, 58, 62, 64, 66 shifting/shifts, 52, 56-58 scarcity of, 56, 58 structure framework model, 53, 64 tourists’, 52, 54-56, 58 “warfare”, 55 Attention economy, 36, 52, 56 Attfield, Judy, 126 Attractions cultural, 59 what constitutes, 67 authentic/authenticity, 60, 6263, 65, 124-126 BALTIC art factory, 46, 49

Baltic Sea, 78, 88, 139 Barcelona, 13 Beamish Museum, 66 Belk, Russell, 55, 57 Belonging (sense of), 23, 102, 111-114, 121-123, 125-126 Berlin, 59, 78, 150 Big Bowl, 128-144 Birth of a Region, 78, 129-133, 135-138, 140, 142-143 BMW, 45 Bo01, 83-84 Branding, 59, 78, 80, 92, 107 values, 59 Brandscape, 44 Calatrava, Santiago, 84, 97, 105 Capitalism, 11, 74, 81, 108 Catwalk Economy, 25 Central Park, New York, 45 Childhood memories, 119, 124 Chinatown, 63 Christersdotter, Maria, 24-25, 51, 85, 91-110, 150 Christian bible stories, 60 religious figures, 60 Cittá Slow, 123 City-branding, 92 Cocoon-prison hotel, 117 Cohen, Erik, 53, 55, 57-58 Collective identities, redefinitions of, 114 Collective memories, 114 Colonial Williamsburg, 17, 62 Comedies, 114 Commodification of culture and experience, 15, 19, 20, 38 Communitas, 116, 121

191

Index Community, sense of, 21, 107, 112, 115-117, 123-125, 135 Consumer Society, 88 Consumer studies, 112 Conviviality, 23, 111, 115, 125 Copenhagen, 24, 27, 59, 75-81, 85-86, 88, 95, 106, 118, 122, 139, 146-160 Copenhagen This Week, 59 “cultural brokers”, 57 tour guides as, 54, 57, 67 Copenhagen Capacity, 78, 147148, 150-152, 155-157, 160 Crafting/crafted/craftsmanship of experience, 52, 55 of tourist behavior, 68 Crouch, David, 14-15, 22 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi, 53 Culinary specialties, 120 Cultural symbolism, 39 Culturalization, 41, 44, 50 Culturalization of economy, 20 Culture commercialization of, 31-33, 60 economization of, 20 “danger-zone tourists”, 57 Danish Golden Age of, 117, 126 Literature, 114, 117 modern painter, 60 roadside inns, 23, 114 tourists, 51 DaVinci, Leonardo, 58 Darley, Gillian, 39 Democracy, 89, 100, 115-116, 125 Denmark, 9, 31, 42, 60, 63, 66, 75-76, 79, 81, 96, 109, 114-115, 124-125, 147, 154, 156-157 Desert Solitaire, 37 Design-projects 92, 98-99, 101, 106, 108 192

Detroit, 39 Dicken, Peter, 69 Digital media, 47 Disconnectedness, 117 Disneyland, 30, 62 Distractions, 58, 64, 66 appropriating, 70 managing, 65, 67-68 psychological and physical, 65 what constitutes, 66-67 Diversified product, 120 Docklands, 17 Dreams, 18, 20, 79, 83, 92, 9899, 103-104, 106-107, 109, 134 Dresden, 43, 45, 49 Edensor, Tim, 43-44 EEC, 76 Ek, Richard, 25-26, 55, 64, 6989, 146, 159 Emotions, hierarchy, 46, 56, 67, 113 and social hierarchies, 135 England, 42, 46, 66 English amenities, 65 heritage sites, 63 industrial environment, 47 industrial pollution, 59 physical, 64 Eno, Brian, 42 Europe, 26, 59, 66, 70, 73-75, 77-81, 84-85, 88, 93, 99, 145, 151, 154 Europe of regions, 74-75, 77 European Union, 26, 59, 70, 7677, 90 Euro-Region, 70 Exhibition, 21, 28, 44, 66, 80, 83-84, 91-92, 95, 107 Experience/experiences convergence of, 55

Index crafting of/crafted/ craftsmanship in, 52, 55, 68 existential, 52, 64 “optimal experiences”, 53 packaging of, 17, 67 social aspects of, 132, 135-143 social embeddedness of, 60-61 Experience Economy, 20, 23, 30, 32, 36, 80, 88, 128, 131136, 140-143, 149, 151, 155, 157-159 Experience-city, 80 Experience industries, 38 Experiencescape defined, 16-19, 126 and nostalgia, 113, 124-126 regional, 72, 89 Experiencescaping, 58-64, 130 Falu copper mine, 37 Familiarity, 113, 122-124 Fantasy, 11, 17, 99, 109 Farming, 36 Fiat, 39 Flexibility, 107, 127, 141-142 Ford, 45 Fornäs, Johan, 22, 38-39 Foucault, Michel, 82, 106, 138 Franchised hotel chains, 111 Freedom Trail, 28-29 Freedom, disappearance of, 113 Freeport, Maine, 13 Fusion cooking, 121 Fyn, 76 GameWorks, 130-131, 138 Gastronomy, 126 Gateshead, UK, 46-47 Gehry, Frank, 24-25, 91, 93-95, 98-101, 103-106, 108-109 Gemeinsschaft, 116 General Motors, 21 Gentrification, 88-89 Genuine social relationships, 116

Genuineness, 125 Geo-economic warfare, 69-75, 89 Gift exchange, 135-143 Gilmore, Joseph, 20-22, 54, 8081, 131, 137, 145, 155 Global culture, 70 Global economy, 17, 70, 80 Glocalization, 70 Great garden, Dresden, 43, 45 Goss, Jon, 72 Goulding, Christina, 112-113 Gourmet meals, 116 Governmentality, 82 “Green Heart of Europe”, 59 Guggenheim Museum, 25, 9395 Gyimóthy, Szilvia, 23, 27, 43, 111-126 Handler, Richard, 62 Hannigan, John, 25, 89, 134, 158 Hanoi, 62, 65 Hard fun, 139 Heelas, Paul, 51, 56 Helsingborg, 75-76 Helsingør, 76 Heritage sites, 37, 63 Highland park, 39 Ho Chi Minh City, 62, 65 Home, metaphors of, extensions of , return to, 83, 121, 124 Homesickness, 112, 124 Hospitality, 111, 122-123, 125126 Host society, 60-61, 64-65 Hostmanship, 115 Hotels, 91-109 Human Capital, 25, 78, 87 Human attention structure, 55 Hygge, institutionalizations of, 115, 125 Icehotel, 32 193

Index Identity cultural aspects of, 19-20, 2225, 77-79, 82, 98-99, 103, 108, 112, 114-115, 121, 125 regional, 70, 82 forming, 74, 78, 87 Image, 20 IMAX, 13 Imperialism, 69 Indulgencescape, 119 Industrial Cool, 35-36, 41-43, 47-50 Industrial sublime, 39-42, 48 Industrial tourism, 37 Industrialization, 38, 41 Industries, traditional, 36, 4142, 44, 48 Informality, 115 Information Society, 36 Interactive map, 47, 160 Internet, 86, 147, 152, 157 INTERREG, 71 Intimacy, 123 Invisible cities, 148-149, 152 Iron cage metaphor, 116 Jazz music, 43 Jensen, Søren Henning, 26-27, 145-160 The Joshua Tree, 42 Kitsch, 121 KK-stiftelsen (The Knowledge Foundation), 38 Knowledge, 16, 20, 35-37, 54, 57, 64, 66, 79, 82, 99, 113, 133, 146, 155 Knowledge Society, 36 Known vs Unknown, 145-158 Kockum’s crane, 35-36, 41, 47, 49 Kockumskranen, 86 Köln, Germany, 12 Kros 111-126 Landskrona, 76 194

Las Vegas, 13, 30 Lebensraum, 80 Lefebvre, Henri, 17-18, 24, 74, 81, 85, 88, 143 Leipzig, 45 Leisure, 14-15, 22-24, 31, 33, 47, 75, 120-121, 125, 140, 142143, 148 Liminality, 132, 143 Liminoid, 125 Lingotto, 39 Linguistic analysis, 114 Linking value, 118 local/locals, 11, 14, 16-18, 24, 26-29, 54, 57-58, 60-62, 66, 6970, 75-78, 84, 86, 93, 100, 107108, 115-116, 118, 123, 134 art, 66 behavior, 62 cultural life, 54 gap between locals and tourists, 54 history, 26, 29, 66, 123 knowledge, 54, 57, 66 poverty, 61 society, 60 Local-global dialectic, 70 Lollopard, 35, 41, 47 London, 17, 29, 59, 150 Lonely Planet, 60-61, 63 Low-wage employees, 31 Lund, 76, 133 Luttwak, Edward N. 73 Luxury, 24, 43-44, 66, 95, 101, 104, 106, 109 Löfgren, Orvar, 20-21, 25, 40, 43, 79, 86, 92, 96, 104, 106, 132, 139 MacCannell, Dean, 60 Malmö, 23-25, 35-36, 43, 47, 49, 75-76, 81, 83-87, 88, 91109, 129, 135 Management strategies, 15, 128

Index Mañana-land, 123 Mankell, Henning, 28-29 Manual worker, 48 Manufacturing industry, 41 Marin, Louis, 73-74 Marketing, 75, 78, 81-89, 146147, 149-150, 153, 158 Mass customization, 131, 137 Matthiessen, Christian Wichmann, 77 Mauss, Marcel, 136, 141 McDonough, William, 45 Melancholic awareness of passing time, 113 Memorabilia, 113 Metropolis, 48, 80, 151-152, 157 Miami Beach, 14 Millenium bridge, 47 Mobility, 92, 106-109 culture of, 82, 86 Mobilityscape, 86 Modern Museum, Stockholm, 39 Modernization, 41, 119 Moral certainty, loss of, 113 More, Thomas, 74 Mythological images, 113 NAFTA, 70-71 Narratives, 46, 88, 92, 94, 96, 104-106, 112-113, 117, 126 Network Society, 36 New Economy, 21-22, 36, 139140 New industrial spaces, 70 New York, 29, 59, 62 Niagara Falls, 40 Nordgren, Sune, 46 Norrköping, 46 North America, 71, 76, 145, 151 Nostalgia, 56, 111-114, 125, 134

Nostalgiascapes, 23, 111-126 Nostalgic consumption, 112, 121, 125 Nostalgic paradigm, 113 Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 39 Nye, David, 39-40 Näringsliv Skåne, 36 O’Dell, Tom, 13-36, 54, 80, 81, 88, 127-144 Ohmae, Kenichi, 69, 80, 88, 150 Ooi , Can-Seng, 19, 26, 51-68, 87 Oriental, 63 Orthodoxy, 126 Panopticon, 86 Paris, 58, 106-107, 150 Patriotism, 114-115 Patton, Phil, 45-45 Pedersen, Carl-Henning, 60 Pennsylvania, 37 Performance, 47, 74, 81, 87, 118, 138, 143 Pinball machines, 116 Pine, Joseph, B. 20-22, 54, 8081, 133, 137, 145, 155 Pioneering spirit, 97 Phaeton, VW, 43 Place marketing, 25-26, 69-89, 149 Place Wars, 72, 80-81, 89, 146 Planet Hollywood, 14, 17 Play, vs. work, 22, 127-128, 139 Polanyi, Michael, 56 Popular culture, 41-43, 111, 117, 121, 125 Populism, 120 Positioning, 125 Post-industrial Society, 36, 38, 48 Post-sightseeing Society, 27, 80 Post-war period, 96, 114 195

Index Potlatch, 141-142 Power, 16-18, 21, 40, 42-43, 48, 77, 82-83, 102-105, 108, 127, 136-138, 141-143, 145 Prague, 51 Preferences, 58, 64, 112, 120121, 125-126 Prentice, Richard, 51, 53, 56, 62, 63, 125 Private domain, 123, 124 Rainforest Café, 17 Recognition, 107, 148 Recycled factories, 46-47 Regeneration, urban, 83, 85 Regime, 75, 85-86, 89 Regime, regional, 75, 82-83 Region, 17, 23-26, 32, 69-90, 92, 96-97, 99-100, 104, 106107, 109, 145-151, 153, 155157, 160 Region, cross-border, 69-71, 73, 75 Relic, 57, 119 Retreats, 30 Rheingold, 48 Rit de passage, 132 Ritualizations, 118 River Rouge, 45 River Tyne, 46 Rojek, Chris, 56 Rome, 150 Rootedness in the past, 113 Rootlessness, 107, 113 Rosengård, 85 Saigon, 63 Scale Wars, 72 Scale, geographical, 69, 71, 7981, 146 Scale, regional, 80, 87 Scale, spatial, 70, 74, 81, 87 Scandinavia, 32, 63, 80, 87, 130, 151 Scandinavian design, 94, 119 196

Scania, 36, 75, 77, 79-81, 88, 108 Scape, 16-17 Schiphol Airport, 37 Sega Enterprises, 130 Segregation of lower classes, 120 Semi-public service arenas, 118 Serious play, 127, 140 Service encounters, 117 Service scripts Shanghai, 59 Showcase-plants, 41 Sim City, 85 Sim Wars, 72, 82, 84, 89 Simulation, 81, 83, 100 Sin City, 85 Singapore, 59, 63, 67, 89 Chinatown, 63 Little India, 63 Sjælland, 76 Slogans, 25-26, 120, 145 Slowness, 123, 125 Societas, 116, 121 Souvenirs, 57, 63, 67 Space, abstract, 85, 88 conceptualized, 81 representations of, 18, 74, 81 Sparke, Matthew, 73 Spatial play, 72-74, 87 Spontaneity, 113 Stand-up comedy, 118 Standardization, 38 Stereotype, 63, 114 Stylized past, 113 Sublime, 39-42, 48 Summer revues, 118 Sweden, 9, 29, 31-33, 39, 71, 75-77, 79, 81, 85, 96, 109, 130 Symbolic power, 23, 92, 105 Synopticon, 86 Tangkjær, Christian, 77-78

Index Togetherness, 97, 115-116, 125, 135 Tourism agencies, 54 authorities, 60, 67 behavior, 68 businesses, 51-52 consumption, 60, 64, 66, 120 destinations, 24, 26-27, 40, 51, 54, 57, 59, 62-63, 66-67, 80, 147 experience/experiences, 51-68 mediators, 54-55, 57-58, 60, 64-66, 68-69 operators, 54 product/products, 52, 54-55, 58-65, 67-69 Tourist(s)/tourists’ Attention, 27, 52, 54-56, 58, 62, 65, 67-69 expectations and preconceptions. 63 gaze, 27 ‘go native’, 61, 65 “Touristification”, 60, 63 Tranquility, 121 The transparent factory (die gläserne manufaktur), 43-44, 49 Trialectics of space (perceived, conceived and lived), 18 Tuborg, 120 Turin, 39 Turner, Bryan, 113 Turner, Victor, 132 Turning Torso, 84-86, 89, 97, 99, 105, 108 U2, 42 Universal Studios, 130 Ulsan, South Korea, 35, 50 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, 37

Urban, 146, 148-153, 158-160 Urban competition, 158-159 Urry, John, 17, 19-20, 27, 54, 56, 83 USA, 37, 61-62, 73, 156 Utopia, 74 Vietnam, 62-63 Viking(s), 61, 63, 66, 79 museum, 63 town, 61 wearing of horns, 63 Vintage, 121 Vision(s), 92, 97-109 VW, 43-45 Websites and marketing, 147160 Western Europe, 145 Western World, 36, 42, 69, 89 Wild things, 126 Willim, Robert, 15, 21-22, 3550, 54, 84, 87, 139 Wonderful Copenhagen, 78, 80, 147-148, 150-153, 155-157, 159-160 Work, linkage to leisure practices, 15, 21-23, 127-128, 137-143 WorkPlay, 137-143 World economy, 69-71, 73 Yesteryear, 112 Ystad, 28-29 Zaha Hadid, 45 Žižek, Slavoj, 11, 48 Øresund, 25, 71-72, 77-96, 104, 106-109 Øresund Bridge, 82, 85-86, 9192, 96, 106, 109 Øresund Committee, 78 Øresund Region, 79-84, 86-89, 106-107, 109

197