Searching for a lost aura: a Naxi Dongba’s spatial practices and space remaking in touristic commoditization

This paper explores how space remaking of tourist destinations erases aura of place. Two questions are discussed: (1) where does the aura of a tourism destination originate and (2) why/how is the aura of a tourism destination erased. Ethnographic research was conducted in 2011, 2012, and 2016, in Lijiang, Yunnan Province, focusing on the life story of He Zhenwei, a Naxi Dongba, and the spatial practices of his daily life in his workplace, home, and town. It indicates that more attention is paid to representations of space than to the aura of place in the space-making of tourist destinations. I argue that this kind of space-making tends towards the disjunction of the inherent systems of symbols of physical space, resulting in the loss of the aura of place. The most innovative aspect, in which I draw on Lefebvre’s space theory and Goffman’s theatrical stage, is the juxtaposition of ritual space, life space, and staged space, which elucidates the correlation between meaning-remaking of tourist destinations and the aura of indigenous cultures. The commoditization of heritage tourism is subject to the pursuit of the ‘Other image’ of culture as well as landscaping of place which gradually leads to the annihilation of aura.     

A comparative study of airport connectivity in China,Europe and US: Which network provides the best service to passengers?

This paper investigates the connectivity of the airport networks in China, Europe and US. Our aim is to analyze which network is most beneficial to final passengers in terms of travel time and which of the network features lead to such a result. A time-dependent minimum path approach is employed to calculate the minimum travel time between each pair of airports in the three networks, inclusive of flight times and waiting times in intermediate airports. We evaluate each fastest indirect connection in terms of waiting times and routing factors to consider the effect of the hubs’ coordination and locations. The Chinese network provides the quickest travels for passengers, but this performance is explained by a small number of airports per inhabitant. The US network is the most coordinated when considering indirect connections. The EU network provides the most homogeneous level of service when comparing airports of different sizes.     

The geography of car ownership in Mexico City: a joint model of households’ residential location and car ownership decisions

Suburbanization and car-ownership have increased rapidly in developing-world cities over the past half-century. This study examines the relationship between income, car ownership, and suburbanization across geographies and households in metropolitan Mexico City. Neither car-ownership trends by geography nor a mixed logit model of 43,000 households’ joint car-ownership and residential-location decisions suggest that car ownership and suburbanization are moving hand-in-hand. Instead, wealthier households tend to live in central locations and own and drive cars, while poorer households tend to live further from the urban center and rely more heavily on transit. If a random household’s income doubles, that household is around 44% more likely to get an additional car and 29% more likely to live in the urban center. Given the sticky nature of housing supply and the current model of peripheral housing production, aggregate responses to higher income are more difficult to predict, as they will almost certainly be offset by higher prices. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that higher income and car ownership do not tend to encourage a move to larger houses on larger suburban lots in Mexico City.     

Implications for CARICOM member states in the search for a ‘liberally controlled’ air transport market: The case of regional tourism to Barbados

This study presents an analysis of the state of aviation liberalisation in CARICOM (Caribbean Community) and its implications for regional tourism to Barbados as a member state in CARICOM. The evidence shows that improvements to the regulatory aviation environment in CARICOM would aid improvements in intra-regional tourism. Given the benefits that have been obtained globally, previous studies have been deductive and analysed the benefits of a less restrictive aviation environment in the region. However, the inductive approach of this study reveals that before there can be a successful attempt at any such liberalism in CARICOM, there are pre-existing constraining factors which must be addressed since they will hinder the effectiveness of any such policy. The study therefore proposes that the effectiveness of the existing regional multilateral agreement is hindered by political interference, not only in the overall context of aviation bureaucracy, but also in the business operations of the regional carriers.     

Disentangling the tourism sector’s fragmentation: a hands-on coding/post-coding guide for interview and policy document analysis in tourism†

Qualitative tourism research is inevitably multidimensional. The fragmentation of the tourism sector across policy domains, scales, space and stakeholders leads to ‘blurry’ and aggregated datasets. Yet, tourism studies have a weak record in describing how results emanate from raw qualitative data. This paper presents a coding/post-coding scheme that proved robust in disentangling multidimensional tourism datasets in a middle-range research project that necessitated reflecting on the position of the researcher and the literature study during the data analysis. It describes the pragmatic decisions taken to organise the qualitative data from a research project on cross-border tourism and regional development processes. The paper also functions as a reflexive account of how this scheme came into existence. It contributes to the tools available to practically acknowledge the fragmentation of the tourism sector and the resulting multidimensional qualitative data, and calls for a more open accounting of the data analysis process and the underlying research values in tourism studies.