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Overview
This book examines the complex interplay between industrial heritage and tourism. It serves to stimulate meaningful dialogue about the socioeconomic values of industrial sites and the use of tourism for the growth of the creative economy, and to better understand how the collective social memory and local identity connected to these sites have been shaped by different social groups over time. The volume presents a conceptual framework underpinned by case studies drawn from Asia, North America, Australasia and Europe and advocates the creation of mixed-use spaces and stakeholder collaboration to develop tourism at industrial heritage sites. These theoretical and practical perspectives will be of use to researchers and students of heritage tourism, urban and regional planning and tourism marketing.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781845415150 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Channel View Publications |
| Publication date: | 06/02/2015 |
| Series: | Tourism and Cultural Change , #43 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 273 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Philip Feifan Xie is Professor of the Tourism, Leisure and Event Planning program at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA. He holds a PhD in planning from the University of Waterloo, Canada. His areas of specialization include cultural and heritage tourism, tourism morphology and event management.
Read an Excerpt
Industrial Heritage Tourism
By Philip Feifan Xie
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2015 Philip Feifan XieAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84541-515-0
CHAPTER 1
Approaches to Industrial Heritage Tourism
Theorizing Heritage: Landscape, Memory and Identity
Heritage is a loaded word that is used in daily discourse but has a variety of different meanings (Meethan, 1996). Initially, it conveys the ostensible mission, in which the 'past', understood to be transparent, coherent and discrete, is transmitted in a more or less unchanged form to the present. However, in practice, heritage is a bona fide intellectual exercise that is not just responding to the contours of culture, but is also constructing a selective and incomplete version of the past in a way that is intelligible to present-day audiences. To some extent, heritage is a moot concept (Edson, 2004) with fuzzy semantic boundaries (Cohen & Cohen, 2012). It is generational: the attitudes, stories, moral judgments and key artifacts that presumably make up a given culture's heritage morph over time (Littler & Naidoo, 2005). It is closely associated with societal context and increasingly perceived as human development (Loulanski, 2006).
Heritage is marked by communities who identify their historical and cultural resources and develop these with the intent of sharing them with others (Cass & Jahrig, 1998). Lowenthal (1999: xv) proposes that heritage consists of 'domesticating' the past so as to infuse it with present causes. Graham et al. (2000: 2) echo that heritage is 'a view from the present, either backward to a past or forward to a future'. Heritagization is a process of recontextualization in which material culture is selected, preserved and reconstructed by uniting principles, practices and processes (Misiura, 2006). From a constructionist perspective, the process of heritage-making refers to the ways in which past material artifacts, mythologies, memories and traditions become cultural, political and economic resources for the present (Graham & Howard, 2008).
The discourse of heritage has long been viewed by scholars as a landscape derived from the negotiation of history by its stakeholders. In minimalist terms, a landscape is the backdrop against which archaeological remains are plotted (Ashmore & Knapp, 1999). It is an entity that exists by virtue of its being perceived, experienced and contextualized by people. Cultural geographers refer to the heritage landscape as a genre de vie (Graham, 1994), a harmony between human life and the milieu in which it was lived (Cosgrove, 1998). Duncan (1990: 17) regards the heritage landscape as 'an ordered assemblage of objects, a text [which] acts as a signifying system through which a social system is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored'. Heritage is a signifier, more than a simple idea underlying the historical unity of objects, and involves various perspectives, modes of involution, replacement and engagement. The study of heritage is always placed within a wider framework of the political economy of signs, largely because the identifications of patrimony and heritage that have become increasingly difficult to interpret as staged authenticity in one generation turn out to be authentic 'heritage' in the next (Hobsbawm, 2012). Therefore, it is hard to pin down, objectively and precisely, what heritage represents since the definition is continually altered and negotiated by various aspects of identities. Different interest groups within a culture may have competing interpretations of what a heritage constitutes and may struggle to make their interpretation dominant. Benhamou (2003: 255) suggests that the definition of built heritage includes archaeological sites, historic buildings and historic urban centers; however, they change over time and space and depend on a variety of dimensions such as symbolic, cultural and national identity. Therefore, social constructionists argue that heritage has unstable and blurred boundaries of what it includes and what it excludes. As Cassia (1999: 254) points out, heritage is a transposable concept that is often disputed, yet dispute creates heritage.
Several fields have grappled with the implications of understanding heritage as a contemporary product shaped from history, power and identity (Tunbridge & Ashworth, 1996). The American human geographer Carl Sauer (1925) first formulated the concept of a cultural landscape, a force in shaping the visible features in delimited areas. Heritage is characterized by the complexity of a cultural landscape and a polyvocality of interpretations reflective of an array of social differences. The content of heritage should at least include the following five facets. (1) Any relict or physical survival from the past. Examples are archaeological sites and monumental buildings sanctioned by the government via an adjective title used in various settings, such as 'heritage railway stations', 'heritage industry', etc. (2) Objects presumed to represent or to be imbued with intangible aspects of the past. Heritage comprises a set of collective memories existing within 'an imagined political community' (Anderson, 1991), including people who are bound by cultural and political networks. (3) Objects and artifacts from the past, particularly those that represent the accumulation of a culture's creativity, skill and artistic productivity. Such objects aestheticize imaginary constructs of identity, creating a narrative of progress and cultural accumulation that bolsters the nation state (Graham, 1994). (4) Artifacts of human productivity that can be mobilized to form 'heritage landscapes', a space encompassing associated images and symbols representing an instrument of modernization (Lefebvre, 1991). (5) A major commercial activity which is loosely defined as a 'heritage industry'. Parker (1998: 3) proposes the phrase 'prescriptive elitism' to indicate that heritage is both descriptive, in that it educates people about its contents, and prescriptive, in that it contains both explicit and implicit lessons about what counts as heritage. Both are evaluated by their commercial value and extended from 'a saleable past to include a saleable culturally distinctive present' (Parker, 1998: 2).
Research interest in heritage has been a growing phenomenon since the late 20th century (Herbert, 2001). Heritage is widely viewed as an integral part of culture, which is consciously chosen, explicitly valued and shared with the public. The roles of heritage, seen before in the narrow meaning of symbols of national unity and local pride, have expanded to include much broader phenomena, contributing to political ideals, economic prosperity, social cohesion and cultural diversity (Clark, 2001). In general terms, heritage encompasses both cultural and natural elements according to the UNESCO Convention of 1972 (Ahmad, 2006). Natural heritage includes biological, hydrographic and morphological phenomena, such as lakes, mountains and coastlines. Cultural heritage represents a wide variety of cultural products made by humans in past eras, which are generally categorized into two major factors, tangible and intangible (Jamieson, 2006). Tangible heritage refers to such physical objects as historic buildings, landmarks, urban and rural landscapes, groups of buildings and sites, and museums, while intangible heritage, made up of all immaterial manifestations of culture, embodies the socio-psychological expression of values, lifestyles, traditions, mores and folklores (Vecco, 2010). In the early 2000s, the international community recognized that intangible heritage, due to its incorporeal nature, needs and deserves safeguarding, which culminated in the adoption of the 2003 UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. The former covers the craftsmanship of industrial products or skills transmission. The latter teaches measures to promote traditional knowledge and associated genetic resources that form part of a single integrated industrial heritage.
Despite their individualities, the relationship between tangible and intangible heritage is synchronized and intertwined in a contemporary society. The resource base from which heritage is assembled comprises a variety of events, personalities, rituals and artifacts rooted in a given place and symbolically associated with one another; however, intangible heritage tends to disintegrate into pure image and creates a mental landscape in which everything is pastiche (Urry, 2002). Lenzerini (2011) suggests that the main 'constitutive factors' of intangible heritage are represented by the 'self-identification' of this heritage as an essential element of the cultural identity of its creators and bearers. In other words, intangible heritage can be constantly recreated in response to the historical and social evolution of the societies concerned. Ruggles and Silverman (2009) argue that cultural heritage is shaped by a society whose norms and values attribute differential importance to the objects presumed important and tangential to its heritage. Intangible heritage infuses the tangible with meaning, such as place identity, musical instruments, ritual objects and so on (Deacon, 2004). Munjeri (2004) asserts that tangible heritage can only be interpreted through the intangible, while the intangible values need to rely on the tangible to be visualized. In order to safeguard the essence of heritage, it is critical to recognize and interpret the interrelations between the intangible and its associated tangible heritage.
In recent decades, the connection between cultural detritus and the concept of heritage has been problematized and reformulated via the social formation called 'postmodernity' and a new subjective position called the 'postmodern condition'. Both have been presumed to disrupt previous understandings of the construction and the meaning of heritage. Although the concept of postmodernity is notoriously contested, it reveals tensions between heritage and modernity as a means of economic development. For example, Nuryanti (1996) indicates that the role of heritage in postmodern tourism is challenging, mainly for interpretation, marketing, planning and the interdependencies between heritage tourism and local communities. The problems are largely attributed to two major postmodern symptoms (Jameson, 2001): the disappearance of history, in which our entire contemporary social system has begun to lose the capacity to retain its own past; and a present existing in perpetual change that ultimately obliterates traditions. In the past, traditional industries were all linked to producers, with relatives who worked in factories or on farms, their labor dedicated to making things. There is a lingering concern about losing those connections in the postmodern era: the memory of how we made things or even that we did, and still do. Heritage becomes a part of the entire cultural logic of late capitalism when the glorification of an idealized past becomes a threat to the present. The gradual shift into postmodernity is marked by the continued fascination with heritage and tradition endowed with new meaning and function. The past is viewed as a reference point with a quarry of possibilities from which selection occurs. The use of the past for current purposes empowers the commodification of heritage as it becomes marked and ritualized as an open text transformed through intellectual interpretation. As Casetti (1998: 8) points out, postmodernity evokes 'the idea of dynamic construction, of an open and complex organization', attempting to uncover the ways in which the normalization of gender, race, class and other oppressions is integral to the construction of a single, linear, coherent cultural heritage. Postmodernity is a form of text that can be 'read' from different cultures, languages and social classes, to name just a few.
In the context of postmodernity, heritage closely relates to collective memory, a social construct originating from shared communications about the past and a broad spectrum of meanings associated with different forms of presence, real or imaginary (Nora, 2011). Borrowing French historian Fernand Braudel's term, longue durée, heritage stands for an idea of present-centeredness that can be conceptualized as the result of the interaction among three historical factors: (1) the intellectual and cultural traditions that frame all our representations of the past; (2) the memory makers who selectively adopt and manipulate these traditions; and (3) the memory consumers who use, revise or transform such artifacts according to their own interests (Kansteiner, 2002). These historical factors have evolved at various periods in time and different developmental stages. In reality, heritage is a fluid concept moving to and fro along a past–present continuum. Graham et al. (2000: 24) raise a series of provocative questions: 'who decides what is heritage, and whose heritage is it?'; 'can the past be "owned" and, if so, who "owns" it, what do we mean by "own" and who reconciles conflicting claims to such ownership?'. Smith (2006) coins the term 'authorized heritage discourse' to point out that the cultural identity and memories understood to comprise a heritage are frequently determined by dominant political, social, religious or ethnic groups. Lowenthal (1999) suggests that although we are aware that the past varies from personal experience through fallible memory to learned history, we still want old things to 'seem' old with antiquity valued and validated by the patina of age. In other words, the past is a foreign country that can be reconstructed in the public interpretation of heritage and culture, while memory is represented as a recollection of senses in generational and experiential times.
At a deeper level, memory takes two distinctive forms: transmitted and acquired (Gilloch, 1997). The former is handed down from one generation to the next while the latter is everything that has happened or is felt to have happened. One of the implicit presumptions about memory, certainly in the culture at large, is that a hierarchy exists that designates some memories more important, or more worthy of commemoration than others. Memory plays a critical role in the artificial and synthetic commodity world by offering satisfaction that is fundamentally illusory in nature. It also creates the illusion of inexhaustible variety and the satisfaction of all imaginable wants (Rojek, 1998). Tunbridge (2001: 359) distinguishes between two forms of heritage expression in the context of postmodernity and memory: public heritage expressions that draw on more local history, and private heritage expressions that produce a more dissonant story. In the former, public heritage expressions are made up of multiple messages while in the latter, heritage expressions are streamlined for commercial intent.
Nora (2011) argues that as a result of postmodernity and deindustrialization, there is more 'acquired memory' perceived as commercially viable heritage and less 'transmitted memory' constructed from the past. Heritage is more or less a product of the creative imagination assuming the past exists and is determined by inheritors living at present. It stimulates multiple memories ranging from recollections which flow into each other and diverge, resonate backward and forward and splice the personal and collective (Edensor, 2005). Heritage is enmeshed within new social contexts, whether as part of the history to which it belongs or as marketing that draws people from farther afield. Simply put, heritage historicizes the new landscape for consumption and is heavily influenced by contemporary demand factors, such as the desire for creation, cultural pride, authentic experiences and entertainment by and for visitors. It serves as a process by which functionality is deliberately transformed for consumption, often with thematic interpretation and packaging to enhance its attractiveness.
The increased attention given to acquired memory by heritage projects is a troubling sign of the disarray brought on by what German philosopher Walter Benjamin called 'phantasmagoria', the annihilation of stable meanings in culture coupled with the convergence of public and private spaces. The presumption is that transmitted memory through working with various stakeholders is more important than acquired memory. Benjamin (2002: 17) writes, 'the joy of watching is triumphant' and 'through which the familiar city beckons, to the flâneur as phantasmagoria – now a landscape, now a room'. His understandings of two sets of memories, despite theoretically inspirational, leave several questions unanswered: who decides which acquired memories get transformed into transmitted memories? How does that process work, and how does it uphold, produce or possibly challenge systems of oppression? Why presume that transmitted memories are more important than acquired ones? and what presumptions undergird that hierarchy? These questions come down to the politics of collecting and selecting memories, and the inevitable fallibility of collective and transmitted memories. They turn into a political process that has inspired a number of contemporary polemics about heritage and its interpretation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Industrial Heritage Tourism by Philip Feifan Xie. Copyright © 2015 Philip Feifan Xie. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Approaches to Industrial Heritage Tourism
2. A Framework for Approaching Industrial Heritage Tourism
3. The Proposal for the Jeep Museum in Toledo, USA
4. Perceptions of Attractiveness for Salt Heritage Tourism
5. Waterfront Redevelopment and Urban Morphology
6. La Fabrique des Lieux: the LX Factory and the Westergasfabriek
Conclusions
References
Index
What People are Saying About This
A highly original, engaging and thought-provoking text that is thorough in its coverage and insightful in its critical appreciation of industrial heritage tourism. The ability to fuse academic rigor with flowing narrative is never easy but the author is to be congratulated on a theoretical text that delivers a new 'tourist gaze' directed at industrial heritage with nostalgia, place identity and community engagement common themes running throughout.
This book provides a bold and timely analysis of the current state and prospects of industrial heritage tourism, highlighting successes and failures alike, with a particular focus on its heritage/economy/urban regeneration nexus. The reasoning is based on an impressive body of international references and fieldwork while embedding the theme in post-modern discourses and stressing the need for spatio-temporal contextualisation.
This book provides a framework and exemplary case studies that provide a synthesis and also provoke new ideas for the understanding and conceptualisation for those researching temporal changes and industrial landscapes. This is a great introduction to industrial heritage for students of cultural, heritage and tourism studies.