Although blurred and heavily contested, the concept of 'tourist destination' still deserves careful attention. Despite its unstable characteristics, 'destination' is a central and meaningful term in play among all parties in the field of tourism, including tourists, tourism operators, and politicians, as well as students and tourism scholars. This anthology draws on different approaches and discourses of tourism destination development, while focusing on how they are shaped and reshaped and how they should be read and rehearsed. The book reveals dominant as well as alternative approaches to the field. The authors demonstrate how tourism destinations are commercial, but socially embedded; how they are both material and territorial, but at the same time socially constructed; how production of touristic brands and images are vital, but contested. Such tensions are unfolded through paradigmatic discussions and a series of case studies from the northern hemisphere. The chapters in the book investigate how destination development is catalysed through theming, how changing environments lead to reorientations, and how destinations are political. Altogether, the book provides experts and students with an up-to-date theoretical and empirical insight into tourist destinations.
1: Dimensions of Tourism Destinations; I: Conceptualizing Destinations; 2: Destinations Discourses and the Growth Paradigm; 3: Transforming Destinations: A Discursive Approach to Tourist Destinations and Development; 4: Destination Development Performances: Or How we Learn to Love Tourism; 5: A Place for Whom? A Place for What? The Powers of Destinization; II: Catalysing Themed Destinations; 6: Weaving with Witchcraft: Tourism and Entrepreneurship in Strandir, Iceland; 7: Ski Resort Development. Scripts and Phronesis; 8: Sled Dog Racing and Tourism Development in Finnmark. A Symbiotic Relationship; III: Reorienting Destinations; 9: Integrated Tourism Development? When Places of the Ordinary Are Transformed to Destinations; 10: Standardization and Power in Cruise Destination Development; 11: Transforming Visions and Pathways in Destination Development: Local Perceptions and Adaptation Strategies to Changing Environment in Finnish Lapland; 12: A Hotel Waiting for Renovation: Pallas as a Challenging Case for Tourism Development in Finnish Lapland; IV: Destinations as Politics; 13: Dynamic Development or Destined to Decline? The Case of Arctic Tourism Businesses and Local Labour Markets in Jokkmokk, Sweden; 14: Responsible Tourism Governance. A Case Study of Svalbard and Nunavut; 15: Epilogue: Reflections on Tourism Destination Development
