The Tourism Constellation: Urban Tourism and the ...

Chapter 6

The Tourism Constellation: Urban Tourism and the Globalized Circuits of Commodified Selves Paula Mota Santos Fernando Pessoa University, Porto, Portugal and CAPP, University of Lisbon, Portugal

Introduction This chapter analyzes the role of specific culture-consumption-related buildings in the symbolic economies of some of Europe’s West Coast mid-size cities. The argument to be put forward here is that in certain cities there is an identityrelated narrative imbued in the creation of culture-related facilities and heritage related-urban areas (the “stars” part of “the tourism constellation” in the title of this chapter). It is also argued that these identity-related narratives and respective objectifications through specific urban elements are related to global dynamics and related new reterritorializations of urban systems, namely the emergence of the region (headed by a metropolitan area) (see Sucena-Garcia this volume) as a relevant actor in the globalization-induced new balances of urban and metropolitan systems currently evolving in Europe’s West Coast. These reterritorialized entities present and re-present themselves through a tourism constellation resulting from a proliferation of globalized circuits that both contribute to and constitute these new scales of this economy of immaterialities (identities and senses of self and of place). It will be shown how the growing numbers of cross-border dynamics—and in this case the globalized circuits of heritage values and of the artistic production and consumption—are 109

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The Tourism Constellation

empirical referents of these nonstate forms of articulation of cross-borders networks. As a result of these processes we see a growing number of midsize cities (and their metropolitan areas) playing an increasingly important role in directly linking the realm of the national with global circuits. What is argued here is that we are witnessing a new geography of centrality in which Europe’s West Coast metropolized mid-size cities become articulators and participants in global processes and thus transform their in-the-margins quality into a new centrality. It will also be argued that the Tourism constellation of the title is both a form of self-representation of Europe’s West Coast mid-size cities as a model of urban renewal and development centered on the symbolic economy.

The Centrality of the “Travel and Visit” Experience in High-Modernity The action of temporarily moving out of “one’s place” into the “place of the other” to then get back into “one’s place,” i.e., to be a visitor or a tourist to a place, is a wide spread social practice and one whose study proves to be particularly illuminating of the dynamics relating to issues of social identity and its relation to space as place. Traveling and the related encounter of “places-ofothers” is part of the genealogy of the anthropological science. Nevertheless, anthropology took a long time to turn its academic gaze over to this social practice. For most of anthropology’s history, traveling as geographical dislocation from western to nonwestern worlds, was one of the tenets of the trade that took mostly just a Goffmanian backstage role (Goffman 1990) in anthropological production. However, the importance of tourism in modern lives was not paralleled by a strong development of academic theorizing on it in anthropology or any other social science. One of the reasons for this under- or late-development of this area of studies can be found in the fact that the study of leisure has always been seen as less deserving of academia’s efforts than the study of, for instance, industrialization. Tourism taken as a social practice only gained a recognized status as an academic field of research in the late ’70s, an emergence most clearly epitomized by Smith’s (1977) Hosts and Guests. In it it is already clear how this social practice is deeply embedded in the domain of the symbolic. Because tourism-related activities are more than just countable and quantifiable assets such as numbers of nights slept in one destination or number of jobs directly created by the tourism activity in any one tourist destination, when addressing tourism we are thus dealing with an economy of immaterialities. Tourism is about the production and the consumption of a (sense of) place. Now, the way this production and consumption take place is something that is immensely diverse. A quick browse through the pages of any tourist guidebook (such as for instance the Rough Guide or the Lonely Planet series) shows that the forms of consumption of a place might range from learning the tenets of the place’s history and the basic words of its language, to sightseeing and shopping, to eating and drinking, and even to searching for sexual encounters.

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Tourism, and particularly mass tourism, i.e., the democraticized form of the European elites’ Grand Tour (i.e., the visiting of places other than their own with a view to personal betterment), is thus a central element in present day lives all around the globe. Tourism as a social practice, i.e., “the encountering of the other through visiting their places,” is an illuminating subject of today’s social dynamics for the following reasons: (1) tourism is a social practice central to high-modernity; (2) tourism is integral to the development of modern capitalism and of its consumption practices; (3) tourism participates in, and promotes globalized dynamics that harbor denationalization processes, the latter being a central element in today’s late capitalism. Concerning the first reason, tourism, and namely mass tourism, has been an important element in European economies since the mid-nineteenth century up to the present. Tourism is frequently classified as one of today’s fastest growing industries.1 However, tourism is not just an economic arena: tourism is essentially a social practice and a very important one at that. This importance stems from the pervasiveness of the diverse lived experiences that are encapsulated in the deceptively simple word “tourism.” But the fact that tourism is one of the fastest growing industries speaks for itself of the importance that this social practice has in peoples’ lives.2 Tourism is thus a central activity in the way individuals in high-modernity construct their relation to place (either by visiting a place or by being visited at their place) and, consequently, to social identity and related dynamics. Concerning the second reason, tourism is one of the most central elements in the building of modernity and modern life-styles being closely related to the development of industrial capitalism and the carving out by workers of paid offwork time.3 Tourism is thus an integral part in the development of modern capitalism and of its consumption practices inasmuch as it is part of the commodification process involving people, capital, images, cultures and places. Concerning the third reason, tourism is a globalized industry and both a major drive and a result of a globalized world. But, while being a social practice that participates in globalized fluxes, it is one that is intimately connected to the local. Tourism sells locality to globalized fluxes and consumers. Thus, although tourism has what Sassen (2006) calls, explicitly global institutions and processes (for instance, the World Tourism Organization), it also has processes that do not scale at the global level as such, but are part of globalizing dynamics (for in1

See for instance the contributions in Fainstein and Judd (1999) and in Lögfren (1999, 5). 2 In the mid 1990s around 7 percent of the total world workforce, i.e., c 230 million people were employed in tourism with over 600 million arrivals per year and a spending of $3.4 trillion dollars; the prediction for the year 2020 is that 1.6 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion people will make a trip abroad (Lögfren 1999, 6). 3 The earlier examples of mass tourism are to be found in the UK in the mid 1800s with railroad excursions from inner industrial cities (e.g., Manchester) to seaside resorts (e.g., Blackpool). Thomas Cook, an entrepreneurial and farsighted businessman and Temperance Societies member, started tours to seaside areas as early as the 1840s. Later, in the 1850s, his business also started to offer packages of organized visits to shops and historical places in continental Europe (Lögfren 1999, 161).

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stance a nation-state’s laws regulating land use and property ownership by nationals and foreign nationals). The latter dynamics are multisited, transboundary networks and formations that are working towards “denationalization,” i.e., the dislodging of national capabilities. According to Sassen (2006), this type of processes has failed to capture the social scientists’ gaze because, due to their very nature, they continue to be experienced and represented within the traditional nation-state framework. Denationalization processes promote the emergence of other spatial scales such as “regions.” As one result of such processes, the cityregion is emerging as a more empowered agent in the globalized circuits, as the work by Sucena-Garcia (this volume) demonstrates.4 After setting the scene for the importance of tourism in present day highmodernity, this chapter will next analyze the intertwining of two elements that are central to the concept of the tourism constellation: urban spaces and the visitors’ economy in globalized times.

Cities as Place of Spectacle In The Culture of Cities, Zukin refers to the urban renewal and development strategies of the ’70s and ’80s as creating cities as sites of delectation (1995, 22). However, cities as prominent places of human settlement have always encapsulated in their functions that of “public entertainment.” The cities of ancient Greece and ancient Rome had entertainment purpose-built structures (theaters, circus, coliseums) and their public spaces were also often the setting of public parades celebrating the Gods and/or the victorious military chiefs. Medieval and Renaissance European cities had their cathedrals with their squares and streets along which the religious processions (such as the Holy Week processions in Seville, Spain) and neighborhood-based festivals (such as the Palio races in Siena, Italy) enacted a display of community belongingness. It is possible to view 18th-century city Baroque urbanism as an objectification through spatial structures of the strongly centralized political powers of the time. The Baroque as a cultural ambience and as a spatial practice works as a stage set where the strong political power of the time objectified itself (the Vatican’s Saint Peter’s square in Rome, Italy is one such instance). However, the nineteenth century and its major changes in the economic system, namely the development of the modern form of capitalism, seem to have obliterated from present day memory the city’s entertainment role. Thus, because in the 1800s industry was the major motor for city growth and development (and for its related social changes), the “idea of the city” in recent memory seems to has been imprinted as “a place of work” (the latter taking mostly the 4

The city has now a new nature as translated in a polycentred reality: the metapolis as defined by Ascher (1995), a conceptualization closely related to what Gottdiener calls deconcentration (1994, 19). The metapolization of lifestyles is translated into society’s increasing complexification (increased diversity of space and social stratification, a deepening of labor division and consequent increase in networkability) and singularization (the increasing forms of marking inter- and intragroup differentiation) (Ascher 1998, 78– 79).

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form of industry and/or commerce). But interestingly enough, if a present day representation of the nineteenth-century city tends to vacate it of its entertainment function, it is exactly the same nineteenth century that brings the beginning of a major element in terms of a society of the spectacle and of scopophilia that so mark high-modernity: the emergence of the world fairs or world exhibitions of which the very first took place in London’s Crystal Palace in 1851.5 The world fairs of the 1800s were organized around a theme and can arguably be seen as one of the precursors of today’s themed environments such as shopping malls, theme parks, restaurants, and even cities. For instance, Vienna’s 1873 world exposition was organized around the theme culture and education while Chicago’s 1883 world fair was organized around the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World and was known as Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition.6 So, in fact, the city of the 1800s was not really alienated from its entertainment role. What the 1800s city did was to spatially dislocate that function from its central urban fabric: the grounds of these world exhibitions, although located in a city and referred to as being in (of) that city were in fact located in noncentral places of the city.7 But the grounds of an international fair, even if not located in the city proper, have in fact a city-like quality since they are the embodiment of a proto-urbanism, a place where we find carefully planned streets and squares through which people stroll in contemplation of the wonders there orderly displayed for their gaze: a scopophilia urbanity. If on one hand we can keep identifying entertainment functions in the nineteenth-century city, on the other hand we have to recognize that it is in the nineteenth century that a spatial specialization between places of work and places of leisure start to assume a modern form in some European cities. And it is not only the example of the world fairs. In fact, the development of the British seaside resorts such as Blackpool or Brighton are one such instance of space specialization, being closely related to the already referred development of the British industrial city (Meethan 2001). Thus, it can be argued that the emergence of urban areas as places for an increasingly higher number of visitors, i.e., of places 5 This imprinting of the 1800s city as a place of work is neglecting to contemplate the birth of the cinema in the late 1800s and its popularity as a form of mass entertainment (and I am leaving aside other forms of public entertainment such as the popular theater or vaudeville). Another element of this scopophilia entertainment in the nineteenth century city is already described by Benjamin’s Arcades Project (Benjamin and Tiedman 2002), and it is one that will be objectified by the big department stores with their fantastic shop windows displays. Note that all these forms of scopophilia entertainment are strongly mediated by consumption practices. 6 World fairs and exhibitions were also a display of modernity in the form of industrialism and often of colonial power. Nevertheless, what is being underlined in this text is not the ideological element of these events, but the form they assumed. 7 This fact is naturally closely related to a real estate economy, i.e., to the availability of land for the building of those extensive exhibitions grounds and to more or less consciously driven projects of city renewal and development. The grounds chosen for the international fairs (that, let it not be forgotten, were temporary) were usually land that had no other higher value to real estate developers.

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that are the object of mass consumption, is closely related to the development of the (early industrial) capitalist system and its specific production rationale.8 Almost at the same time that this segmentation/specialization rationale develops in industry we also start to find highly specialized entertainment spaces in the city, such as the grounds of the international fairs, a process that led to today’s themed urban areas encompassing heritage areas, shopping districts, and leisure entertainment grounds, such as for instance the so ubiquitous “waterfronts” (see Kondolf and Podolack, this volume) or even entire cities centered on entertainment such as Las Vegas (see Gottdiener, this volume). The tour de force of the development of mass tourism in Europe was related to the Mediterranean region and to the emergence in the 1920s of a sun and beach leisure culture, one where the hedonism of the tanned body gains an unparalleled centrality in western lifestyles.9 This is the time when the social elites of Europe head to southern Mediterranean shores in search of sun and sea with the French Riviera acquiring its status as the elites’ leisure place. In time this conceptualization of the Mediterranean sun and beach leisure culture trickled down to other social classes. This latter fact together with a democratization of air travel, brought an enormous development of French and Spanish Mediterranean seaside resorts (Meethan 2001), a movement later benefited also by the resorts of other countries with Mediterranean shores or adjacent seas, such as Greece, Italy, Portugal, Tunisia, former Yugoslavia, and Turkey. Present day tourism is no longer solely centered on the beach and sun leisure world. As the capitalist system evolved into post-Fordist models, we have witnessed a segmentation of the tourism market through the development of several types of tourism, i.e., through an increased theming and specialization of the tourism market. This market sectioning of the leisure industry via theming has produced a multiplicity of “tourism-objects” (Santos 2005), i.e., of tourists’ attention-centering realities such as nature, sports, sex, health, etc.10 Within tourism market specializations we also find “cultural tourism.” The cultural attractions that constitute the “tourism-objects” of this latter form of tourism are usually located in urban areas, assuming the form of namely (but not solely) historical buildings and the so called monuments. A city’s monuments are the objectification or embodiment through architectonical forms and urban struc8

By specific production rationale I mean here the breaking down of the production process into a sequence of individual and highly specialized actions carried out by different individuals who repeatedly carry out specific and partial actions that are part of the complete production process. Thus in this way the emergence of a leisure industry started to produce specialized sites that were often spatially severed from an individual’s usual living and working place. 9 While previously a tanned skin was a sign of a lower class status—those who had a tanned skin were manual workers who were usually exposed to the natural forces of the environment—in the 1920s the tanned body became a sign of affluence (the ability to have the time and the resources to head off to Mediterranean shores) and of health and sexual attractiveness (tanned skin as sign of a healthy life, one where the body is exercised through the leisure of sports and the fruition of the open air). 10 On some forms of these new themed tourisms see Vale (this volume) and his concept of “the new rural.”

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tures of the past and its actors, i.e., of history. Within this narrative of the self history is objectified and turns into heritage. Heritage is thus a common staple of the symbolic economy. In the 1970s and 1980s, both in Europe and the USA, the symbolic economy rose to prominence in certain urban areas against a background of industrial decline and financial speculation. This renewed visibility of tourism in cities is thus related not only to the characteristics of late-capitalism’s globalizing dynamics and to the emerging centrality of an educated middle-class, but also to deindustrialization processes that are part of post-Fordist capitalism. According to Zukin, during the ’70s cultural tourism was identified with “urban renewal without demolition and despair, a revival of community identity and civic pride” (1995, 81). When we take this trend of urban renewal and connect it to the effects of the globalizing fluxes on social identity, we witness a feliticious conjuncture in which there is the valuing of heritage and of its minor sibling, tradition. These two deeply identity- and centrality-embedded concepts (Santos 1998; 2003) bring about the emergence of the commodified selves on the title of this chapter.11 The concepts of “central” and of “peripheral” are more than just geometric: they are symbolic in as much as they encapsulate order and structure, and thus meaning. It is to such issues as applied to the reality under analysis that this chapter will move on to the next.

Newly Acquired Centrality of Peripheral Areas: The New Forms of Consumption in the Present Day Metropolis Europe’s West Coast midsize cities and Europe’s West Coast itself display a double “noncentrality” insofar as these cities are (1) not the largest urban systems within the respective national urban hierarchy, and (2) are located in what has traditionally been a peripheral area of Europe.12 It should be noted that center and periphery are mutually constitutive concepts: in order to have one you need to have the other. However, where the center and the periphery are depends on the location of the knowing subject, i.e., of the agent who perceives a reality as central or as peripheral. Thus, if seen from its inside, Europe’s West Coast can be seen as the place where Europe ends, from its outside (i.e., from the other continents) the same area can be seen as the place where Europe begins. It is argued here that there has been a rise in the centrality of these “margins” of Europe in recent decades. If we take the Iberian Peninsula as a whole, and within it its western Atlantic arch, this latter region holds first place in terms of the number of inhabitants when compared to the other four regions into which the Iberian Peninsula is 11 A commodification of social selves is also analyzed, although in different terms, by Vale (this volume). 12 The word cities is here used to encompass not just the traditional sense of the concept, but also a metropolitan and metapolized reality as referred to by Sucena-Garcia (this volume) and Faria (this volume). Thus, the two terms will be used interchangeably, unless stated otherwise.

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divided (see Maia, this volume). But this “new centrality” is also a result of specific local development strategies that chose to capitalize the value of locality while integrating it in wider globalized networks, namely in globalized circuits of the symbolic economy. This model of development is usually objectified in specific areas of the city (the historic centers) and in particular buildings (star architecture purpose-built art and music centers) producing what I call a tourism constellation, taking here astronomy’s definition of constellation as an imagined area defined by prominent (i.e., the more visible) points (stars). The narrative being produced by tourism constellation’s clever intertwining of past-themed and present-themed elements is one of a new geography, one through which a traditionally peripheral region of Europe—it’s West Coast—is stating a new centrality. As Seixas (this volume) refers, there is the possibility of having to consider a 4th circuit of capital, one that relates to an economy of consumption and of its immaterialities. In fact, and according to Zukin ‘in contemporary market economy, the organization of consumption has just as important an effect on economic and social structure as the organization of production. Cultural strategies of visual consumption permit the selective consumption of space and time with ‘new’ tourism manipulating and capitalizing on symbols producing real economic value” (Zukin 1991, 259). Thus, looking back at the last two to three decades of municipal government we can see that more time and resources have been dedicated to the promotion of tourism activity than to the development of other industries creating a new commodity out of the urban.13 By paying attention to these urban development strategies it is possible to find in some cities a recurrent association of specific nodal points—a constellation—tantamount to what seems to be a development pattern within the observed metropolitan systems. This recurrent association of nodal points or tourism constellation is constituted by two main strands: a past-based node (the old cities) and a present-based node (contemporary art and signature architecture),14 a trend that can be found in several of Europe’s West Coast midsize cities that are hubs of metropolitan areas (Figure 14). Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao had such a jump-start effect on the development of a new life cycle for Bilbao by extricating the city from a depressed, de-industrialized economy15 that it has assumed the status not only of a case-study, but also (and mostly) of the first instance of a well succeeded and

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How far back we can place this reality will depend on where we locate it: even within Europe’s West Coast midsize cities, we can find examples in the late ’80s (Bordeaux, France) or the late ’90s (Porto, Portugal). In the UK, for instance, such investment can be found already in the early ’80s with, for instance, the renovation of Wigan Pier in Greater Manchester. 14 The forms of art enclosed in this node are fine arts and music. 15 The main industries in Bilbao up to the ’80s were steelmaking and shipbuilding. Bilbao’s model of urban renewal developed in the ’90s and of which Gehry’s Guggenheim is the most well known element, brought better days to its inhabitants through a sustainable symbolic economy (i.e., a service-based system).

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Figure 14. The Tourism Constellation: Examples from Europe’s West Coast

thus often copied model of urban renewal and development that took the present-based node of the tourism constellation as its central element. The “Guggenheim” or “Bilbao effect” is the coined expression for this urban renewal and redevelopment model.16 However, if we pay attention to other mid-size cities form western Europe (Figure 15) we can see that the opening dates of the purpose-built structures part of their tourism constellation are not only very close in time, as in fact Santiago de Compostela has had its tourism constellation 16 Concerning an analysis of global pathways as expressed in the so called “Guggenheim Bilbao effect” see Del Cerro Santamaria (2007)

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Figure 15. Dates of Acquisition of UNESCO’s WHS Status and of Opening of the Art Museums/Music Centers

* The old part of the city of Bilbao is not a UNESCO WHS, but it is one of the elements featuring in the city’s tourism website and on international tourists guidebooks; the date allocated in the table is not completely arbitrary since it is the same as the opening of the Guggenheim, just because it is assumed here that at least then the old part was also marketed to tourists, and therefore also part of the “tourism constellation.”17

Figure 16. Santiago de Compostela’s Tourism Constellation

The past-based node: the old city (left) and the present-based node: Siza Vieira’s Gallego Centre of Contemporary Art (right) © Paula Mota Santos

nodes in situ much earlier than Bilbao, although less spectacularly so (Figure 16). More, if we broaden the picture over these present-based node stars by taking into consideration the emergence of the idea of building the structures (and not just their opening dates) we can see that they are even closer in time than the opening dates alone would allow to perceive (Figure 17). 17 This particular issue of when to ascribe a date for the tourist marketing of Bilbao’s historic center could be solved through a survey of guidebooks on the city dating from previous decades (the ’80s and ’90s), but the material to carry out this particular query was not available to me at the time this research was carried out.

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Figure 17. Dates of Emergence of the Idea (*) and of Opening (**) of the Art Museums/Music Centers

In fact, the contract for the construction of Siza Vieira’s Serralves Contemporary Art Museum in Porto was signed the exact same year as Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao was decided to be built: 1991. The fact that Porto’s Serralves opened two years after Bilbao’s Guggenheim does not mean that one was thought of after the other. But more relevant to underline than the dates of these two cities’ tourism constellation present-based nodes, is the recurrent location of the emergence of the ideas of these architecture projects in the late ’80s and early ’90s. This latter recurrence makes the explanation of the emergence of these cultural structures through only, if at all, a Bilbao “copycat model” historically untenable.18 This is not to say that later, and in the face of Bilbao’s success story, such tourism constellation urban development model was not pursued by other cities, sometimes literally so. As Guasch and Zulaika say “after Bilbao, every city has dreamed of its own Guggenheim Effect” (2005, 17).19 18

On the earlier than Bilbao stages of this model of development see Zukin’s (1995) narrative and analysis of the tortuous story of the (failed) Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in the old factory town of North Adams, in the Berkshires. This was the first megaproject spearheaded by Guggenheim’s director, Thomas Krens, who had here his first attempt at creating an outpost of a global cultural empire. This specific idea of creating a contemporary art museum in this place had its beginnings in the late ’80s, being dropped in 1994. 19 Curiously enough, apparently, in the very first meetings that Gehry held with the Basque authorities, what was requested of him by the former was to design for Bilbao the equivalent (city marketing wise) to the Sydney Opera House (Isenberg 2009).

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In fact, under Thomas Krens’ tenure the Guggenheim Foundation saw several outposts of the Guggenheim Museum being built and/or proposed: the Deutsche Guggenheim, designed by R. Gluckman opened in 1997; in 1999 there was a proposal to have a mix-use complex (including a Gehry-designed museum) built on the east river waterfront in Lower Manhattan (the proposal was dropped in 2002). In 2001, the Guggenheim Hermitage designed by R. Koolhaas opened in Las Vegas (it closed in 2008). In 2008, there were talks of a Z. Hadid designed Guggenheim outpost in Vilnius, Lithuania. In 2009 there were plans for a Bilbao’s Guggenheim satellite in the city of Guernica, 40 km east of Bilbao. Guadalajara, Mexico, was also a serious candidate for a Guggenheim outpost. The Abu Dhabi Guggenheim designed by Gehry is presently under construction (estimated conclusion date: 2017). Although the emergence of the urban development model based on the tourism constellation seems to have emerged before Bilbao’s Guggenheim, this is not to negate the importance of Bilbao’s case since it was there that this model was undoubtedly elevated to a paramount position by this city’s extraordinary transformation from a depressed urban area to a main European tourist point. However, remarking that the elements part of Santiago’s tourism constellation were already in situ before the ones at Bilbao could bring about the argument that the two cases are not suitable for comparison since the architecture elements in Santiago are not comparable to the ones in Bilbao. In fact, the former do not have the iconic or landmark value (see Gottdiener, this volume) achieved by Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao: the architecture stars of Santiago’s tourism constellation are not as bright as Bilbao’s. But one can also argue that the comparison between the architecture-objects in the examples listed in Figure 14 (or in any other city for that mater), is not really an appropriate course of action. In fact, the argument can be made that much the same way as the experientiation of seeing Picasso’s Guernica cannot be compared to the experientiation of seeing Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, the experientiation of visiting Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao cannot be compared to the experientiation of visiting in Porto Siza Vieira’s Serralves or Koolhaas’ Casa da Música (Figure 18). As objects of artistic creation the buildings listed in Figure 14 stand on their own merits. But as elements part of the tourism constellation urban development model, they stand alike. It is not in their quality of artistic creation that these signature architecture buildings are been taken here. They are being taken as an objectification of a process, as an element part of an ongoing narrative that mid-size cities are writing on themselves. This is as much a narrative on their place in globalized fluxes as it is a narrative on and a production of their sense of self in present day highmodernity.

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Figure 18. Porto’s Tourism Constellation

The Present-based node: Siza Vieira’s Serralves Contemporary Art Musuem (left) and Koolhaas’ Casa da Música (right) © Paula Mota Santos 2013

Urban Tourism and the Tourism Constellation: Issues of Agency Tourism, as a social activity and as an industry, is a very particular form of commodification within the capitalist system in as much as the place of consumption (the locality visited by the tourists) is also the place of production (the locality producing the tourist site). This analysis of the tourism constellation model will next deal with issues of production (agents promoting the new infrastructures) rather than of consumption (visitors to the places part of the tourism constellation). What can be grasped from the cases presented here is the centrality of the local/central administration dynamics and the seminal importance of the cohesion funds made available by the EU for regional development.20 At the same time that the EU recognized that it had regions that were more central and others more peripheral, the tools to even out such disparities were created.21 This resulted in a paradox of a sort: noncentrality (i.e., underdevelopment) was becoming an advantage and thus was being transformed in an emerging centrality by 20

It should be noted that in the Spanish cases presented, this newly emerged importance of the noncentral areas of the state was further reinforced by the 1979 new Spanish constitution that granted the right for historical communities to form autonomous regions in Spain. 21 The European Commission’s second report on economic and social cohesion for the period of 1994–1999 (report adopted by the European Commission in January 2001) supplies an index of accessibility in order to give practical content to the concept of center-periphery. It lists three types of regions: central regions (accessibility index over 50 percent above the EU average); peripheral regions (index under 40 percent—Portugal and Spain are included in this category); intermediate regions (index above 50 percent and 40 percent) (European Commission 1999, 30).

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which peripheral and underdeveloped regions had specifically designed resources (i.e., programs and respective funds) allocated to them. But who were the agents managing the resources behind the two nodes part of the tourism constellations presented here? Concerning the past-based node, the old part of the cities listed, all but one (Bilbao) have acquired a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) status.22 In order for heritage to be classified by UNESCO as a World Heritage, there must be an application made to UNESCO by the nation-state where such heritage is located. Thus, although the process often starts via a local power dynamics (in the cases at hand, usually the city council promotes the application of its city to UNESCO’s WHS status), the nation-state has not only to support it but also has to be directly involved in the promotion and submission of the application. Concerning the present-based node, the art museums and the music and exhibition centers (mediated by signature architecture), most of the cases listed resulted from a combination of actions of local and central governments (Portugal and France), local and regional governments (Spain).23 Bilbao’s Guggenheim was built via the initiative of the local government and was totally funded by the Basques: the city authorities provided the land (a disused industrial site in the port district), the autonomous government and the provincial authorities gave $154 million, and 80 private companies pledged to make a contribution of one kind or another (Iglesias 1998).24 According to the dossier available in its website, the Euskalduna Conference Center and Music Hall required an investment of 81.136.634,09 euros, out of which 13.522.772,35 euros were subsidized by the European Union (EU) and the Basque government, and the remaining amount by Bizkaia’s provincial council. The land was donated by Bilbao City Council. The building is owned in its entirety by Bizkaia’s Provincial Council.25 In the case of Santiago de Compostela, both the Galicia Auditorium and the Galician Museum of Contemporary Art are closely related to the role of the city as European capital of culture in the year 2000, and as such are a result of local, regional, and state dynamics; but in the case of Santiago the most emblematic 22 In the case of Bordeaux, it is not the whole of the old part that is a WHS, but only the old harbor. 23 According to the information made available in the respective websites, Bordeaux’s CAPCMusee 1989 renovation works of the nineteenth-century colonial produce warehouse “were financed in great part by the French state,” which could allow one to assume that the previous renovation works (1979 and 1984) were financed by other (local?) sources. ; consultation made 05/2010. 24 According to MacCannell, “Krens [New York’s Guggenheim Director] demanded from Eusko Juarlaritza [Basque Autonomous Government] $200 million up front for the franchise name, a commitment of an additional $100 million toward construction costs, the promise of a $50 million art acquisition program, and an ongoing subvention of $7 million annually toward operating costs and upkeep” (MacCannell 2005, 23). 25 consultation made 05/2010.

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example of these dynamics is the City of Culture. Run by a foundation created by the provincial government (Xunta) that seats in its board of trustees Xunta members, plus two banks (Caixa Galicia and Caixa Nova) as well as the state’s telecommunications company, Telefonica, the project initiated its works in February 1999 via the launching by the Department of Culture, Social Communication and Tourism of the Xunta of an international architecture competition to find the creators of the future site. The funds necessary for this urban ensemble were taken from public money, something that, together with the perceived megalomanous nature of the project, has been a continuous source of criticism by local Galician agents.26 Serralves Contemporary Art Museum in Porto was financed by EU and PIDDAC’s funds.27 The Serralves Foundation was created in 1989, being the entity responsible for the museum and its grounds, as well as the activities there taking place. This foundation was initially composed of 51 entities from the public and the private sector. Presently such number is 172. The construction of Casa da Música, whose costs were initially estimated in 33 million euros but ended up by costing 111.2 million euros, benefited from the financing made available by the Programa Operacional da Região do Norte, part of the 3rd Community Support Framework funds of the EU. In December 2005 the Casa da Música Foundation was formally created to act as the entity responsible for this cultural infrastructure. At the time of its constitution, this foundation was endowed by the Portuguese state with 3.1 million euros. It also benefits from an annual stipend of 10 million euros. In its board of trustees are representatives of both public and private sectors.

The Consumption of Commodified Selves One thing can be understood from the recurrent presence of the urban renewal model of the tourism constellation: the cities that have usually been in the margins of Europe are assuming a new centrality, one that emerges from metropolization dynamics and related changes in forms of the production and consumption of symbolic capital. The question that centers this analysis is not the listing of the agents behind the building of the venues part of the present-based node. The historical contingency that made available to certain regions of the EU, namely its peripheral regions, specific development funds does not obliterate the question as to why this model of urban development (i.e., the tourist constellation) was taken up by these mid-size cities and at the time they did. The argument to be presented here is that the tourism constellation is the embodiment of 26

On the local arguments against the investment made in the City of Culture, see for instance Bermejo Barrera (2007). 27 PIDDAC stands for Programa de Investimentos e Despesas de Desenvolvimento da Administração Central/Central Government Program of Investments and Expenses for Development, which is part of the [European] Community Support Frameworks (CSFs of which there were so far three: I: 1989–1993; II: 1994–1999; III: 2000 – 2006; the same type of funds exist now as National Strategic Reference Framework of which the current one runs from 2007 to 2013).

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a narrative, the objectification of a social identity being produced in a context of a highly commodified late modernity. Social identities are closely related to representational systems. The latter are constituted by signifying practices and by symbolic systems (Woodward 1997; Hall 1997). Thus, representation is a practice that is closely linked with identity and also with knowledge, being an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged through the use of materialities that stand for or represent things beyond themselves. The tourism constellation urban renewal model produces new places, new urban landscapes.28 Even the long existing buildings of the old city core are created anew, changing as they do from being old to being historic to being a heritagescape.29 The individual elements part of a tourism constellation—the stars of the astronomy-based metaphor—are not unique to mid-size cities. Major European capital cities present similar stars. However, in these latter cities not only is their constellation constituted by more numerous stars as, most importantly, the pastbased node seems not to be a part of it. For instance, the city of Lisbon, although it has the material resources (i.e., an old part of the city) necessary to do so, does not play the heritage card as strongly as Porto or as Santiago de Compostela do. So the question arises as to why do these midsize cities, cities that although occupying a place of relevance in their national urban system hierarchy (but never its top), seem to recurrently install heritage (the past-based node) within their tourism-constellation? Is it the need to affirm themselves in the national arena via the reinforcement of their identity as produced by the underlying of their history? Is it because having been peripheral to centralized development strategies of previous decades they reached high-modernity with a wealth of old buildings that post-modernity transformed from old into ancient buildings and thus into heritage? Is it all the above plus (and after the already referred to loss of their industrial or commercial basis) the perceiving of an heritage/traditionbased development strategy in tune with the need for the individuation of place brought about by globalized fluxes? Concerning the past-based node, due to the very nature of the historical process old cities are usually the place where the present day city can retrace its genealogy, i.e., it is the place “where the city was born.” Historic centers are a condensation place: in contrast to other (more modern) parts of the city, they not only embody the past, they make it present. To visit the old part of a city is to come across history head-on. These are powerful places: urban areas filled with old buildings and historical monuments. Timeless places, but never ahistorical places, these are urban areas that are loaded with symbolic and representational 28

The conceptualization of space as landscape is a useful tool to analyze the relationship between space and social identities. A landscape is always a representational system being intimately related to the notion of perspective, i.e., of a situated gaze and thus of situated agency. 29 As Zukin states even “at the outset of landscape painting in western Europe in the fourteenth century, landscapes were pictures of symbols rather than fact [both imposing and representing visual order, often representing panoramas of a moral or philosophical order]” (1991, 16–18).

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value (the heritage value) and are thus often the object of consuming and difficult to settle arguments on their future.30 In a previous work (Santos 2003) I have highlighted the fact that within UNESCO’s Tangible Heritage category, the subcategory “Cultural Properties” is the most represented of all of the subcategories.31 Within the listings part of Cultural Properties, Cities and Historic Centers (HC) is the type of heritage that presents more listed sites.32 When looking at this latter type of WHS we can see that the 10 years between 1978 and 1988 saw a total of 36 HC classified by UNESCO, representing an average of 3.3 HC sites classified as WHS per year. In 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin wall, there were no new HC sites listed by UNESCO. The 10 years that followed the dismantling of the Eastern bloc, i.e., from 1990 to 2000, saw the classification of 59 HC sites as WHS, representing an average of 5.4 HC sites listed by UNESCO. This is a dramatic difference in relation to the 10 years previous to the fall of the Berlin wall. The marked increase of HC sites classified by UNESCO post-1989 shows the renewed centrality of these markedly identity-bounded urban areas in times of increased global fluxes, and nowhere is that more visible than in the cases of the new independent nation-states that emerged from the dissolution of the former USSR in 1991: by 1999, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, each had one site classified as WHS by UNESCO, and in the three cases the sites were the old core of their capital cities: Vilnius (1994), Riga (1997), and Tallinn (1997).33 The past-based node is then a node that contributes in a most clear manner to the sense of self that the city is producing for itself and for the globalized tourism market: its main resource is history, and a place’s history and related monuments are always unique and nonrepeatable. Old and derelict parts of the city (areas that were usually the poor areas of the cities) have now become heritage areas having thus acquired a new centrality resulting from their newly acquired symbolic capital. Old parts of the city are thus transformed into the city’s synecdoche. Through them, the whole city is represented: historic centers are in most postcards, in all guidebooks, and in every tourist camera. The present-based node is supplying another strand to the narrative of the self of the tourism constellations. Cultural institutions establish a competitive advantage over other cities for attracting new business and corporate elites. “Culture suggests the coherence and consistency of a brand name product. [In European and American cities in the 1970s] (. . . ) who could build the biggest 30

On issues related to old cities renewal programs, see, for instance, Herzefeld (1991), Mitchell (2002), Santos (2005), and Hill (2007). 31 The analysis carried out in 1999 showed that Cultural Properties listings represented 77 percent of the whole of the Tangible Heritage listings, while Natural and Mixed categories represented, respectively, 20 percent and 3 percent (Santos 2003, 260). 32 A reliable figure is not possible to be presented since UNESCO does not offer reliable statistics for the subcategories under each one of the three types of Tangible Heritage: quite frequently one single site is listed under more than one type of heritage part of a subcategory and there are incongruences in the listings offered online. 33 The numbers of WHS in these three countries in 2010 is: Lithuania: 4, Latvia: 2, Estonia: 2, but none of the new additional sites are HC. These keep on being just those of their nation’s capitals.

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modern art museum suggested the vitality of the financial sector. Who could turn the waterfront from docklands rubble to parks and marinas suggested the possibilities for expansion of the managerial and professional corps” (Zukin 1995, 12).34 These factors are most certainly still at play in the cases here presented. But it is interesting to note that all the museums listed in the four examples are contemporary art museums. There are two ways of looking at this and they are both intertwined. In one way the cities are affirming their cosmopolitanism by inserting themselves through their high visibility arts centers and museums in the international and globalized circuits of commodified art, and specifically in the circuits of contemporary art. The cosmopolitanism derives from (1) the recurrent use of signature architecture for these art centers producing on occasions iconic buildings, such as Bilbao’s Guggenheim designed by Gehry and (2) the dedication of the structures to contemporary art. Avant garde art is usually associated with metropolitan centers (Zukin 1995, 103), and in this respect Europe’s West Coast midsize cities listed here are promoting an image of new centrality in as much as they are acquiring and exhibiting the trademark elements of any big metropolitan center, although never at the scale of the truly global cities (Sassen 1992) such as London or New York. But there is also probably another reason for this centrality of contemporary art in these urban development strategies: the contemporary art system is an open system, i.e., it is not a system that has finished evolving. Unlike other historically older art systems, it is an art system where new works by already established names keep on being produced as well as new names appear. This means that if you want to open a museum of relevance in your city, one that aims at inserting itself in the global art scene, you are more likely to be able to do so within the contemporary art system than any other art period system. For instance, the major works by Old Masters are all already part of the collection of long-established museums, and the likelihood of new and relevant works by Rembrandt or a Goya or any other artist of the period to surface the art scene are practically nil. And even if such works were to come into the market, their price would be prohibitive in relation to the funds available in these urban development projects. This is not to say that contemporary art works cannot also achieve extremely high prices,35 but the fact that a discerning contemporary art museum board can invest in a new name that in time might become firmly established opens the possibility of building a worthwhile contemporary art center. This would be very difficult to achieve in other art periods where older and more established museums, such as the Louvre, have secured their place several decades and sometimes centuries ago. So although there are material factors that might explain this recurrent choice of contemporary art for the new art centers and museums that are being 34

Seabra (this volume) also refers to this relation between the ability to carry out big international projects to the production of an image of a modern and can-do agency. 35 In August 2010 the Sotheby’s Summer Evening Sale of Contemporary Art achieved a successful total of €9,517,050/$11,679,324, a figure well above the presale expectations of €5.1–7.0 million/$6.3–8,6 million.

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opened within the tourism constellations presented here, the symbolic role that they play, namely the connection between avant garde art and cosmopolitan centers, must be brought to the forefront. The argument for a new centrality of the above listed Europe’s West Coast mid-size cities and respective metropolitan regions is also supported by the use of star architecture. The buildings listed here were often attributed to an architect (or a consortium of architects) as a result of an international call for projects. This competition inserts these on-the margins cities and respective metropolitan regions in the signature architecture world circuit. One of the outcomes of this participation in globalized circuits of symbolic capital was that most of the architects involved in the actual designing and construction of these noteworthy buildings are not, for the most part, citizens of the country where the museums and/or art and music centers were built. These actively desired and created new centralities can also be read in the expressed aims of these contemporary structures as expressed on their web sites (Figure 19). These art venues aim at being more than a place for local consumption, clearly positioning themselves in an international and globalized arena in terms of the art exhibited and/or produced, but also in terms of the audiences they are catering to—never just from the city or metropolitan region where they are located. In some very successful cases they include an international public.36 But perhaps of all of the venues listed in this text, it is Santiago de Compostela’s City of Culture (Figure 20) that more clearly embodies this actively sought new centrality of Europe’s West Coast mid-size cities via a strategy anchored in the symbolic economy and desire to assume a privileged role as a culture broker between Europe and other world regions.37 Santiago’s City of Culture is both the most recent of all the examples listed and the most ambitious in terms of scale and expressed aims: Situated in Santiago de Compostela, an emblem of European cultural tradition whose historic city has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985, the City of Culture of Galicia rises on the top of mount Gaiás as a formidable architectural milestone for the new century. Inspired by the historic city of Compostela, the complex shall be articulated by streets, colonnades, gardens and plazas, transcending the mere concept of a cul-

36 The globalized nature of these venues can also be seen from their programming, of which a detailed analysis should prove useful in terms of delineating the global-based contacts that are established through music events and featured exhibitions and respective curators. 37 This of Europe’s West Coast mid-size cities’ role of privileged mediator between Europe and other world regions, namely Latin America, see Seabra (this volume).

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Figure 19. The Tourism Constellation: Present-Based Node’s Stars Mission Statements

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Figure 20. Santiago de Compostela’s City of Culture, Peter Eisenman’s Architecture Collective

General view (top), the arcade (bottom left), the Galicia Historial Archive (bottom right) © Paula Mota Santos 2013

tural center to become a city with a life of its own, where visitors may not only enjoy the programming scheduled for each building, but also go shopping, eat out or just simply stroll. Five pedestrian streets link all the buildings to a main central plaza, surrounded by 25 hectares of parkland with walkways for strolling and leisure. Its unique buildings, interconnected by streets and plazas equipped with stateof-the-art technology make up a space of excellence for reflection, debate, and actions orientated towards Galicia’s future and internationalization.

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The Tourism Constellation . . . built to embrace the best expressions of the culture of Galicia, Spain, Europe, Latin America, and the World, this new all-encompassing and pluralistic “city” will contribute towards meeting the challenges of the information and knowledge society. [It] has been conceived as a large-scale cultural hub, devoted to the knowledge and creativity of today, the City of Culture of Galicia has been designed ever since its inception as an instrument to combine past and present, enabling an integrated approach to a strategic element for the development of Galicia: that of culture. Its spaces shall host services and activities devoted to the preservation of heritage and memory (Galician archives; museum of Galician), the study, research, experimentation, production, and dissemination in the field of literature and thinking, music, drama, dance, film, the visual arts, audiovisual creation, and communication center for music and performing; international art center). As a place for convergence and international projection, the City of Culture of Galicia shall revitalize in the 21st century the twofold vocation—voyager and hospitable—of Galician people, contributing from a cultural standpoint to the 38 social and economic development of the land.

Final Remarks The tourism constellations of the four cities here presented are part of their representational system, of the way they think themselves and thus of the way they produce their sense of self in the lived present. The selves being produced are also being inevitably, and even consciously, commodified in as much as they are a central element in the urban development strategies pursued that in turn are strongly based on the power of the symbolic economy. The tourism constellations of the midsize cities here analyzed (and most likely in others as well) is constituted by a time-deep and singularly specific entity (the old core of the cities, their unique and space-specific history—the past-based node) and by a cosmopolitan entity (the art and music centers mediated by signature and star architecture—the present-based node). This latter node works as a contrasting element to the former by not negating the antiquity of the past, but bringing it instead to the present and weaving it in, producing a full-blown high-modernity. Actively and purposefully inserting themselves in a full-blown highmodernity by weaving the past (heritage) and the present (contemporary artistic production) together and thus constructing a new centrality: such is the statement made by these midsize cities’ tourist constellation nodes. We see it in Bordeaux's CAPCMusée located in the now renovated old colonial produce warehouse; we see it in Bilbao's Euskalduna Conference Center and Music Hall located in the old shipyard area in a building whose ship-like shape pays tribute 38 . Consultation made 05-2010.

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to Bilbao's metal working and shipbuilding tradition that operated for so long in the city. We can also see that very same statement in Porto's Serralves Contemporary Art Museum. Located on the grounds of a former wealthy industrialist family’s private estate, Siza Vieira’s architecture lives as one with the family’s impressive home, an historic Art Deco house, and its extensive park. A fullblown high-modernity where heritage and contemporary artistic production are weaved in together as a path to a new centrality, is also the statement of both Santiago’s Center of Contemporary Art whose modernist lines are today part of the UNESCO’s historic center ensemble and of its unfinished City of Culture, the latter a set of extraordinary buildings that rises outside the city on the top of mount Gaiás as a formidable architectural milestone for the new century.