Memory tourism in a contested landscape : exploring identity discourses in Lviv, Ukraine

The study explores divergent representations and cultural identity in a historically contested landscape. The first form of representations includes politically amended place marketing. It is analysed how public discourse on a city’s development and regeneration articulate inscriptions of local authorities to pursue political-economic agendas. The second form of representations is diaspora’s imaginary of a pedigree place that derives from genealogical research and travel. In this way, genealogy enables counter-memories to uncritical marketing and ‘alternative’ voices in recast of local history. A contested landscape is conceptualized in the framework of politics of past to reflect stakeholders’ present-day preoccupations. Two forms of representations conceptualize spaces of dominance and resistance in Lefèbvre’s (1991) production of space. The empiric study is conducted in Lviv, a city with complicated past and national identity due to interchangeable powers. The fieldwork comprises the ongoing marketing campaign in Lviv launched in connection to Euro-2012, and the Polish, Jewish, and West Ukrainian diasporic representations. The findings show how the national and the Eurocentric meta-narratives embed the identity discourses of the official élite, and how diasporic texts suggest a genre of resistance to the marketing scripts

‘Tourism state’ cultural production: the re-making of Nova Scotia

Mathews and Richter - amongst many - have condemned the paucity of political analyses in Tourism Studies, while Hall and Meethan have likewise bemoaned the field's related privileging of prescriptivist studies of policy making at the expense of longitudinal, descriptivist interpretations. Responding to such calls, this paper (on the under-suspected ideological power and authority of tourism) critiques the contribution to the understanding of real-world governmental action of the historian McKay as generated in his investigation of matters of cultural representation and cultural formation in Canada

The shophouse hotel: Vernacular heritage in a creative city

10.1177/0042098008099358Urban Studies462341-36