Tourism, Capital, and Place: Towards a Critical Geography of Tourism

Travel and tourism has become one of the largest industrial complexes and item of consumption in modern Western economies. It is argued here that, to date, geographers studying tourism have done so without fully grasping the fact that tourism is an important avenue of capitalist accumulation. I contend that if this weakness is rectified the geographic analysis of tourism could provide important contributions to contemporary debates in geography. In an attempt to integrate critical theory and political economy into the study of tourism, two themes are developed: the capitalistic nature of most travel and tourism production and consumption; and the contribution of tourism to the analysis of territorial competition and economic restructuring. The core of the argument presented is that the study of tourism assists us to recognise how the social meaning and materiality of space and place is created, and how these representations of place are explicitly incorporated into the accumulation process. To understand how tourism is involved in this, we need a thcorisation that recognises, and unveils, tourism as a capitalistically organised activity driven by the inherent and defining social dynamics of that system, with its attendant production, social, and ideological relations.