Border Wall Heritage Tourism: Attraction, Valuation, Significance

The substantial increase in walls and barriers worldwide calls for more extensive understanding of border walls and their tourist appeal. Border walls – materialized, appropriated, imagined – are important in our contemporary world because they manifest as an increasingly dominant statist response to global mobility and inequality. This article conveys the heritage dynamics of border walls as they emerge as geopolitically significant sites and landscapes, how these places become tourist attractions, how they are valuated, and how border wall heritage tourism manifests in overlapping regimes of heritage authenticity, touristic attraction, geopolitics, community, and institutional affiliation. Lenses of critical heritage, tourism, and border studies guide the valuation of border wall heritage through regional and global transformations, post-western understandings of culture, history and heritage, and the socio-political forces that actualize them. After providing a framework for valuation of border wall heritage tourism, this study examines cases in China, at the Berlin Wall and Cold War barriers in Europe, and the geomorphological walls of the Chile–Peru–Bolivia divide to offer insights about the shifting transnational, multiscalar, global and post-human dimensions of border wall heritage tourism.