Producing multisensory rural tourism space through community-based commodification in Samiran Village, Indonesia

Rural tourism is increasingly understood as a spatial process, yet limited attention has been given to how commodification actively produces rural space beyond its economic dimensions. This study examines how rural tourism space is produced through community-based multisensory commodification, drawing on Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space to conceptualise commodification as a process operating across perceived, conceived, and lived dimensions. Using a qualitative case study of Samiran Tourism Village, Indonesia, the research combines participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis to investigate how tourism reshapes socio-spatial relations. The findings show that community-based multisensory commodification operates through visual, aural, and gustatory practices that selectively reconfigure landscapes, everyday activities, and cultural expressions into tourism experiences. Rather than functioning as a purely market-driven process, commodification is continuously negotiated through uneven power relations among government institutions, market forces, and community actors. Consequently, rural tourism space emerges as a hybrid and contested socio-spatial formation in which material transformation, symbolic meaning, and lived experience intersect. The study advances tourism geography by conceptualising community-based multisensory commodification as a socio-spatial process operating across Lefebvre’s spatial triad, thereby reframing community-based tourism as a negotiated form of spatial production shaped by power relations. It further contributes empirical insights from a Global South rural context by highlighting lived space as a critical site of negotiation and potential resistance within tourism-driven transformation.