The Dictionary of Human Geography

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emphasize, construct and delimit a geography

of significant sites. Visiting these places may

be part of accumulatingcultural capital.

The scripting may also rework the histories

and geographies of places. As Jane Desmond

notes, ‘tourism is not just an aggregate of

merely commercial activities; it is also an ideo-

logical framing of history, nature and trad-

ition; a framing that has the power to reshape

culture and nature to its own needs’ (1999,

p. xii). With deliberate hyperbole, the

architects MVRDV speak of a Norway turned

from a forest to a supervillage, the Alps be-

coming a park with hotel cities, France chan-

ging into a ‘‘‘Guide du Routard’’ landscape,

in which the agricultural products became the

instrument for a gastronomically oriented

zone penetrated by hotels and restaurants

according to special nostalgic rules’ and Tus-

cany as an ‘international villa park’, where

‘gigantic private gardens are maintained by

the former farmers’ (MVRDV, 2000, p. 57).

Meanwhile, other areas become associated

with ‘ludic’ activities – spaces where play is

not only allowed but, in many cases,

demanded. Tourism there forms a ‘territorial-

ized hedonism’ (Lo ̈fgren, 1999, p. 269). We

might think of these as liminal zones with

social rituals where normal rules of conduct

are suspended, in times and spaces apart

from the everyday (Shields, 1991).

Critical accounts point out that touristic

meanings for places can clash with or replace

local ones – thus eroding an originalsense

of place and reducing it to simulacrum

orplacelessness. This ‘erosion thesis’ that

sees change as diminishing original cultures

and reducing global differences (Hannerz,

1996) risks presupposing a ‘coercive con-

ceptual schema’ of tourism ‘impacting’ on

local cultures seen as pitted against a global

industry and cultural changes arising from

tourism resulting from ‘the intrusion of a

superior sociocultural system in a supposedly

weaker receiving milieu’ (Picard, 1996,

pp. 104, 110). It also echoes a tendency in

academic work to denigrate tourists almost

as another species – which Lo ̈fgren parodies

as ‘turistas vulgaris’ (1999, p. 264) – who

travel in ‘herds’, ‘stampede’ on to beaches,

‘flock’ to see places and ‘swarm’ around

‘honey-pots’. mc

Suggested reading

Cartier and Lew (2005); Crang and Coleman

(2002); Lew, Hall and Williams (2004); Lo ̈fgren

(1999); Minca and Oakes (2006); Urry (2002).

town A general name for an urban place

but, like both acityand a village, with no

generally accepted criteria on which to distin-

guish such a settlement. Such definitional

problems constrain both historical analyses

(e.g.urban origins) and planning for urban

futures. rj

townscape The observable units of urban

form that can be mapped and classified.

Early work inurban geographyfocused on

morphology– the patterns ofland useand

built form (such as street layouts and building

heights), and the processes underpinning

their evolution – with little reference to their

visual appearance in thelandscape. A rigor-

ous approach was developed by M.R.G.

Conzen (1907–2000: see Conzen, 1969),

who identified three main townscape elem-

ents: the town plan (within which the other

two were largely constrained), the land-use

units and the built form. His pioneer work

has been developed into studies of not only the

patterns of urban morphology but also of the

agents who shape and re-shape it, including

pioneer studies by Whitehand, Larkham and

others in the University of Birmingham’s

Urban Morphology Research Group: the

International Seminar on Urban Form launched

the journalUrban Morphologyin 1997. rj

Suggested reading

Whitehand (1992). See also http://faculty.

washington.edu/krumme/VIP/Tiebout.html

trade Under normal capitalist conditions,

the transportation and exchange ofcommod-

itiesfor money. As such, trade provides a vital

link between production and consumption in

capitalistcommodity chains. It is through

trade that commodities reach their markets,

and it is only when commodities are sold into

marketsthat the value produced by the ex-

ploitation of workers is abstracted out and

represented in the exchange values or prices

generated by market trading (Harvey, 1999

[1982]). For these reasons, trade derives both

its immense significance and considerable con-

temporary contentiousness from the ways in

which it is interwoven with the wider polit-

ical–economic organization ofcapitalism.

When it occurs across nationalborders,

trade serves to create international economic

ties. As a result, international trade statistics

provide some of the best data available about

the actual economic interdependencies under-

pinningglobalization. Trade data showing

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_T Final Proof page 764 31.3.2009 9:40pm Compositor Name: ARaju

TOWN