Experiencescapes: Tourism, Culture and Economy, 2005, Tom O'Dell & Peter Billing (eds.), Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business University Press, 197 p. By Susanna Heldt Cassel, Assistant Professor in Human Geography, PhD, Department of Economy and Social Sciences, Dalarna University.
"Experiences have become the hottest commodity the market has to offer." (p.12). This is the starting point of the book on 'experiencescapes' edited by Tom O'Dell and Peter Billing. The book is an anthology with contributions from eight researchers in the academic fields of Service Management, which includes the disciplines of ethnology/anthropology, human geography, and business administration.
The purpose of the book is to analyze the significance the market of experiences has for cultural and socioeconomic change in modern society. This is done by analyzing experiences and the experience-economy in terms of how it produces particular spatial settings, stylized landscapes, or 'experiencescapes'. The way in which experiences are organized spatially by the manipulation of material culture is of central importance in the book.
The particular locations where experiences are planned, developed, sold, and consumed are organised and staged strategically. Tourism is an obvious and important part of this development but it is noted that the significance of experiences also transcends the borders of tourism and leisure.
It is stated that experiences have gone from being a 'value added' to concrete goods and services, and thus valued as commodities in themselves. This process is part of a larger transformation from a production-led to a consumption-led society, sometimes called an 'experience-economy'. The seven cases presented in the book provide interesting examples of how the importance of experiences is visible in different contexts ranging from regional competition to the management of specific tourist sites.
Examples illustrate how experiences are staged for consumers with the right cultural as well as economic features, such as, for example, spectacular buildings like the Turning Torso in Malmö and the construction of luxury hotels. The importance of the right taste and cultural capital is discussed by Silvia Gymóthy, who undertakes an interesting examination of the consumption of nostalgia in countryside inns. She concludes that 'nostalgiascapes', designed deliberately or otherwise, are metaphorical meeting grounds where experiences of authenticity and genuineness coincide. These experiences are, in other words, a sort of escape from the designed and stylized, while the physical surrounding and the interior decoration remains of great importance for the essence of the experience.
It is however also noted that experiences are not only limited to the collective, the spectacular or to leisure-time. The staging of experiences is a multi-faceted practice where the extraordinary exists alongside the more mundane and the trivia of everyday-life. Experiences are, according to the wider definition suggested by Tom O'Dell, about transcending the borders between the collective and the individual, between work and play. An example of this is the growing market for conferences and business events or leisure-activities at work.
The staging of tourist-related experiences is both a matter of arranging the physical settings and landscapes and of creating and mediating ideas and feelings. The ways in which tourist experiences are framed and interpreted by both tourists and tourist mediators are discussed in a chapter by Can-Seng Ooi. According to Ooi, the content of tourist experiences – how they are received – depends upon the level of tourists' own knowledge and expectations, which, in turn, are mediated through tourist information, guidebooks, media and place marketing etc. This perspective on the production and consumption of experiences as mediated through texts, pictures and stories raises new and interesting questions for those researching tourism and place marketing.
The chapters deal with 'experiencescapes' in quite different ways and the overall picture presented is not at all homogenous or easily grasped. The weakness of the book is primarily its disparate content and the lack of a more concrete discussion on how to cope with the new experience-economy in practice.
The target audience for the book is focussed on researchers, as an academic perspective is adopted throughout. The knowledge presented should also be of interest for those within the fields of policy and planning. This is particularly evident in respect of the discussion of how unequal power relations in society can be even more accentuated through certain projects of urban renewal such as spectacular and exclusive experience centres. As such, it is pointed out that 'experiencescapes' are not only spaces of leisure, but [...] "their physical contours also delineate spaces in which ideologies are materialized, and through which they can be contested" (map; Military base closures 1990-2006).