project: analysis of a destination

Summarizing a journal article – Assignment 2

Name: Chun Kei Yip

ID: yipcy010

In this article titled ‘Destination New Orleans: commodification, rationalization, and the rise of urban writers’ in vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 305-334 of Journal of Consumer Culture in 2007, Gotham provides the look up of New Orleans to demonstrate the connection of rationalization and commodification in urban tourism development in the 20th century first half. Tourism involves space consumptions and flow of people in specific areas to enjoy nature, local culture, persevered nature or otherness. This article examines the part played by visitor guidebooks, literary writers and the New Orleans Association of Commerce in creating a destination image. Destination image is a seen signal that plays the role of attracting potential tourists and also portraying the framework of culture that authenticate the experience of the tourist while in New Orleans city.

This article argues that, (re)producing and creating symbols of assorted urban and a destination image need a system of institutional or formal organizations set. Organizations and institutions create the routines, rules and structures that model the way in which destination images and tourism markets develop how actors arrange and present symbols to influence people in travelling and investing, and how the actors build up promotional strategies. Analysis of commodification and rationalization in the destination image production provide a unique viewpoint for appreciating tourism as a consumption practice that is comprised of a set of local practices and distant processes.

Gotham (2007) has identified the main players and organized interests that are involved in the formulation of promotional strategies, formal organizations and networks to create an image of destination and to construct a promising infrastructure of tourism in the city of New Orleans.

Gotham (2007) has conceptualized tourism as institutions and practices set that take part in place promotion rationalization and local culture reframing as the experiences of consumption-based entertainment. The increase of mass tourism in the beginning of the 20th century reinforced and reflected cities scenery as places where one can get fascinated, amused and exoticism. Urban representation new forms that included, visitors’ guides, photography and literary description of the city nurtured an emergent destination image, as railroads, hotels and other mode of transport acted as communication networks that disseminated motifs, symbols and local images to the international, as well as, the national audience.

Gotham (2007) looks at the role that the Association of Commerce played in promoting development of tourism and place-promotion. During the 1920s and after that, the Association of Commerce aided in inaugurating a fresh age of specialized tourism development and place promotion that was meant for the purpose of restructure New Orleans’ consumption landscape, a procedure that would be rationalized further in the after decades of the II World War. The ability to deploy and create partial and selective images of the city of New Orleans through advertising and tourism media turned out to be the new mode of realty construction and urban representation. The Association of Commerce used rational organization in localizing the flows of distant capital. New Orleans’ commodity images and broadcast local information to distant areas through network connections with corporations. Rational organizations did not only streamline the image production process, but also helped in opening up of new opportunities and avenues for consuming places and cultures.

Gotham’s study of promotion place in the city of New Orleans offers imminent into the important part that tourism plays in the support of helping to increase mass consumption and establishment of a culture that is consumer broad-based in America. Elites of local economic borrowed the culture from an abundance cultural material to disseminate and produce an image of destination that helps in facilitating the contemporary creation of consuming cities or consuming self. As a way of consuming space and culture, tourism discourses and practices helped in the creating a consuming subject, as well as the idea that suggest that cities are also places of visual consumptions, such as historical sites and culture.

Gotham’s analysis of commodification and rationalization in the destination image production claim that early tourism development had an optional similarity with the urban culture transformation into a commodity-spectacle or abstract image. The Association of Commerce aided in legitimating an urban culture developing conception that mirror broader transformations in consumer capitalism political economy. One of the place-promotion characteristics that were being emphasized in the early times was based on display of commodity, amusement and entertainment as the main constituent of the urban life.

Gotham looks at the consumer capitalism rise in the end of the 19th century as described by leach (1993). According to Leach (as cited in Gotham, 2007, p. 328) consumer capitalism is desire culture that is future-oriented that confused what he called the good life with goods. As the 19th century was ending, leach claims that cardinal aspects of the increasing consumer culture shifted to consumption and acquisition as a way of being happy; the new cult; the desire democratization and the value of money as the main value measure in the society. Similar to other organizations of business and commerce chambers in the other cities, the organizations and the social elites in New Orleans played a major role in supporting and generating mass consumptions development by presenting traditions, cultures and customers as consumption objects.

Gotham (2007) claim that, New Orleans’ images that were presented through the Association of commerce signifying work were descriptions that were hypostatized and the mirrored profiteering motives, which included celebrating desire of travelling and expanding the form of commodity. During the course of 20th century, the elites in the local were responsible for establishing stylish synergies and networks with hotel organizations and entertainment programs to help in furthering rationalize urban imagery production and change the metropolitan region into a tourism consumption major site.