Mobile Networks and Place Making in Cultural Tourism

Abstract

Tourism has become an increasingly important asset for small and medium-sized cities. However, tourism is a vulnerable basis for the local economy of towns and cities as it depends on far-reaching, mobile and unstable networks of visitors, cultural industries and attractions, local authorities, voluntary associations, buildings, objects and so forth directing flows of people, money, information and images. These networks produce new cultural economies and policies, contingently committed to the projects of producing ‘tourist places’. This article challenges conventional understandings of territorial learning by comparing two cases of cultural tourism and their spin-off developments in Roskilde, Denmark: first the Viking Ship Museum, its development into a ‘Museum Island’ in the harbour area during the 1990s and its project ‘Return of the Viking Longship'; second, the Roskilde Festival with its still not fully developed projects ‘Musicon Valley’ and ‘Rock City’. We emphasize the role of local authorities and of international connections. In so doing we attempt to bridge the gap between contemporary discussions of tourism and cultural economy in cultural and economic geography, and ask how these attractions, events and projects have emerged and how the dynamics producing tourist places are organized in time and space.