Tourism Spaces: The New Experience Design

Abstract

The aim of this article is to offer a theoretical contribution to the organisation, design and significance of tourism spaces, at a time when tourist practices are experiencing both change and intensification.
From an architectural perspective, the study seeks to understand the evolutionary link between holiday practices and spaces, interpreting tourism as a context of creative relations between people, aspects, things and the places in which practices take place.
Based on this interpretation, the paper defines architectural and urban categories of tourism, briefly comparing various literature on tourist organisations. In the second part, through the examination of recent examples of tourist experiences, planning actions and their ability to generate new tourism landscapes are evaluated. For both places and tourist experiences, that which emerges and the fields of application involved constitute guidelines and development tools for a form of tourism design that is more knowledgeable about the encounter between tourists and residents, and more reliable given that it is founded on the distinctive features of territories.

The study demonstrates that tourism spaces, if intended as contexts of creative relations between people, aspects, things and places in which practices take place, may now develop a certain potential that once again calls into question a series of much debated opposites, tourists - residents, free time - work time, holiday space - day-to-day space, attractive resources and their transformation into elements of tourism, which had otherwise previously been consolidated by the tourist phenomenon.
In the end, tourism proves itself to be an imaginative impulse, which is capable of reinventing the qualities of places and successfully orientating urban events.