Locative Tourism Applications

Book excerpt: Travel through time. Walk the streets as they were. See through floors. Hunt for ghosts (with drink in hand). Hear the walls speak. These are just a few of the ways that locative tourism applications seek to augment the urban experience. This book explores the universe of locative tourism applications. It uses multi-sited sensory ethnography with diverse apps in 12 cities around the world to interrogate how these applications layer (often branded) maps of meaning over the urban environment, and exposes what their use – at the embodied intersection of physical and digital space – can tell us about the production of cityscapes for touristic consumption. Locative Tourism Applications takes a journey in three parts to evaluate how these “extensions of the senses” mediate users’ experience of urban locales. The first offers the reader some theoretical and methodological orientation, the second takes them on a whirlwind tour of locative apps, and the third settles in for an extended exploration of two destinations: Montreal and Christchurch. With broad cross-disciplinary appeal, this volume will be of interest to scholars from tourism studies, cultural geography, urban studies, new media studies, and sensory studies and will be particularly valuable for sensory ethnographers examining mobile and location-aware media.