This article discusses a form of urban tourism branding based on the archetypical form of consumerism: 29 leisure shopping. Commodity fetishism is instrumental not only to increasing mainstream fashion sales 30 but also to rejuvenating and multiplying city images on the global competitive market. Drawing from 31 fieldwork performed in Paris, the article analyses and discusses the strategies developed by key players 32 to promote leisure shopping for urban tourists. It specifically focuses on the actions of public-led tourism 33 marketing organisations. Paris is historically renowned as a capital of style and a commercial metropolis, 34 which can easily be used as a basis to develop urban branding strategies for promoting tourism. However, 35 urban branding based on leisure shopping per se was rarely fostered until recently. Previous theoretic 36 reflections on urban development and consumption -leading to debates on the ''fantasy city'', the ''cul-37 tural-creative city'' and ''local shopping streets'' -provide the analytical basis for understanding the pro-38 motion of leisure shopping as an urban tourism branding strategy in Paris and the changing relations 39 between urban political economy and consumer capitalism.40
Under the label of ‘shopping tour’, tour operators currently offer package tours which aim to highlight for the visitor the commercial appeal of a particular location. A variety of destinations are suitable for tours with such a label. In this context, certain ‘shopping tourism’ destinations simply consist of areas where the concentration of corporation-led retail venues is high. The Novese Area, in the northwest of Italy, has been transforming into such a destination since the opening of the Serravalle Designer Outlet, an outlet ‘village’ which opened in 2000. This paper reports on original research aimed at enquiring about shifts in the representation of the landscape of this area as it is shown in\ud
the discourses of local political and business actors. It is argued that this case study portrays a rather unique case of late western urban regeneration practice through which a formal industrial area is turned into a consumption site suitable for tourism. Here, the\ud
repositioning process not only influences local planning policies, but feeds – and is fed by – a simultaneous process of consumption normalizatio
Draft; final version published as:C. Rabbiosi, A. Vanolo (2017) 'Are we allowed to use fictional vignettes in cultural geographies? ', cultural geographies, v. 24, n. 2, pp. 265-278.
AbstractFictional vignettes are narrative texts that academic researchers may invent in order to illustrate arguments or to present their research outcomes; they are stories or situations that do not strictly report factual realities observed by the author, but that, in any case, implement the heuristics for the arguments that the author wants to raise. Although there are several works in social sciences taking advantage of fictional narratives, geographers have started mobilising invented stories in their writings mostly recently, provided that a variety of creative methodologies had been introduced. The aim of this article is to present fictional vignettes as an integrative research method and writing technique, while discussing potential opportunities and limits relating to their use in geographical research, particularly within the recent rise of various 'creative methodologies' in cultural geographies.
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