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The authors focus on the rise of adventure tourism in New Zealand and suggest that the growth of adventure-tourism attractions is related to important transformations in the sociocultural geographies of the places concerned. Three issues are addressed: first, the increasing importance of adventure-tourism facilities, practices, and subcultures, which have interconnected with the social spatialisation of places and landscapes; second, the ways in which adventure tourism transcends the metaphor of the tourist ‘gaze’, and suggests attention to the embodiment of tourist practice; and third, the implications for an understanding of nature—society relations inherent in representational texts used to advertise adventure tourism.

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This paper discusses the ways in which the commodification of adventure in tourism has increasingly become implicated in the production and consumption of tourist places. It examines the notion of adventure in tourism and the changing nature of commodification in postmodern and 'post-tourist' times. The rise of adventure tourism in New Zealand is used as an example of how adventure has been commodified. A survey of tourist brochures for adventure tourism attractions in New Zealand reveals some of the particular characteristics of adventure which are being incorporated into commodity form for tourists. These characteristicsinclude place, spectacle, embodied experience and memory. Although aware of the limitations of using textual evidence from brochures, the paper concludes that Best's (1989)society of the commodity and the society of the spectacle are clearly significant in New Zealand. Sign exchange is also important in the commodification of adventure although it is concluded that places and practices are as yet rarely eclipsed by adventure signification.

This paper begins with a review of the residential mobility literature that arose out of housing and planning policy aimed at decreasing the negative effects of urban transience. The literature identified the range of factors influencing residential mobility, but Rossi's (1955) claim that mobility was a 'natural' outcome of life stage changes became the basis for the majority of this work. Most of this literature arose out of quantitative research approaches but writers drew attention to the inability of these approaches to capture the increasing complexity of family life and residential mobility. Drawing on data from the Christchurch, New Zealand, house and home study, this study argues that the qualitative ethnographic method used provides a more holistic approach to, and understanding of, the events and issues which influence household mobility over time. Within this context, the paper presents excerpts from interview data framed as ontological narratives and related stories embedded in social and economic contexts. Some of the themes identified are those of identity, home and place attachment, change and social differentiation, and the impact of gender relations on mobility decisions and experiences. These findings, like those in previous literature, are relevant to housing and planning policy making given the increasing diversity of residential developments and issues of access to social, financial and environmental resources. Understanding how individuals and families establish relationships between themselves and the places in which they live is important given increasingly divided and differentiated experiences of contemporary urban life.