CHAPTER SEVEN
7.1 A place to start
Following the principle of general symmetry, ethnography was put forward as a useful method for investigating tourism as an ordering. However as an ordering the ‘ins and outs’ of tourism cannot be pre-determined and therefore the assumption of an ethnographic field that contains tourism is problematic. Despite this, a place to begin is still necessary and the following section describes how Sullivans Cove in the city of Hobart, Tasmania came to qualify for this.165
165 Serres describes tracing orderings as like navigating the northwest passage (1990/1995:16), yet even
142 Source: Lea Photography Tasmania
Chapter Two described how the practice of ‘following tourists’ had been significant in the performance of tourism research. To avoid any temptation to substitute a ‘tourist point of view’ for an explanation of tourism, tourists were discounted as a place to start. For the same reason I avoided becoming a tourist to locate a place to start, opting instead to conduct ‘ethnography at home’ in a place I already knew well. This choice capitalised on the advantage of familiarity in terms of time getting to know the place, and also avoided any confusion that might come from choosing a place that I would unavoidably encounter in a tourist-like way. At the same time, a place to start at home could not be found among ‘hosts’ because this also risked subscribing to humanism, to reinstating a world split in two and to the host point of view instead. While the study could have started with humans and then plotted the heterogeneous assemblies they become involved in, as an experimental post- humanist account of tourism, neither tourists, hosts nor other human actors were emphasised at the start. For these reasons a place to begin was generalised to an actual place ‘Sullivans Cove’ that was a convenient walking distance from the university I worked at.
As a research object ‘places’ are steeped in a humanist/materialist asymmetry where they are “determined or driven in the last instance” by either humans or the physical environment (Law 1992: 382). In urban literature material or physical determinism claims the primacy of
143 non-human elements in shaping the social (Cuthbert 2005:7) and on the other hand social reductionism gives primacy to human understanding or meanings of place. In tourism research the latter is most usual, reducing the physical to an embodiment of social relations and practices (Robbins 1996:283), where places come to be “surveyed and invested with symbolic significance” (Pritchard and Morgan 2006:764). 166There is a sense in which this practice of asymmetry is bizarre when it is applied to places since they are clearly
heterogeneous entities including people, signs, images, buildings and roads. The very complexity of place is an outcome at least in part of this concentrated heterogeneity and yet ironically this proves a good reason to continue the practices of dividing them up into natural and human elements.
The principle of general symmetry finds a way to take this heterogeneity into account and combats both the physical determinism that is practised in the spatially oriented sciences and the social reductionism that is practised in the human oriented sciences. Instead of this distinction, “space and form are the product of their contemporary culture, but so are users and their culture the product of their social and physical environment” (Arida 1996: 142). Therefore a benefit of starting with a place is that it does not specify a humanist or materialist reading and when diagnosed symmetrically, is already ‘relationally material’. To the
relational precedents set out by by De Certeau (1984) and Le Febvre (1991) as examples, are added relations that include with more equity both humans and non-humans (Amin 2007). Places are ‘socio-technical’ entities (Graham and Marvin 2001) and a symmetrical researcher who begins with a place can situate themselves in media res and pursue multiple kinds of actors from there. A benefit of starting with a place that can be augmented with the prefix ‘tourism’ is that it assumes an established presence of tourists, tourist attraction, planning and organisation. When this is added to symmetry, a relationally material definition of a tourism place becomes a heterogeneous assembly that is variously ordered in such a way as to attract tourists and facilitate tourism.
7.1.1
Tourism Places
144 Tourism places have been useful in tourism research for locating tourists, measuring tourism impact and understanding how tourism production is done. These studies and the practical implications they give rise add importance to tourism places as both artefacts and
technologies of the ‘common sense of fieldwork’ (Czarniawska 2004: 779) and in tourism research constitute “a level of analysis” (Jackson and Murphy 2000:37) in themselves. Studies of tourism places that focus on tourism production have tended to reinforce a virtue of tourism planning and development and an assumption that the organisation of the
“material, aesthetic and sensual qualities of place” influences the activities or ‘performances’ that tourists then undertake (Edensor 2001:63). Built into this assumption is that the ability to attract and manage tourist behaviour holds the key to both maximising the desirable and minimising the undesirable impacts of tourism.
[T]ourist places may be fluid, but they are fluid in specific ways. For much of the tourist industry places are not simply a matter of location but also of production. Places have to be produced in ways that afford certain tourist practices, not just in terms of the catering and hospitality industry, but more significantly as a matter of producing interesting places to go. To attract tourist flows, places need to be seductive and suggestive (Baerenholdt and Haldrup 2006: 210).
Tourism places are the coal-face of the ‘production-consumption nexus’ (Milne and
Ateljevic 2001: 372) and they, their failures and successes are mainly thought to result from a positive correlation between how a place is planned and developed for tourism and how tourists become attracted to and engage with that place. That said it is also recognised that not all of tourism production and consumption takes place in a tourism place and includes
anticipation (Urry 1990) as well as recollection (Franklin 2003) taking place ‘elsewhere’. Consequently not all of the explanation for tourism production and consumption can be found in ‘the tourism place’, however much of it is. While a tourism place is distributed, there has been a tendency to deal with what is extraneous to the place as “underlying [and equally ‘overarching’] processes that shape the emerging tourism landscape” (Shaw and Williams 2004:1). This study focuses on the production of tourism insofar as the case is one of
planning and developing tourism in Sullivans Cove. As an ordering this production involves ‘work’ and ‘process’ so that through performances of heterogeneous materials tourism ‘keeps resulting’ in this place.
145 Symmetrically the question of planning and developing a tourism place cannot be resolved through only humans and the meanings they give, the outcomes they intend, or the places they design. There is also no search for ‘extraneous factors’ that are often ‘bigger’,
sometimes overarching or otherwise underlying, as a means to explain how tourism happens in the case of Sullivans Cove. While the principle of general symmetry does not exclude ‘human intention’ and ‘extraneous factors’, they cannot precede, cause or transcend the orderings they take part in without first showing how they do. Instead, tourism places and their organisation and development are understood as performed through humans and non- humans and any explanation of them belongs to the ordering(s) they become.
Some tourism places are more ‘saturated’ in tourism than others and this saturation also makes them more ‘separated’ as tourism places. These ‘enclavic developments’ include resorts, some holiday islands and purpose built attractions like Disneyland. These are often criticised, from distance they themselves allow, as contrivances or inauthentic places and this lack of authenticity results from a more singularly focussed planning and manufacturing so that some places are considered completely ‘unnatural’.167This suggests that despite all the benefits of tourism planning, too much planning leads to too much contrivance and the place that results is not natural. It also suggests that single purpose planning and places are less fashionable than they used to be.168
Other tourism places are clearly more ‘mixed’ places involving non-tourism activities and non-tourists so that the two are inseparable. These places are multiple and often very different places simultaneously and this, conversely is held to mean they have evolved in a less
contrived, more natural manner than ‘strictly tourism’ places. Cities are exemplars of this where London, Paris and Venice are old and well established ‘tourist destinations’ and these are now ideal locations for exploring how “tourism does not stand far apart” from non- tourism activities, where each is somewhat “absorbed into the daily life of the city” (Ehrlich and Dreier, 1999 in Franklin, 2003:1).169Symmetrically mixed places are useful for showing
167 This does not discount these ‘rarities’ as important if ‘unnatural’.
168 The dominance of mixed use planning in the urban literature mirrors the ecological movement where healthy
urban systems rely on a concept of mix in the same way that sustainable agriculture requires diversified crops. Healthy economies similarly advocate multiple industries so that whether tourism or farming, any singular and therefore intensive forms of land-use are problematic.
146 how tourism coexists with other forms of organisation and how agency and activity is
distributed. Sullivans Cove is an example of this.
7.2 Sullivans Cove
Sullivans Cove is a part of the city of Hobart that particularly attracts tourists. At the same time it is a port, the historical core of the city and to the people who live there, the
sentimental ‘heart’ so it is both is both a tourism place and a place for other things. As the ‘tourist quarter’ of the city is not quite so mixed that it would represent an ideal of mixed place, but neither is it a strictly tourism place, and involves other things, people and uses as well. Not least among these is a pride of continuing as a working port, something that once defined the city of Hobart. This means in Sullivans Cove tourism is produced alongside other things that are also being produced and this means tourism does not have right of way, despite there being evidence to show that it has achieved this right many times. A question that arose in response to this was ‘how this right might be achieved?’
As a tourism place Sullivans Cove provides tourist services including accommodation; tourist information; restaurants, bars and cafes; theatre and entertainment and gift shops. It offers the well-known ‘Salamanca Markets’; ferry rides and guided, historic tours combining what is ‘quintessentially Tasmanian’ an endorsement focussed on historical charm and natural beauty with what is ‘quintessentially Hobart’ a once-colonial ‘city of the sea’.170 Formed of
eighteenth century warehouses, a natural deepwater harbour and Wellington Ranges as a backdrop, this earliest part of the city stands today to ‘concentrate’ and ‘sum up’ and what lies beyond to tourists, while facilitating their ability to get beyond as well. In this way Sullivans Cove acts as a gateway for tourists as well as attraction in its own right and is therefore a ‘double incentive’ tourism place. Not surprising then, is that almost all of Tasmania’s tourists visit Sullivans Cove.171 How they learn about this place is through the road system, to a lesser but increasing extent the ship route and through promotional material where Sullivans Cove is the postcard image of Hobart, ‘the south’ and also Tasmania more generally.
170 Marine Board of Hobart Annual Report 1988 in Hudspeth and Scripps (2000:354). 171 Tourism Tasmania http://www.tourism.tasmania.gov.au , Accessed February 7th 2010.
147 Source: Nucolorvue postcards, Australia.
Salamanca Place, in Sullivans Cove, is Hobart's favourite hang out. It's where the hip meets the homespun and everything in between.
With dozens of restaurants and shops, the best plaza in Tasmania and nightlife, pubs, artists, galleries, craft shops to suit every budget and the famous Salamanca Market every Saturday, this is THE PLACE to SEE! 172
In these ways Sullivans Cove is ‘obviously tourism’ and therefore a good place to locate tourism orderings. However since the development of Sullivans Cove into a tourism place has only partially been won over from, or replaced other developments this is also a good place to understand tourism orderings alongside other things. As a continuing working port and
junction of road and sea touring routes, Sullivans Cove also continues to act in the manner it was originally intended for and this original intention is important itself to tourism ordering. It is a transportation gateway to and from Southern Tasmania and continues as a ‘last refuge’ (predominately for scientists) before the Antarctic (Phillips in Hudspeth and Scripps 2000: v). While traditional cargo shipping has decreased in Sullivans Cove, cruise ships and scientific
172 ‘Discover Tasmania’ website:
http://www.discovertasmania.com/activities__and__attractions/popular_attractions/salamanca_place, accessed February 4th 2010.
148 expeditions have increased so that like developments in other sea ports Sullivans Cove works as a port in a more diversified manner, and this manner increasingly involves tourism
(Hudspeth and Scripps 2000: 336).
These characteristics made Sullivans Cove a good candidate for discovering tourism ordering. As a place that was located ‘at home’ the Cove circumvented the need to practice tourism at the same time as researching it. As a place that was not completely tourism but appeared to be increasingly becoming so, Sullivans Cove provided the means to understand emerging tourism orderings alongside other things. While this provided a place to start, it was to be a short reprieve because the problem then became ‘which tourism ordering?’
7.3
The brief and the beginning
Since part of the quest was to illustrate tourism as something performed by more than humans, part of the question to address was how non-humans can be made to matter to tourism. In 2004 while these decisions were taking place, something new was being added to Sullivans Cove and this was a building called Zero Davey. When Zero Davey emerged on the Sullivans Cove landscape it immediately attracted the critical attention of the press and ‘the people of Hobart’ through the press. In relation to the small scale of the city, and of Sullivans Cove in particular, Zero Davey was a prominent and significant development. Providing up- market, apartment styled accommodation the building’s main purpose was to serve out-of- towners or tourists. Consequently, it could provide ‘the people of Hobart’ with little other than something to look at and this visual legacy took up the main part of the same people’s dialogue. To the apparent indifference of Zero Davey to the local people in terms of its function was added a perceived indifference to the location in terms of what is ‘in keeping’ with Sullivans Cove. Therefore in 2004 when I was looking for a place to start, this new ‘tourism object’ stood at the centre of a controversy in Sullivans Cove.
As a tourism development Zero Davey offered an opportunity to get immediate access into a tourism ordering. As hotel accommodation Zero Davey was part of tourism, and this
involvement was extended in the November of 2004 when the local newspaper The Mercury reported this most recent in a string of ‘Zero Davey stories’:
149 Davey St planner defends his vision: A 6-star view of controversial Zero Davey’s luxury lifestyle
PROPERTY developers have defended Zero Davey, saying it provides a much-needed gateway to the city of Hobart.
The developer said he was straight-forward with the Hobart City Council when he proposed the idea and came away with some briefs – including the requirement to provide a ‘gateway’ to Hobart. Road-works were done and extra land was acquired from the Crown to accommodate a building which purposefully did not shy away from being one of the first things to be seen entering the CBD, he said. “The idea was for people to pass a gate, to have an opening” he said. “From there you get the ‘wow this is what’s here’. 173
This ‘defence’ brought to light what had hitherto remained obscure in the public debate. Zero Davey also fulfilled a brief to provide a gateway to Sullivans Cove - or a gateway to what was already a gateway - and to create an effect of ‘surprise’ to people who are unfamiliar with this place. This ‘gateway brief’ added a new ordering to Zero Davey making it more than another controversial building in Hobart and not only another controversial tourism development. Importantly for the task I had set myself, the gateway brief signalled how Zero Davey was multiply associated with tourism orderings, being at once ‘hotel accommodation’, a piece of architecture that adds to (or detracts from) a special place, as well as forming a ‘gateway’ to the special place for those who are arriving there for the first time.
Without having to look very far, Zero Davey was already a contentious ‘new build on the block’ that brought it plenty of attention.
There’s nothing more certain to spark a heated public debate than a new development on Hobart’s waterfront.174
In adding tourism stock to Sullivans Cove and in providing a gateway to a tourism place that is itself a gateway in a touring destination it provided an entry point for investigating
173
The Mercury 22nd November 2004
174 Editorial,
150 organisationally-relevant findings (Law 2002). In commencing with a building and orienting the study towards it, the importance of non-humans also became exaggerated and was
consistently re-emphasised so that ‘they’ had a better chance of being taken into account. In this way Zero Davey acted first to orient the material relations that would be pieced together in the study. My decision was based as much on it offering itself as a ‘reasonable place’ to expect to gain some appreciation of tourism ordering.
From this point whenever Zero Davey was talked about and written about it did something including ‘offend’; ‘complement’; ‘compete’ and ‘complete’ all at once (see Chapter Nine). Since Zero Davey was as Zero Davey did, the simple plan from here was to follow up as much that was said or written about the building in order to exhaust as many possibilities for what Zero Davey does and what this ‘doing’ itself helped to do. However, while Zero Davey in Sullivans Cove provided an opportunistic location and beginning for the research neither