In the second seminar Ramon Ribera-Fumaz, director of the research group on Urban Transformation in the Knowledge Society of the IN3 (http://in3.uoc.edu/opencms_portalin3/opencms/en/investigadors/list/ribera_fumaz_ramon), described the frame and the impacts of policies to promote tourism in Barcelona, of the main European tourism destinations, that is also considered a smart city ecosystem.

1. Smartketing
Making Internet sense of tourism destinations
Ramon Ribera-Fumaz
rriberaf@uoc.edu
Internet Interdisciplinary Institute
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

2. How do you plan your holidays?
How do you keep record of your holidays?
Fundamental changes done by the intensive use
of internet, social media and in general ICT
A whole word to explore…
… but we have only 3 hours…
We will focus on one relation between:
Internet (virtuallity) and place (materiality)
Mostly based on the experience of Barcelona

3. Internet (virtuallity) vs place (materiality)
When we focus on Internet and Social Media, we
tend to forget about place:
1. Focus on what happens on the net
2. Place becomes virtually mediated and many
times de-materialised
BUT
Tourism as a business is based on delivering
experiences anchored to a place.
Place as the key competitive and differential
asset (even when is fake: i.e. Las Vegas)
And virtual technology have place impacts that
can be transformative

4. Plan of the class
1. A little about: Barcelona, experience economy, tourist
gaze, socio-technologies and place.
2. A little more about: Barcelona, experience economy,
tourist gaze, socio-technologies and place.
3. Sharing Destinations: sharing economy, sharing tourism
and its impacts

5. A little about: Barcelona

6. A little about: Barcelona

7. A little about: experience economy, tourist gaze, socio-technologies...
And place

8. A little about: experience economy, tourist gaze, socio-technologies...
And place
Experience economy

9. A little about: experience economy, tourist gaze, socio-technologies...
And place
Tourist gaze

10. A little about: experience economy, tourist gaze, socio-technologies...
And place
Socio-technologies

11. A little about: experience economy, tourist gaze, socio-technologies...
And place
place

12. A little about: experience economy, tourist gaze, socio-technologies...
And place
Materially & virtually Remaking place

13. A little more about: Place/Destination
Tourism is a place-based activity

14. A little more about: Place/Destination
From mass fordist to mass postmodern tourism

15. A little more about: Place/Destination
From mass fordist to mass postmodern tourism

16. A little more about: Place/Destination
Changes of place/destination

17. A little more about: Place/Destination
Monopoly rents and symbolic capital
Destination is about uniqueness & authentity:
If claims to uniqueness, authenticity, particularity and
speciality underlie the ability to capture monopoly rents,
then on what better terrain is it possible to make such claims
than in the field of historically constituted cultural artefacts
and practices and special environmental characteristics
(including, of course, the built, social and cultural
environments)? (Harvey 2001: 1003)

18. A little about: Place/Destination
Monopoly rents and symbolic capital
Destination is about uniqueness & authentity:
Many rest upon historical narratives, interpretations and
meanings of collective memories, significations of cultural
practices, and the like: there is always a strong social and
discursive element at work in the construction of such
claims. Once established, however, such claims can be
pressed home hard in the cause of extracting monopoly rents
since there will be, in many people’s minds at least, no other
place than London, Cairo, Barcelona, Milan, Istanbul, San
Francisco or wherever, in which to gain access to whatever it
is that is supposedly unique to such places (Harvey, 2001:
103).

19. A little more about: Place/Destination
Monopoly rents and symbolic capital
The rise of Barcelona … has in part been based on its steady
amassing of symbolic capital and its accumulating marks of
distinction. In this the excavation of a distinctively Catalan
history and tradition, the marketing of its strong artistic
accomplishments and architectural heritage (Gaudi, of
course) and its distinctive marks of lifestyle and literary
traditions… This has all been show-cased with new signature
architectural embellishments … and a whole host of
investments to open up the harbour and the beach… and turn
what was once a rather murky and even dangerous nightlife
into an open panorama of urban spectacle (Harvey, 2001:
104).

20. A little more about: Place/Destination
Monopoly rents and symbolic capital
But … as opportunities to pocket monopoly rents galore
present themselves on the basis of the collective symbolic
capital of Barcelona as a city (property prices have
skyrocketed …) so their irresistible lure draws more and
more homogenizing multinational commodification in its
wake. The later phases of waterfront development look
exactly like every other in the western world… multinational
stores replace local shops, gentrification removes long-term
residential populations and destroys older urban fabric, and
Barcelona loses some of its marks of distinction. There are
even unsubtle signs of Disneyfication. This contradiction is
marked by questions and resistance. Whose collective
memory is to be celebrated here ...

21. A little more about: Place/Destination
Monopoly rents and symbolic capital
(the anarchists like the Icarians who played such an
important role in Barcelona’s history, the republicans who
fought so fiercely against Franco, the Catalan nationalists,
immigrants from Andalusia, or a long-time Franco ally like
Samaranch)? Whose aesthetics really count (the famously
powerful architects of Barcelona like Bohigas)? Why accept
Disneyfication of any sort?(Harvey, 2001: 105).

22. A little more about: Place/Destination
City as spectacle
commodification: the city as a commodity, the
development of a consumer society where market
relations subsume and dominate social life (Gotham
Fox,2002).
New users of the city ... Some with more power that it
might look at first glance (Martinotti, 2011)

23. A little more about: Place/Destination
City as spectacle
society of spectacle (Debord 1973): the domination of
media images and consumer society over the individual
while obscuring the nature and effects of capitalism
the spectacle ... [as] a tool [that ]... ‘distracts’ and ‘seduces’
people using the mechanisms of leisure, consumption and
entertainment as ruled by the dictates of advertising and
commodified media culture (Gotham Fox, 2002 1737).

24. A little more about: Place/Destination
City as spectacle
Contradictions emerge in the meaning of spectacle and
the city, and the city and tourism itself.

25. A little more about: Place/Destination
But... Increasing inter-place competition and Increasing
generation of attractions in place

26. A little more about: Place/Destination
Monopoly rents and symbolic capital

27. A little more about: Experience economy
The distinctive feature of the experience economy is that
services need to be more than just mere ‘services’, which can
seem boring to the increasingly thrill-seeking consumer.
Services need to be somehow pleasurable and memorable;
they must be ‘experiences’, ‘revealed over a duration’ (Urry
and Larsen, 2011: 53).

28. A little more about: Experience economy
In a post-Fordist economy businesses need to think of
themselves as ‘theatres’ with their staff as performing artists
in order to engage with consumers (Pine and Gilmore, 1999:
104). Places of service encounters need to be imagined and
staged as affective venues of atmosphere and eventness
where memorable experiences come to be ‘revealed over
time’. Service producers must thus learn to perform, play,
enact and stage – not unlike actors in a theatre. They are no
longer providers of benefits but stagers of sensations (Urry
and Larsen, 2011: 53)

29. A little more about: Experience economy
Experience economy
Policy makers, urban planners and architects, who are
seeking to revitalise decaying places and commercialise
cultural institutions such as theatres and museums,
increasingly turn into ‘experiencescapes’ (Hayes and
MacLeod, 2007). Tourism and hospitality managers
also adopt [these] ideas so as to develop innovative
approaches to service performance (Landry, 2006; Bell,
2007) (Urry and Larsen, 2011: 53).

30. A little more about: Experience economy
Experience > function

31. A little more about: Experience economy
Experience > place?
Territorialization of experience

32. A little more about: socio-technologies
Technologies plays a fundamental role
- Social Media/Web 2.0
- Augmented reality
- Sharing

33. A little about: socio-technologies

34. A little more about: socio-technologies
Tourist Gaze
The ‘tourist gaze’ is not a matter of individual psychology
but of socially patterned and learnt ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger,
1972). It is a vision constructed through mobile images and
representational technologies. Like the medical gaze, the
power of the visual gaze within modern tourism is tied into,
and enabled by, various technologies, including camcorders,
film, TV, cameras and digital images.
There is no single tourist gaze as such. It varies by society,
by social group and by historical period. Such gazes are
constructed (Urry and Larsen 2011: 2)

35. A little more about: socio-technologies
The history of capitalism:
is a history of the role of signification and meaning systems
in the economic life of society. This role is not confined
merely to the marketing of commodities. Rather, the entire
process of capital accumulation is shot through with
mechanisms that depend on symbolic processes for their
proper functioning (Gottdiener, 1997: 48).

36. A little more about: socio-technologies
Thus, “meanings systems” and other forms of signification
are not merely products of technology, media and consumer
culture or the selling of a destination
They are products produced into deeper cultural but as well
material social relations.
We need the bigger picture where these processes interact

37. A little more about: Tourism impacts (Urry 2013),
In mobile societies, tourist destinations are fluid:
Tourists, business travelers, commuters, commodities, ideas,
signs ….global connections through economic, social, cultural,
technological networks
Place (tourist destination) isn’t only constructed thru local
history and processes
Place is articulated in global relations constellations there
(and everywhere)
This could lead to conflict

38. A little more about: Tourism impacts (Urry 2013),
These impacts can be:
social: economic, cultural, political…
environmental: CO2, resources…
And these impacts depend on the intersection of various
economic, social, cultural, environmental, and as well
TECHNOLOGICAL!

39. Sharing Destinations: sharing economy

40. Sharing Destinations: sharing economy

41. Sharing Destinations: sharing economy
“I think it’s simple. If you care a bout
your fellow human beings, you share
what you know with them. You share
what you see. You give them anything you
can. If you care about their plight, their
suffering, their curiosity, their right to
learn and know anything the world
contains, you share with them. You share
what you have and what you see and
what you know. To me, the logic there is
undeniable.”
The audience cheered, and while
they did so, three new words, SHARING
IS CARING, appeared in the screen…
Mae Hollands, in Eggers (2013: 302)

42. Sharing Destinations: sharing economy

45. Sharing Destinations: sharing economy
The sharing economy “is a socio-economic system
built around the sharing of human and physical
resources: shared creation, production, distribution
and consumption.
A common premise is that when information about
goods is shared, the value of those goods may
increase, for the business, for individuals, and fo the
community
Techology enables this system, it makes connections
between people. Goods and services more efficient,
resulting in new communities, organizations and biz
models for the public and private sector
(wikipedia)

46. Sharing Destinations: sharing economy
Guiding principles:
Unused value is a wasted value
Waste as food
Access not ownership
Transparent and open data
Trust
Urban density
(wikipedia)

47. Sharing Destinations: sharing economy
Driving forces
ICT: open data, mobiles, apps, social media…
(Urbanised) population growth
Rising income inequality
Increasing global crises
Increasing volatility and natural resources
(wikipedia)

48. Sharing Destinations: sharing economy
Sharing economy

49. Sharing Destinations:
Once I took a taxi...

50. Sharing Destinations:

51. Sharing Destinations:

53. Sharing Destinations:
But is the clash between the old and the new economy about that?

54. Sharing Destinations:

55. FromS@haalrbienrtgar sDaestinations:
airbnb Hotel

56. Sharing Destinations:

57. Sharing Destinations:

58. Again: experience economy, tourist gaze, socio-technologies...
And place
So then,
Sharing economy?
City as spectacle?
Social media role?
And your experience?