David Wilson (can it be the UI guy? sounds a bit off his usual subjects) teamed with John A. Jakle in 1992 to write a book called Derelict Landscapes: the wasting of America's built environment.
Might be interesting if it is more than just a documentation of failed infrastructure.
Tourism and Regional Development: New Pathways. Maria Giaoutzi and Peter Nijkamp, eds. Oxford UP, 2006.
Focus on intersection of tourism, information technologies, and regional development. Sounds pretty au courant!
Review in PG November 07 by Stephen Hanna says the contributions are very quantitative-driven, and (as he says unfortunately) there is only one chapter on critical tourism studies, which misinterprets, oversimplifies and fails to account for newer extensions of, the tourist gaze approach to analysis. That chapter is by Lila Leontidou. Hanna writes that "several authors using this approach have retheorized the relationships among representation, experience, memory, and commodification to recognize that the resulting tourism places and practices are far from static" (557). Leotidou in Hanna's assessment is not one of them.
Methods chapters are said to be good for researchers and advanced students.
I am thinking about this because I need to be clear about where I am situated in academic tourism geography. "As far away as possible" is probably not a strategically acceptable answer during a defense!
I feel as though I have been on the road constantly for the last four weeks, and naturally, with traveling and preparing for interviews, output for my dissertation has suffered.
It's not all a loss, though: constantly refining my research talk (I'm doing it again for a conference in San Francisco next week) has really helped me to step back and think about the big picture issues I'm working on, and has helped me to see where the gaps are. (Just in time for my research trip in two weeks.)
1. A very penetrating (ie skeptical) question about the economic value of communist heritage tourism really pushed me to think about the other benefits of this brand of tourism, including the cultural colonization that I suspect is happening as Nowa Huta is re-evaluated as to place value. (That perennial question: "co warto zwiedzic" - what is worth visiting?) But can I show the causality? Discourse is more the answer than tourism, probably.
2. A question on Monday about the faddism of such tourism made me realize that I have to be always aware of the passage of time. What is true today may not be true tomorrow; communist heritage tourism is dynamic and changing, especially as the world "speeds up."
3. I feel I've made some strides connecting my method to humanistic geography. After years of bumbling around with linguistics, this feels really solid.
4. I am beginning to develop a better picture of the situation with the redevelopment of the steelworks and redevelopment in Krakow more generally, as I understand who the players are and what their relationships are.
I read up on quite a bit of CEE-specific environmental data in preparation for my teaching demonstration on environmental issues in CEE. Two books I didn't get to, but that would be interesting reading if I come back to this, are Barbara Hicks' Environmental Politics in Poland: a social movement between regime and opposition, Columbia UP, 1996, and Roger Manser's Failed Transitions: the eastern European economy and environment since the fall of communism, New Press, 1993.
Hicks is more concerned with the social and political dynamics of the various organizations; Manser is trying to show that the promise of the market to fix environmental pollution has not yet been realized. However, since his book was published a mere 3 years after the Fall, I am not sure that he is really giving it a fair shake.
My trouble in preparing the materials on environment in Poland is that everything was out of date. There is very little current information available. I think the topic is somewhat tangential to the bigger picture of my dissertation anyhow.
Just a quick placeholder so I can get this stuff in Wilson and throw away this slip of paper:
Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation. Has to be recalled. Sorry, whoever you are.
Tuan, Annals v. 81:684-96. Promising article on discourse instead of economy. Prefiguring Lovering? - I wonder.
LC categories:
Cities and towns - Soviet Union
Cities and towns - Europe, eastern
Books:
City and regional planning in Poland. Jack Fisher
cities without crisis. Davidow. MLAC
some other thing HT145.S58 B6x 1980.
And more:
Cities of the Soviet Union, the classic by Chauncey Harris
Urban inequalities under state socialism, Ivan Szelenyi.
Architecture and ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin era : an aspect of Cold War history / Anders Åman.
New York : Architectural History Foundation ; Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1992
arch/la NA958 .A4713 1992
I found it in the cached titles I type into MNCAT (that's not the right phrase for them but the auto completer thingy); I must have been too lazy on some day to go over to East Bank and actually GET the book.
Andrzej mentioned a book I should read: The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland 1943-1948," Krystyna Kersten, 1991.
MNCAT has it, of course. Also there is a book called The est of communist regimes in e Europe which might also be interesting to take a look at.
I'm interested in seeing what the rhetoric was like then, at the beginning, compared with the retrospective position that is now being formed - and, I'd argue, solidified.
One of my colleagues here in the summer school put me onto a relatively new book that I should definitely read: Auschwitz, Poland and the politics of commemoration. Jonathan Huener, who's in the history dept at UVM.
2003, Ohio UP. You can get the TOC in a link from MNCAT (a wonderful service, btw) and it looks like it would be interesting and a good complement (methodologically) to the anthro stuff I've been reading about constructing discourses.
There are a lot of history students here, and mostly they do archival work. I suppose the built world is MY archive, in some sense. I am just mistrustful of interviews as Truth - they seem even more loaded than my perception of reality.
PS: this is the only book in MNCAT, btw, in the LC category "Memory - poltiical aspects - Poland." So maybe my work is more important than I thought. Nah, probably not: but at least for the moment I am working on something fresh. I live in fear of being scooped.
These notes are from the bibliog of Handler and Gable's book on Colonial Wmsburg.
Benedict Anderson. 1991. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism.
We referenced this in Geog 3161 - it might be helpful in assessing how NH is or could be constructed as a national myth of overthrowing communism. (Which reminds me: I have to do a digest of the 1980s NH history to be clear on the events and the people.)
Robert Bellah et al. 1985. Habits of the heart: individualism and commitment in American life. Less impt for the immediate project, but I like the concept of a community of memory and want to know more about it.
Susan Porter Benson et al. ed 1986. Presenting the past: essays on history and the public.
Jo Blatti, ed. 1987. Past meets present: essays about historic interpretation and public audience. Seems very similar to Benson's. Not in MNCAT.
?Dean MacCannell. 1976. The tourist: a new theory of the leisure class. This is old but MacCannell gets cited a lot so perhaps worth a look. Aha! MNCAT says there is a 1999 edition.
2 articles by Dan Rose on market and elite discourses. 1) Anthropological Q 64:3: 109-125 (1991) and 2) Public Culture 4.1: 109-127 (1991).
There might be others but even these may not be directly relevant. I feel that I got a lot of good questions out of Handler and Gable, and should really work those.