Narrow Results

“Place” is a key concept in humanistic geography and researchers have applied it to the field of tourism. Geographers like Edward Relph added humanistic perspective to the notion of place, and his work did not contribute only to the maintenance and restoration of existing places but also the creation of new places. Big cities with abundant historical resources and notable characteristics are relatively easy to develop tourism, while small cities which have poor economy and few historical and cultural resources have to exert even more efforts to enlarge the tourist industry.

Performing art festivals can play an important role in the creation of new places. Because they can be newly made through performances and related programs, even if local historical resources are poor. Some small cities in Korea and China are actively exploring how to change themselves into new places by means of such festivals.

County of Zhangbei, for example, is situated close to Inner Mongolia region in China and owns vast grasslands. Lack of historical and cultural resources, it didn’t have many option but to rely on agriculture and the result was a poor economy. In 2009, the first Zhangbei Grassland Music Festival was successfully held and attracted more than 100,000 visitors to this small town in only three days. After ten years, Zhangbei Festival has become a popular destination for music lovers and travelers in China, and the county was transformed into a town of rock music from an unknown village.

This paper is a case study on Zhangbei Grassland Music Festival which focuses on the progress of creating a new place through performing art festivals, and divided into five parts: First, it introduces background and the objectives of the research. Secondly, it focuses on the theoretical base of place and placeness. Thirdly, it provides the information on Zhangbei county and Zhangbei Festival. Fourthly, it analyze the process of making a new place through the festival. Finally, it comes to a conclusion that a new place can be created by the art festival, and tells what Zhangbei County need to do for the improvement of this upturn.

Within the systemic framework of Environmental Psychology (Bechtel and Churchman, 2002) and following Urry (2002) and Pearce's approaches (2005), the aim of this research is to investigate within the context of urban tourism which world views emerge from a Discourse Analysis (Edwards, Potter, 1993). of the speech of native and non-native Sardinian residents. It addresses the issue of how social-physical diversity might be preserved (the problem of tourism sustainability, Di Castri, Balaji, 2002).

In this regard, forty in-depth narrative interviews of inhabitants with short- and long-term residential experience in Cagliari (Italy) were conducted and examined (Discourse Analysis). It was found that the native and non-native's rhetorical devices expressed similar representations of urban places, but in diverse relationship to social and place identity. Their environmental transitions were based on the tourist gaze, or the functional view and heritage pride. This displays some basic central dimensions of sustainable tourism.