Tourist development as an opportunity for viable and equitable territories: a return to the future

Abstract

The paper aims to link three main thoughts: First urban planning has traditionally been unable to tackled tourist spaces in relation to their physical specificity. Tourist spaces are not "normal" urban spaces. On the contrary they belong to categories related to human imaginary environments and tourist architecture has reply to this fantasies by imposing preconceived "traditional" forms and geographies assuming that is what the eventual customers expect following their constructions of signs. Secondly, in the present globalised economy, places and territories compete with each other like companies in the commodity market, but their strength its linked to their unique characteristics, thus authenticity is not only a cultural requirement, but a guarantee of market positioning; and finally after acknowledging the unsustainable current urban growth models we propose that a viable solution consist of returning to relations of proximity no conceived as a return to traditional forms, but as a reinterpretation of then.