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do so on the basis of its own specific relative geographical location and the
specific accessibility this allows for.
Globalisation, as the word itself suggests, points to the whole globe.
Behind notions of a free-floating, de-materialised global tourism market,
where prices are set between supply and demand, there is always a
material tourism geography of specific nodes and routes that connects and
disconnects places as tourist destinations on the Earth. Although New York
may be marketed as a “global city” this does not mean that it exists or
reaches everywhere. New York, like all other places on the Earth, is strictly
local too. Yet, due to its relative position in a wider network of
transportation, communication, economics and politics, it can indeed have
a strong influence on other places.
There are then reasons, not least geographical, to be cautious and not
take the level of the global for granted. It may well be adequate to use the
concept globalisation as denoting horizontal processes and highlighting an
increasing interconnectedness of the world, but what one finds behind are
networked local places and events. These do not float around as locals in a
global container space, but exist through their relative positional
connectivity. As Thrift points out, global space:
is no longer seen as a nested hierarchy moving from ‘global’ to ‘local’.
This absurd scale-dependent notion is replaced by the notion that what
counts is connectivity (Thrift 2004, p. 59).
Contrary to those popular notions and expressions claiming that “the
local and the global are related” to each other, or that “they influence each
other” in various ways, the local and the global are then not to be
conceptualised as two separate entities. In the same vein, this equally
applies to the relationship between tourism and the global. As Urry writes
when arguing for a hybrid conceptualisation of tourism and the global:
There are not two separate entities, the ´global´ and ´tourism´ bearing
some external connections with each other. Rather they are part and
parcel of the same set of complex and interconnected processes.
Moreover, such assembled infrastructures, flows of images and of
people, and the emerging practices of ´tourist reflexivity´ should be
conceptualised as a ´global hybrid´. It is hybrid because it is made up of
an assemblage of technologies, texts, images, social practices and so on,
that together enable it to expand and to reproduce itself across the globe
(Urry 1990/2002 p. 144).
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