VitrA Çağdaş Mimarlık Dizisi - Arkitera

appraisal
New Hotel Design
What is the main purpose of tourism?
This question can be answered simply: visiting other cities and countries, getting to
know various cultures, discovering history, acquiring different experiences...
Tourism activities, initially carried out only by the privileged classes, have evolved and
diversified rapidly due to the development of transportation infrastructure, the increase
in living standards, the spread of the idea of going on holiday and the increase of
mass communication and interaction. Tourism has become a major industry with subcategories
such as leisure tourism, cultural tourism, rural tourism, health tourism, congress
tourism, golf tourism, hunting tourism and sports tourism (Altun-Doğaner, 2006).
While individual tourism activities were dominant starting from the 19th century until
the beginning of World War II, after that period, mass tourism became a determining
factor, the explosion in package tours started in America and reached Turkey in the
1980s, by following a path through France, Spain and Italy.
This change has transformed the so-called “subject tourist”, who makes individual visits
especially for the purpose of cultural tourism, to a “statistical tourist” which is a consumer
of the package holiday.
Tourism has become an activity which is sold at a fixed price in all-inclusive tours involving
crowded airports and group trips and defined by collective visits and collective
entertainment (Tanyeli, 2004).
Individual Tourism
Subject Tourist
Second World War
Mass Tourism
Package holidays
Organized masses
Statistical Tourist
Post-tourist
Table 1: Systematic change of Tourism
63% of today’s daily tourism activities are based on exploring historical and famous
buildings and experiencing urban spaces. (Richter, 2010). Tourism has always had a
leading and transformative power in architecture and urban space. This leads to the
creation of artificial environments and the realization of tourism activities based on
these environments. The spaces, objects, visual images and themes created in this
way are quickly consumed by the organized masses. The efforts of attracting visitors
based on pre-constructed ways of life has created a tension at many levels between
the locality of tourism that should be targeted, the original identity of the region and
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