Untitled

The Age of Touristic Reproduction
beginnings, fleeting fashions, and incessantly changing lifestyles. Built as a
haven of security the city soon became the stage for criminality, instability,
destruction, anarchy, and terrorism. Accordingly the city presents itself as a
blend of utopia and dystopia, whereby modernity undoubtedly cherishes and
applauds its dystopian rather than its utopian aspects—urban decadence,
danger, and haunting eeriness. This city of eternal ephemerality has frequently
been depicted in literature and staged in the cinema: this is the city we know,
for instance, from Blade Runner or Terminator I and II, where permission is
constantly being given for everything to be blown up or razed to the ground,
simply because people are tirelessly engaged in the endeavor to clear a space
for what is expected to happen next, for future developments. And over and
over again the arrival of the future is impeded and delayed because the remains
of the city’s previously built fabric can never be fully removed, making it
forever impossible to complete the current preparation phase. If indeed anything
of any permanence exists in our cities, it is ultimately only to be found
in such incessant preparations for the building of something that promises to
last a long time; it is in the perpetual postponement of a final solution, the
never-ending adjustments, the eternal repairs, and the constantly piecemeal
adaptation to new constraints.
In modern times, however, this utopian impulse, the quest for an ideal
city, has grown progressively weaker and gradually been supplanted by the
fascination of tourism. Today, when we cease to be satisfied with the life that
is offered to us in our own city, we no longer strive to change, revolutionize,
or rebuild it; instead, we simply move to another city—for a short period or
forever—in search of what we miss in our home city. Mobility between
cities—in all shades of tourism and migration—has radically altered our
relationship to the city as well as the cities themselves. Globalization and
mobility have fundamentally called the utopian character of the city into
question by reinscribing the urban ou-topos into the topography of globalized
space. It is no coincidence that in his reflections on this globalized world
McLuhan coined the term “global village”—as opposed to global city. For
the tourist and the migrant alike, it is the countryside in which the city stands
that has once more become the key issue.
It was primarily the first phase of modern tourism—which I will now
term romantic tourism—that spawned a distinctly antiutopian attitude
toward the city. Romantic tourism in its nineteenth-century guise cast a