CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Sillars, Kitty |
|---|---|
| Title | Representing History Underfoot: An Analysis of the Approach to History on Self-Guided Walking Tours in Tokyo, Florence, and Vienna |
| Summary | Walking through the city is an oft overlooked staple of tourist activity, and the popularity of walking tours in Florence, Vienna and Tokyo are a testament to this. This thesis will consider how history is constructed and communicated on self-guided historical walking routes in these three cities. These routes privilege individual “attractions” from various points in each city’s history performing a curation of the urban landscape. Furthermore, they can be considered a form of history in the public sphere as they allow their public, their audience: the pedestrian tourist, to access spatially experienced historical information. Combining an analytical approach to the history of tourism and theories of the “Tourist Gaze” in tandem with the idea of the city as museum, this research untangles the various inconsistencies, biases, and value judgements made while curating the cityscape in the context of tourism. While walking, popular urban histories and tourism have all been surveyed separately, research into self-guided history walks as a nexus of these fields is currently negligible. The methodology combines fieldwork with content analysis of walking route materials (including information boards in situ, leaflets, and app-based online content) to discover the impact of the walking route as embodied experience, and as directed by signs and textual information. This research will be used to interrogate how walking tours coax the tourist towards a specific vision of the historical city and what this says about the tourist image of the living city. This thesis concludes that the “official” nature of walking routes created by state tourist boards limits their capacity to delve into the complexities of the historical, and memorial, spaces they traverse. While walking tours created by organisations outside the tourist industry suggest the potential for immersive and informative historical experiences, and the autonomy of the independent walker always allows for free discovery, government endorsed routes repeatedly favour palatable versions of history. |
| Supervisor | Tacchi, Francesca |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/sillars_kitty.pdf |
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