A discourse analysis of the urban imaginaries represented in tourism marketing for Johannesburg in the post-apartheid era
Date
2016
Authors
Bam, Angela Phindile
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Abstract
Like many cities around the world Johannesburg began marketing to attract tourists in the 1990s.
Johannesburg has in the last couple of years become a ‘hot’ tourism destination and is increasingly
ranked among the top global tourist destinations. Tourist cities market their cultural, historical
shopping, entertainment and lifestyle attractions to attract tourists and wealthy residents. They also
regenerate older historical districts or build new attractions in the form of high profile infrastructure
and architecture. To attract tourists, cities use discourse to represent themselves in certain ways to
the prospective tourist. This discourse found in tourism marketing and other communications;
creates certain expectations or commonly held imaginings of a city as a tourism destination. These
are referred to as tourism imaginaries. In cities these ‘tourism imaginaries’ become absorbed as
urban imaginaries that shape not only tourist spaces, but the whole city. The research aims to
deconstruct the imaginaries represented in Johannesburg’s tourism marketing to understand how
tourism is shaping Johannesburg in line with this view. Discourse analysis is used as a method to
achieve this. Michel Foucault understood discourse as a system of representation, where discourse
is a way of creating meaning by representing knowledge and exercising power around a subject at a
certain time in history and in a particular way. Besides the content analysis of the tourism marketing,
the discourse analysis also captured how tourism businesses in three case study sites namely
Newtown Precinct, Vilakazi Street and Montecasino Entertainment Complex have responded to the
discourses in the City’s tourism marketing. A central argument made is that the drive to create
tourist cities reinforces rather than reduces power inequalities and creates further fragmentation by
creating pockets of exceptionalism reserved for tourists. The research contributes to the recent
interest in the cultural and political understandings of cities which considers the often invisible or
overlooked manifestations of power that shape cities. In the research tourism imaginaries are
conceptualised as central in the generation and shaping of social practices in the City. It was
concluded that the move to create tourist cities has given tourists and other tourism actors symbolic
power, shaping the city by remote control, and therefore reinforcing global power dynamics that
have shaped the world since colonial times.
Description
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Urban Studies, Johannesburg 2016
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Citation
Bam, Angela Phindile (2016) A discourse analysis of the urban imaginaries represented in tourism marketing for Johannesburg in the post-apartheid era, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, <https://hdl.handle.net/10539/24113>