City Tour Guides: Urban Alchemists at Work

Wynn, Jonathan R.

doi:10.1111/j.1540-6040.2010.01322.x

Cited by 26 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…27 Many guides believe they are providing a public service by spreading niche knowledge as public historians. 30 They frame the encounter between tourist and toured and often teach a celebration of difference and localism. 22 Thus, walking tour guides' urban alchemism (see below) is always an act of pedagogy, even without formal students, as it teaches the tourists a way to know the city.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This contrasts with other forms of urban mass tourism, like bus tours, which are more confining and sterile experiences. 30 By getting the tourists 'out amongst the folks' (folks who sometimes interrupt tours), guides present a city that would be recognizable to locals, as it is imagined by the tourists, and in a non-simulated form. While guides may 'schmaltz' the stories or add small embellishments, the Chicago of the walking tours is usually authentic.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How to Become a “Real Chicagoan” in No Time: The Promise and Pedagogy of Walking Tourism

Henry¹

2017

AJUR

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This study takes seriously the tourist’s desire to feel like a local and examines how walking tour guides work toward fulfilling that desire. The paper examines some of the techniques used by urban walking tour guides to convey local cultural cues. The tourist, armed with these cues, may feel able to fit into a new culture as a quasi-insider. Through qualitative methods, primarily participant observation, the researcher identifies three tactics that guides implement to make the tourist to feel like a local. These tactics are labeled agent alignment, urban alchemy, and material action. These tactics take place within a borderzone, the liminal time-space between insider and outsider status. A successful guide facilitates the border crossing, allowing the tourist to transition from tourist to perceived ‘real Chicagoan.’ However, the unsuccessful guide forces tourists to exit the borderzone unchanged, still as tourists. These findings highlight the uniqueness of walking tourism as a niche tourism and wade into the conceptual milieu of ‘localism’ and ‘the local.’ KEYWORDS: Walking Tourism; Urban Tourism; Tour Guides; Localization; Interculturalism; Urban Alchemy; Agent Alignment; Chicago

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to Become a “Real Chicagoan” in No Time: The Promise and Pedagogy of Walking Tourism

Henry¹

2017

AJUR

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“…Using the body to create alternative narratives and meaning of the city is evident in Jonathan Wynn's work on urban tour guides in New York City (also see Bendiner‐Viani ). Wynn (, 150) adopts Jack Katz's term “urban alchemists,” defined as the “sometimes wild, sometimes even frantic, often ingeniously innovative effort to appropriate an almost magical kind of public good that could be taken to define cities.” Wynn addresses the ways that tour guides “magically” connect stories that exist in the interstitial space between fact and fiction to the neighborhoods they walk people through on foot. The tour guides/urban alchemists are not unlike flâneurs or Situationist drifters; all seek to create or uncover new ways to understand the urban environment through active physical engagement with it.…”

Section: Feeling the City Or Touchscapesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Being in the City: The Sociology of Urban Experiences

Borer

2013

Sociology Compass

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Though urban sociologists tend to study the growth and development of cities, there is a venerable yet often marginalized tradition that addresses the embodied experience of urban life. Studies of urban experiences have recently begun to flourish due, in part, to the rise of sensory scholarship. Recognizing the connections between urban experiences and sensory stimulations provides nuanced ways to explore the actions and interactions between individuals and their relationships to and with urban places. Relying on a diverse literature of recent studies that focus on cities as dense sensory environments, this article shows the significance of studying city life at the experiential and sensory levels. First, a few seminal early works are discussed, with specific emphasis on Georg Simmel. Then, each of the five bodily senses and their correlated sensescapes -seescapes, soundscapes, smellscapes, tastescapes, and touchscapes -are presented in order to show individuals and groups use their senses to experience and make sense of the city. The article concludes with a brief discussion of methods and few suggestions to encourage future analyses of the everyday embodied and emplaced practices and interpretations of being in the city.Most urban sociologists -as well as geographers, political scientists, economists, and scholars from equally important fields that contribute to the inter-and trans-disciplinary literature of "urban studies" -tend to study cities with a wide-angle lens, especially those studying globalization, global cities, and transnational urban networks. There is, however, a venerable yet often marginalized tradition that puts the experience of urban life at or near the forefront of analysis. Some of the first sociological studies, as well as literary depictions, of city life focused on the ways that budding industrialized cities affected the social psychological dynamics of urbanites (see Lees 1985;Strauss 1968). Despite a few notable exceptions, the actual experiences of being in the city -at the bodily, sensuous, or existential levels -have often been assumed rather than assessed through careful analysis and interpretation. This lacuna is shrinking; however, in large part because of the studies discussed herein.From the most mundane to the most spectacular, pure and unmediated experiences are difficult, if not impossible, to study empirically (see Davis 1997). One's narrative of their experience is always filtered through cultural expectations and norms of storytelling (Gubrium and Holstein, 2008). This should not halt the quest for understanding experiences in general and urban experience in particular. Stories are not any less real than the raw data of facts. "The factual accuracy of a story is often less important than the purpose of the story or the way that it is used" (Borer 2006b, 187). Fortunately, scholars have pushed forward, developing various ways to study social experiences without reducing them to the cognitive mechanisms and brain functions that can only be detected by MRIs and other sophi...

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“…Bu başlık altında değerlendirilen çalışmalar da temelde turistlerin tecrübeleri ile ilgilidir (Mackenzie ve Herr, 2013). Bunun yanında uluslararası literatür incelendiğinde Cohen (1985), Holloway (1981), Pond (1993), Ap & Wong (2001), Black ve Weiler (2005), Salazar (2005), Reisinger ve Steiner (2006), Wynn (2010), Mak vd. (2011), Pereira ve Mykletun (2012), Hallin ve Dobers (2012), Byron (2012), Overend (2012), Weiler ve Black (2015) gibi yazarların salt "turist rehberi" ve "turist rehberliği" ile ilgili konulara odaklandığı görülmektedir.…”

Section: Introductionunclassified

“…Academic studies into tourist guiding compared to the other fields of tourism are relatively fewer, and the ones published are from the points of tourist, not the tour guides (Mackenzie and Herr, 2013). Some examples of the studies from the perspective of tourist guides in the foreign literature are by Cohen (1985), Holloway (1981), Pond (1993), Ap and Wong (2001), Black and Weiler (2005), Salazar (2005), Reisinger and Steiner (2006), Wynn (2010), Mak vd. (2011), Pereira and Mykletun (2012), Hallin and Dobers (2012), Byron (2012), Overend (2012), Weiler and Black (2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mesleki Bağlılık: Turist Rehberleri Üzerine Bir İnceleme (Vocational Commitment: A Study into Tourist Guides)

Arslantürk¹

2016

isader

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ÖzetTurist rehberliği turizm sistemi içinde önemli bir yer tutmaktadır. Türkiye koşulları düşünüldüğü zaman 2012 yılında resmileşen meslek kanunundan dolayı yasal ve zorunlu bir unsuru haline gelmiş ve resmi olarak meslek olarak tanınmıştır. Ayrıca konumları gereği turistlerle yüz yüze bir etkileşim sağladığı için memnuniyet yaratmada ve turizm potansiyelini gerçekleştirmede turist rehberlerinin rolleri dikkate değer konumdadır. Turist rehberliğinin akademik anlamda turizm ile ilgili diğer çalışmalara oranla özellikle arz taraflı daha az incelenen bir konu olduğunu söylemek yanlış olmaz. Bu anlamda bu araştırma turist rehberlerinin mesleki bağlılıklarına odaklanmıştır ve iki değişken açısından mesleki bağlılıkları incelenmiştir. Araştırma sonuçlarına göre ikinci işte çalışma durumuna ve turist rehberliği eğitim durumuna göre mesleki bağlılık alt boyutlarında istatistiksel olarak anlamlı farklar bulunmuştur. Ayrıca, turist rehberliği mesleğinin özel durumu göz önüne alınarak ileride yapılacak çalışmalar için çeşitli önerilerde bulunulmuştur.

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City Tour Guides: Urban Alchemists at Work

Cited by 26 publications

References 26 publications

How to Become a “Real Chicagoan” in No Time: The Promise and Pedagogy of Walking Tourism

How to Become a “Real Chicagoan” in No Time: The Promise and Pedagogy of Walking Tourism

Being in the City: The Sociology of Urban Experiences

Mesleki Bağlılık: Turist Rehberleri Üzerine Bir İnceleme (Vocational Commitment: A Study into Tourist Guides)

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