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Abstract
Under the label of ‘shopping tour’, tour operators currently offer package tours which aim to highlight for the visitor the commercial appeal of a particular location. A variety of destinations are suitable for tours with such a label. In this context, certain ‘shopping tourism’ destinations simply consist of areas where the concentration of corporation-led retail venues is high. The Novese Area, in the northwest of Italy, has been transforming into such a destination since the opening of the Serravalle Designer Outlet, an outlet ‘village’ which opened in 2000. This paper reports on original research aimed at enquiring about shifts in the representation of the landscape of this area as it is shown in the discourses of local political and business actors. It is argued that this case study portrays a rather unique case of late western urban regeneration practice through which a formal industrial area is turned into a consumption site suitable for tourism. Here, the repositioning process not only influences local planning policies, but feeds – and is fed by – a simultaneous process of consumption normalization.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their precious comments and helpful suggestions. I am grateful to Nora Mahony and Sarah Hudson for the linguistic revision of this paper, and to Maroš Krivý for graphics help. Particular thanks are due to my Ph.D. supervisor, Prof. Giampaolo Nuvolati, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy.
Notes
See also www.dubaishoppingfestival.com (13 May 2010).
See also www.shoppingbyparis.com (13 May 2010).
This includes both day-trippers and visitors staying overnight, by-passing the WTO definition of a ‘tourist’. ‘Tourists’ is more frequently used in this paper with reference to the meaning the actors attribute to their practice (Rabbiosi, 2009). Likewise, ‘tourism’ is used with reference to the infrastructure it involves.
Shopping malls are listed as tourist attractions specifically in the English-speaking world. For a European case, consider for instance the Bicester Visitor Centre, located at Bicester Village (an outlet village), which has won a national award for the most visited tourist information centre in southern England. See http://www.bicester.gov.uk/Core/BicesterTownCouncil/UserFiles/Files/TownGuide/bicestervillagecommunitypartnership.pdf
See 4. European Factory Outlet Center Report (Falk, 2009), or the International Council for Shopping Centers definitions, www.icsc.org, for an insight into different ways to categorize shopping malls.
A direct translation of the Italian would be ‘luxury without limits’, or ‘luxury without scrimping’, but it is worth noting that the slogan differs slightly in other languages: ‘Indulge yourself in a guilt-free shopping tour’ in the English version, and ‘Faire des folies devient raisonnable’ (‘extravagance becomes reasonable’) in French.
No legal definition exists. Beyond sharing the pricing policy, factory outlet villages are considered to be those malls with a surface of 10,000 mFootnote2 or more and an ‘open air’ structure.
Paradoxically, the poem considers the emptiness of life, and especially how the joy and illusion of expectation must come to an unsatisfactory end when Saturday evening draws to a close. The same is sometimes true at the end of a day out at an outlet mall.
The data used in this article have been collected as part of a PhD research work on the development of factory outlet villages in Italy. The research was based on qualitative methods and much of the knowledge in this article is based on field visits, observations, public statements of the key actors involved in the local regeneration process or primary interviews recorded by the author. In this last case, interviews focused on the relationship between public actors and McArthur Glen and had an average length of a couple of hours. All the materials were collected in Italian. All the translations are the author's.
Data source: Profilo storico di un'area industriale. Media Valle Scrivia-Piana di Novi Citation(2005); Saluti dal novecento. Arquata, Serravalle, Gavi, Val Lemme e Val Borbera. Cento anni di storia e cartoline Citation(2003) and Ciarlo and Sassi Citation(1998). I also refer to historical sources mainly collected on-site, since the publications are quite scarce.
http://www.mcarthurglen.it/serravalle/about/style.php (2 February 2009).
Municipalities of Arquata Scrivia, Basaluzzo, Bosco Marengo, Cassano Spinola, Fresonara, Gavi, Pasturana, Pozzolo Formigaro, Serravalle Scrivia and Tassarolo. Another 31 municipalities have expressed an interest in becoming part of the district, most of them representing villages with no existing retail or service activity.
www.distrettonovese.it (13 May 2010).
Parma, one of the Italians art cities, is 160 km far from Serravalle Scrivia, 1:40 h by car. Nevertheless, the city is only 30 km far and a 30 min drive from the direct competitor of the SDO, Fidenza Village Outlet opened in 2003.
