Borrowed production: spatial processes of urban waterfront tourism in Guangzhou

ABSTRACT

Urban waterfronts are time-space constructions encompassing various social relationships and functions. They become tourism spaces in the context of particular interactions among multiple stakeholders, including local governments and tourism enterprises. Yet the processes for and approaches to transforming urban waterfronts into tourism spaces remain under-researched. Based on the lens of Lefebvre’s space production theory, this research explores how tourism spaces are generated in the waterfront area of Pearl River in Guangzhou that originally featured no tourism attributes. The city government has conceived the shifting representations of space for the Pearl River waterfront over time including commercial space, scenery space, and a showcase of a prosperous city image, but neglected tourism development. Cruise companies are the key entity facilitating the spatial processes of the Pearl River Tour. The approach to space production presents itself as a means of ‘borrowed production,’ where cruise companies produce tourism spaces by embedding themselves into government plans and flexibly utilizing public projects that significantly improve waterfront infrastructure and views. This study contributes to the literature on tourism space production by clarifying the negotiating relationship between urban politics and tourism enterprises.

KEYWORDS:

• Cruise tourism
• urban tourism
• tourism space
• Lefebvre

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Shameen was a territory leased by Britain and France (1861–1949), where more than 150 European-style buildings were located. Shameen was next to Bai’e Pond, the starting point of the Pearl River tour.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.42001165), and Hunan Education Department Scientific Research Project (No.19B336).

Notes on contributors

Gouxiong Yu

Gouxiong Yu is an assistant professor at School of Business Administration, Guangdong University of Finance. His research interests include tourism space production and urban night tourism development. He has published more than 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and is the principal investigator of two research projects.

Shuru Zhong

Shuru Zhong is a postdoctoral fellow in School of Tourism Management, Sun Yat-sen University. She has authored publications in sustainable food systems, cuisine tourism and urban governance.