Free guided tours: storytelling as a means of glocalizing urban places

ABSTRACT

This article poses the question of how storytelling takes place in free guided tours. It aims to explore guides’ contributions to the glocalization of urban places. Theoretically, the study departs from the concepts of glocalization, place, and storytelling. Empirically, it builds on data from Copenhagen, Berlin, Warsaw and Tallinn, collected by means of participant observations and document studies. Results show that storytelling in free guided tours is based on recognizable narratives from the twentieth century. These in turn, relate both to local urban and to national histories. Likewise, storytelling is influenced by global influences formed by free guided tours as an international business model. Global influences are embodied in the guides, whose biographies accentuate their international experience as travellers. Their guiding practices have a strong influence on the practice of history. They have the power to choose attractions, movements, and stories. In the end, new forms of guiding practices and storytelling emerge. Important factors for this are: the collaborative business model, internationally experienced guides, guests’ previous knowledge, and the cities’ local context. The practices combine local context and cosmopolitan culture and thereby contribute to the glocalization of urban places.

KEYWORDS:

• Free guided tours
• storytelling
• practice of history
• glocalization
• tourism geography

Introduction

In June 2018, a group of international tourists looks down from the old fortifications on the free state of Christiania, an alternative tourist site in Copenhagen. The tourists take part in a free walking tour of the district of Christianshavn. An Englishman in his thirties has guided them through the district, telling the history and stories of this colourful borough. Afterwards, he receives a voluntary tip from the participants. This event may represent the theme of this article. Place and history are a result of one interpretation thereof, besides many other. Tourism in general, and free guided tours in particular, act as hubs of interpretations, facilitated by storytelling. In addition, many tours are guided by individuals who have only recently moved to the city. Who is a local, able to tell local stories? And in which ways are global influences localized in stories told in guided tours?

Free guided tours are increasingly common in urban areas. They resemble ordinary tours, but with the difference that participants give tips instead of buying an official ticket. Other differences are the dependence on online marketplaces (del Pilar Leal Londoño & Medina, 2017), the possibility for virtually anyone to become a free guide (Koerts, 2017), the greater involvement of free guides in organization and marketing activities, and the ability to attract younger participants (Widtfeldt Meged & Zillinger, 2018). Free guided tours have gained popularity along with the massive entry of digitalization in our societies. Most current urban marketing channels are performed via digital platforms, which are increasingly international in scope (Widtfeldt Meged & Zillinger, 2018; Zillinger & Nilsson, 2019). The increasing variety of guided tours has gone alongside a general increase of urban tourism in Europe. Heeley (2011, p. 24) assumes that larger cities account for about 40 per cent of all incoming international tourists in Europe. He concludes that “cities in the early 21st century Europe are primary tourist destinations for both international and domestic visitors” (Heeley, 2011, p. 21).

Web-based platforms come in various forms. They allow consumers to share information, and as peer-to-peer platforms, they provide a market place for people to share services via virtual intermediaries. Therefore, these models are part of sharing economies (Gyimothy, 2017). As such, they can either be commercial or community based. Hall and Gössling (2019) distinguish between sharing and collaborative economies, by which sharing economies are strictly peer-to-peer, whereas collaborative economies also include business-to-peer relations. While the rhythm of walking and standing is not necessarily different from ordinary tours, free guides engage informally with the urban environment. Local guides literally share the knowledge of their home city to visitors (Zillinger & Nilsson, 2019). Following this, free guided tours are part of both the sharing and the collaborative economy.

Participating in a guided tour includes being presented to a selection of places and histories. In recent decades, public historical interest has been broadened to include modern and social history, including traumatic tourism (Bryon, 2012; Lennon & Foley, 2006; Mathisen, 2019; Willis, 2014). Places with significant events are by nature contested (Godis & Nilsson, 2018; Ladd, 1997). Guided tours are an under-researched factor in the transformation of stories about urban areas. While free guided tours are based on global organizational practices and homogenized concepts, the tours themselves are fundamentally local, since they take place in specific urban contexts. This process is understood in terms of glocalization (Salazar, 2005, 2006). Salazar (2005) argues that guides are key actors in the process of localizing, and simultaneously asks for grounded research to verify this statement. This is a request that we willingly accept.

The aim of this paper is to study how storytelling takes place in free guided tours. We focus on Copenhagen, Berlin, Warsaw and Tallinn. We start by analysing how guides are telling stories about chosen historical paths, which are by definition localized. Further, we ask whether, and in which ways, the guides themselves contribute to glocalization of urban places. This is done by extensive document analysis and by participant observations of free guided tours. Thereby, we aim to contribute to the understanding of how the meanings of urban places are re-negotiated as a consequence of the performance of collaborative economies in tourism.

Glocalization, place, and storytelling

The modern world has been characterized by ever-increasing flows of trans-border interaction, also known as internationalization. In the latest half-century, integration of economic activities has reached a qualitatively higher level, called globalization. Globalized production processes are constituted by a high degree of functional integration across borders, in turn causing even more interaction (Dicken, 2014). Transnationalism is another concept used to understand these processes. It refers to the “multiple ties and interactions linking people and institutions across the borders of nation-states” (Sirkeci, 2013, p. 2). Thereby, it refers to a myriad of cross-border networks, which build the social space where production processes and economic transactions actually take place. These social spaces are increasingly non-physical, not the least as a result of digitalization (Sirkeci, 2013). Similarly, concepts like transnational urbanism and trans-local geographies (Brickell & Datta, 2011; Smith, 2001) emphasize the networked character of this social space, linking actors and practices across borders and between communities, not the least in the context of migration. In this article, we link glocalization processes to guiding companies. These companies have activities in many countries that are built on transnational and/or trans-local networks, wherein the guides themselves move in transnational social contexts.

In relation to such mainly non-physical concepts, glocalization is a much more localized and materially concrete term. It describes how global structural forces intrude on and adjust to local circumstances following reconfigurations in international politics of scale (cf. Swyngedouw, 1997). This could be in the form of investment capital, incoming business models, or increasing flows of international tourists. Increasing flows of capital and people may cause spatial conflicts, which appear as conflicts over different kinds of urban resources such as housing or transport. The term glocalization is highlighting global structural change and concurrently acknowledging local contextualization and agency (Bauman, 1998, p. 41; Swyngedouw, 1997). In extension, it influences the interpretation of place, which adds subjectivity and agency to spatial analysis and thereby introduces both matter and meaning. By conceptually highlighting a place perspective, the human dimension is emphasized. Gren and Hallinn (2003) argue how the concept of place is used “to capture meaning, experience, intentionality” (2003, p. 138, author’s translation). In this context, it raises issues like: Who has the right to choose the spots to be presented in a city? Who has the right to define the stories being told? And, whose memories and histories are allowed to take place?

The sharing economy is part of glocalization, as it connects people from all over the world, and positions their actions in a local place. Guided tours, a local phenomenon that is simultaneously influenced by global developments and local context, contribute to influencing participants’ understanding of the place in the world (Black et al., 2019; Zillinger et al., 2012). With an increasing state of glocalization comes the parallel desire by many international tourists to capture local idiosyncrasies, to be immersed in place, and to look behind the public scenes, yearning for an authentic relationship with locals (Bryon, 2012). Such a process has lead destinations around the globe to adapt to the homogenizing culture of tourism, while at the same time trying to commodify local particularities (Salazar, 2006). A year before that publication, Salazar (2005) argued that tourism may turn both people and places into easily consumable attractions with a focus on streamlined versions of local culture. This leads to the question about what the term local actually means, and Salazar (2005) concludes that the local can be understood as a space that is populated by people with a particular sense of place (Salazar, 2005). Such a place is related both backwards and forwards in time. Likewise, Bunten (2015) studies the question of who is allowed to tell the indigenous story of a place. This question receives additional importance when local guides have lived in other places, before they move to the place where they are guiding. Guiding literature has maintained that guides who are presenting their own culture are attributed with authority (cf. Feldman & Skinner, 2018). We argue that the term local may have to be replaced with glocal, when guides have moved here lately, and when guiding companies are influenced by global business models.

In a similar vein, history is not the past, but rather our relation with the past in the present. In other words, history consists of our stories of the past, interpretations brought to us not only by scientific research and education, but also in the form of popular science, literary fiction, film, media, in tourist practices – and guided tours. The history of a place is narrated and performed during guided tours (Bryon, 2012; Mathisen, 2019). Thus, we argue that guiding is the practice of history taking place. In order to convey access to such places, guides use interpretative techniques to create connections that can be both cognitive and affective (Modlin et al., 2011). In this, guides are mediators aiding visitors to get under the skin of the places they visit, a clearly affective and emotional endeavour. Herein, storytelling plays a major role, as stories create meaning through contextualization and the embodiment of emotions. This is even more important when Internet access provides visitors with ubiquitous information about a place. We argue that the importance of storytelling increases in times when access to pure information is omnipresent. Our argument is supported by Feldman and Skinner (2018), who state that guides’ performance in situ provides participants with a sense of “being there” – something that a homepage cannot offer. Stories as such can be understood as experiences that are organized into a consistent unit and thereby stimulate people’s feelings and the intertwining of the past, present, and future. In this, they interconnect different stories and facts and thereby reproduce urban cultures and local histories (Mathisen, 2019; Wynn, 2005).

The request for stories has increased considerably, and guides play an ever-important role as mediators of meaning in this process (Bryon, 2012; Dekel, 2018; Feldman & Skinner, 2018). Telling a story to participants on a guided tour automatically means that guides make a selection and impart how they understand and interpret the city. This way of understanding a guided tour is closely related to the concept of place that in turn is mentally, socially and culturally negotiated. Both places and guided tours are created in interaction between practice and context. Such questions are in fact not new, but have been touched upon in the seminal works on tour guiding by Holloway (1981), Pond (1993), and Cohen (1995), to name a few. The importance of storytelling and content was emphasized by Hallin and Dobers (2012) who explored the relation between places and their representations. They concluded that all guided tours are political, dependent on how the stories are told. In relation to individual places, different political discourses unfold. In this process, the tour builds on the tourists’, often diverse, associations to the place. In a similar vein, Widtfeldt Meged (2010) found out that guides use intercultural strategies in presenting the tensions between culture of the place displayed, and the culture of the participants. Hereby, they play on participants’ preconceptions. As in any process of interpretation, the problem for the guides is to find out which previous knowledge and associations to relate to. In order to gain attention from a wide range of guests, stories are likely to build on well-known historic events and persons, or on internationally known fictional figures.

The framing of places can be done in different ways and Bryon (2012) has identified four ways of storytelling. In his taxonomy, he identifies what he calls official, alternative, entrepreneurial and relational guides. Official guides possess a certificate approved by government and are the formal actors in the industry, concerned about displaying a positive image of their destination. In order to construct appealing tours, these guides select places and objects to frame cities as attractive places (cf. Amin & Thrift, 2002). Alternative guides use tours to send out their message to a larger group of people, and to put themselves on the map. They are often rooted in cultural associations or action groups, and aim to emancipate tourists based on their strong emotions for the city in which they work. In our empirical material, Alternative tours Berlin stands out as a typical example of this category. The main aim of entrepreneurial guides is to earn profit, often targeting groups of foreign tourists; the stories told aim at being entertaining and pleasant. They would mix edutainment with pieces of information. Finally, relational guides are less structured and more dependent on online networks than the other three forms. They pay much attention to local and personal aspects, and “[g]locality seems to be the main characteristics of this type of guides, where showing the ‘real’ tourist destination and engaging in meaningful intercultural encounters is essential” (Bryon, 2012, p. 39). In general, the art of reproduction seems to increasingly depend on the interlinking of entertaining and educational forms of presentation, in which the personal touch in an essential ingredient (cf. Wynn, 2005). The stories aim at showing daily life and authenticity, and the choice is dependent on the guides’ personal interests. While these four guide types are all different, Bryon (2012) points out that the history of the place visited is important to all of them.

Methods

Free guided tours in four Northern European capitals: Berlin, Copenhagen, Tallinn, and Warsaw are studied, all of them heavily influenced by globalization. The cities differ in size and in visiting numbers. Berlin and Copenhagen are well established tourist destinations, whereas Warsaw and Tallinn are relative international newcomers. All of them however have faced a fast increase in visiting numbers during the latest decades. Today, the tourism industry is making major economic and cultural impacts in all four city centres. Tallinn’s role is further emphasized being a cruise destination. In 2018, 339 cruise ships brought 635,000 visitors right into the city centre (Port of Tallinn, 2019). Importantly for this paper, the modern history of the four cities also shows substantial differences. Copenhagen generally represents a relatively stable Nordic development path. Berlin has been the epicentre of twentieth century World history, leaving highly contested marks in the cityscape. Warsaw and Tallinn inherit lengthy memories of hardships connected to World War 2 and communist dictatorship. Warsaw suffered more severely from World War 2 than most other cities. Tallinn’s history is closely connected to Soviet occupation and the struggle for national independence. Together, the selected cities represent an interesting mix of urban characteristics and historic experiences. In addition, the cities and their histories are well known to the authors, who have done observations here on several occasions. In this relation, it needs to be emphasized that the aim of this study is not to compare the cities. Rather, examples from the cities are used to highlight different perspectives and aspects of similar processes.

In order to study glocalization by means of storytelling in free guided tours, document studies and participant observations were done. The document study entailed all documents available within the four studied cities. In this, it resembled a trawling procedure. In the homepage review, we searched for signals of glocalization presented by the naming of places and mobilities. In other words, we searched for presentations of geographical information. We also searched for indications on the choice of places, facts and histories. During observations of guided tours we focussed on the selection of places. We excluded places where history is on display in its own right, such as historical museums. This left us with three main place categories: 1. Monumental and prominent places with important symbolic meanings, such as Brandenburger Tor in Berlin; 2. Places which embody particular, often traumatic historic events, such as the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto; 3. Historical districts in a current process of social transformation, where stories of social struggle and poverty are told alongside the alternative and hip. Examples of such districts are Vesterbro and Christianshavn in Copenhagen. Our analysis is based on the stories told by the guides during the tours, and the description of these places in the analysed documents.

Only tours based on individual participation are included, not tours conducted in cooperation with tour operators or cruise lines. As we were open to results we found in the empirical data, we did not aim at conducting a systematic comparison between different categories of guiding practices. Initially, websites marketing guided tours were identified using the following terms: guided tours, walking tours, free tours, free guided tours, and bike tours. There were considerable overlaps suggesting a very good coverage, with the unlikely exception of tours not marketed digitally. In total, 175 guided tours were identified, of which 122 were walking tours and 49 were conducted on bicycle. Out of this sample, 37 (21 per cent) were labelled as free guided tours based on terms like: free, tip-based, or voluntary fee. All free guided tours were walking tours, there were no free bicycle tours in the sample. The strategy resulted in a sample of homepages of 17 guiding firms that were analysed by content analysis. This resulted in the study of 37 tours and 107 guide presentations (Table 1). Unnecessary to say, this is a huge sample of documents. The desktop study was complemented with onsite visits to Tallinn and Warsaw and participatory observations in Copenhagen (six in 2016–2018) and Berlin (eight in 2005–2019).

Table 1. Free guided tours studied (see Appendix 1 for list of websites).

	Guiding firms	Free guided tours	Guide presentations
Berlin	6	12	64
Copenhagen	3	5	20
Tallinn	5	7	12
Warszawa	3	13	11
Sum	17	37	107

The material from the websites was categorized into (a) routes and locations, (b) descriptions of the place and its history, and (c) guide presentations. The character of the guided tours is explained in the beginning of the next section. As the homepages are public documents, there are no major ethical hindrances to study them in a project like this. In the moments of observations, the authors presented themselves as tourists with a special interest in guided tours as such, including their university affiliation. Only in three cases, this was not possible as the researchers felt it disturbed the guiding activity that had a non-predicted flying start. In the analysis, all guides are anonymized; Swedish names are used as alter egos.

Results: guides as mediators of contested urban places

There is a large variety of firms doing free guided tours, and this points to the impression that guided tours constitute good business for the operators. Several of them have establishments in a large number of cities. For example, Sandeman operates 20 cities in Europe, the Middle East and the USA, among them Berlin and Copenhagen (Sandeman, 2019). The selected organizations offer two kinds of tours. The first ones have an introductory thematic appeal, such as “Old Town Walkabout” or “Free Tour of Copenhagen”. These tours aim at giving an overview of the most well-known central places: the old towns of Warsaw and Tallinn, Brandenburger Tor and Unter den Linden in Berlin, and the royal palaces of Copenhagen. There are also tours targeting special interest groups, such as “Berlin Wall Tour” or “Jewish Warsaw”. Such tours normally have a fixed price that is usually only slightly higher than a recommended tip on a free guided tour (€ 10–20). They resemble ordinary tours by other organizations (Widtfeldt Meged & Zillinger, 2018).

Free guided tours apparently have to present themselves as an alternative to traditional (official) guiding, which is described as boring. The free guides need to be entertaining, otherwise they will not get paid. It remains unclear what they mean by not being boring, but traditional guiding is apparently seen as something old-fashioned. It is presumed to be a regulated business conducted by certified guides in uniforms who follow scripted instructions. Interestingly, Polish free guides make a point of their guides being certified (Orange Umbrella Tours, 2019). This is likely related to the Polish tradition where licensed guides are well educated, particularly in history. The importance of history in Poland is reflected in numerous recent controversies, for instance regarding how World War 2 is explained in museums (Michalska, 2017). There is thus an interesting blurring of categories, pointing at the importance of local and national contexts. However, the common story is that free guided tours are different, and that they (sometimes inexplicitly) target young people: “Things are changing: a new generation of travellers tour, explore, and discover differently” (Generation Tours, 2019). In this way, it is as much a matter of style as of content.

Portraits of individual guides tell a similar story; the guides’ personalities and creative skills are highlighted. A large number of guides has cultural professions alongside their guiding. As they are described as well travelled, their cosmopolitanism is emphasized: “Sven is a global nomad and living cultural melting pot” (Sandeman, 2019). Free guided tours, as part of the collaborative economy, thus represent new ways of organizing guided tours. They build on global innovations in organization, business models, and guiding practices. As will be further developed below, guides themselves often embody a cosmopolitan culture through their personal heritage and/or international travel experiences. When moving from place to place and adopting to local practices, they partly act within trans-national social networks. In this highly internationalized context, the stories told during free guided tours take place where local and national contents meet a globalized form of performance. It is in this context, when cosmopolitan business models and global guides frame their stories in conditions enclosed by global visitors, that an adaption to practices of glocalization take place. In this section, the globalizing process is analysed through the urban histories told during free guided tours, and the guides’ roles as mediators of glocalization.

Guides as mediators of local histories

All four capitals have long and dramatic histories. Besides comprehensive tours, they all provide tours that are thematically based in twentieth century history. Examples for this are “Free Communist Tallinn Walking Tour”, “Jewish Warsaw”, and “Third Reich Tour”. Online, the “Original Berlin Wall Tour” is presented as a walk to the “many sections and visible reminders of this famous political catastrophe” (Original Europe Tours, 2019). This quote insistently represents the numerous choices being made: Organizations choose clearly visible and famous representations of the past, which enable the vibrant telling of their historic stories.

In Warsaw and Berlin, the Second World War is central to the history of the cities, and the scars of war are still visible. Interestingly, the presentation of war in all guided tours means a concentration on World War 2, and nothing else. Other wars, such as World War 1 or the Danish-German wars, are neither mentioned in the online documents nor during the observations. In Berlin, the centre of Nazi power is visited along with places associated with memories of persecution and resistance. The selection includes places such as Hitler’s bunker, the ministry of the Third Reich air force, and the Holocaust monument. Many dramatic events during war are related to current occurrences in the cityscape, such as describing the place under which the Führerbunker was located as “the most visited parking lot in the world” (guide Anna during a tour in February 2019, author’s translation). Hitler himself is presented as a man occupied with trying to cope with his growing drug addiction and successional moods, which impeded on his staff and associates. This presentation of Hitler builds on popular images of him as a crazy ruler. The traumatic aspects are less suited for in-place storytelling, thereby making Hitler insignificant in the present. Metaphorically, this resembles a parking lot for troubled parts of history.

In the Warsaw tours, the destruction of the city during the war is emphasized together with memories of the two major uprisings of 1943 and 1944. Modern Warsaw is described as Phoenix, the mythological bird rising from the dead (Free Walkative Tours, 2019). Thereby, the capital city also represents Poland as a nation. These are uncontroversial stories. The tour guides intertwine selected places that make up a simple story understandable for an international audience. It is relatively easy to identify with the good and the evil sides of history, Nazi occupiers versus courageous Poles and persecuted Jews. One of two free guided tours of Jewish Warsaw also follow an internationally known script. It moves around the Ghetto and tell the story of the Holocaust and the 1943 uprising by showing places like the Pawiak prison and the “Umschlagsplatz” (reloading site) where Jews were selected for transportation to their deaths. The other one has its focus on Jewish Warsaw during the pre-war period, when the city was one of the centres of Jewish civilization. By holding on to the history of the living, that guided tour builds a bridge to contemporary Jewish life in Warsaw (Free Walkative Tours, 2019; Orange Umbrella Tours, 2019). That particular tour points at an interesting potential of free guided tour as a means of conveying lesser known stories of a city’s history, and thereby making it more complex and interesting.

In contrast, Copenhagen was physically untouched by World War Two. Very few really dramatic events have taken place in the city’s history since the Napoleonic wars. The storytelling of Copenhagen, as it is presented in the free guided tours, concentrates on traditional tourist attractions like the royal palaces, the parliament, the colourful old harbour, and the picturesque city centre. These tours build on the image of “Wonderful Copenhagen” as a fairy-tale city, known from the stories of H. C. Andersen. Well-known places are blended with guides’ stories that build on their own experiences in, and their personal attitudes towards, the selected places. In Copenhagen, even the alternative tours become cosy: Tours to the former working class districts of Vesterbro and Christianshavn focus on their transformation from socially problematic areas to “super hip”. Each district “has a fascinating history bound together by their vibrant diversity and un-compromising counter-culture” (Sandeman, 2019). Interestingly, both the alternative tours that visit Christianshavn advertise the alternative community Christiania as a main attraction, they even use photographs of it on their homepages. However, they tend to forget to tell their guests that their tours are not allowed into this self-proclaimed free-state. Christiania manages its own guided tours in order to be able to tell their own story and to keep profits in the community. Ironically, Christiania tours become the local alternative to free guided tours, thereby contesting issues related to alternative localhood.

More recent history is presented by the Cold War tours in Tallinn, Warsaw and Berlin. In Berlin, the Wall acts as the perfect artefact that symbolizes the scar between East and West Germany at that time. In the free guided tours with this theme, the Cold War and GDR become parts of the same story, focused mainly on the Memory of the Berlin Wall and places related to border crossings and escape, such as Brandenburger Tor, Tränenpalast, Checkpoint Charlie and a part of the wall located at Bernauer Strasse. These places are not randomly chosen, together they constitute a general and easily accessible piece of history that suits neatly into guides’ stories. The same goes for the stories told. Erich Honecker’s famous quote “Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu bauen!” (transl. No one intends to build a wall!) is taken up as a means to explain the (lack of) political dialogue between East and West in the 1960s.

Tränenpalast, the Palace of Tears, is located at one of the former border crossings, Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, where families would be separated or re-united, which explains its name. Based on its history, this is one of Berlin’s contested places. Today, Tränenpalast is a small museum free of charge. It is included as a stopover during the three-hour tour “Red Berlin”. During our visit, three free guided groups were at the small museum simultaneously, it was crowded (observation February 2019). It is a place in which the daily lives of the citizens in divided Berlin becomes palpable. This primarily takes place through stories built on emotions. Note that while the museum tells the story of people suffering, the guide bases his storytelling on a mix of sorrow and happiness, such as vividly describing moving scenes when families were re-united here at Christmas. Historical facts act as a canvas upon which guides express individual life stories. Hereby, the guides develop meaningful relationships between their often international participants and the history of this particular place. By means of these relationships, visitors are enabled to understand the former border as a multifaceted place in which different discourses exist in parallel.

As parts of living memory, significant places from the Cold War may be contested today. The most prominent recent example is the Soviet bronze soldier in Tallinn, visited on a free communist walking tour (Estadventures, 2019). As a commemoration of Soviet liberation of Estonia, alternatively the beginning of half a century of brutal occupation, the soldier statue symbolizes two antagonistic versions of Estonian history. When it was moved from central Tallinn to a cemetery in the outskirts in 2007, there were protests from Russia and from Russian Estonians (Kniivilä, 2016). By including the statue in a guided tour, a relevant contemporary issue is addressed. By telling the stories of its meaning for different groups of people, this particular history brings the past into the present, possibly opening the participants’ eyes for the conflicting claims of the place. Contrary to many other stories present in guided tours, it does not build on anything that is widely known outside Estonia itself. Thereby, guided tours that tell stories and show places like the Soviet bronze soldier potentially become truly educational to foreign audiences.

In the Cold War tours, it emerges that visitors not only consume the city, but that they simultaneously participate in its construction, as they inhabit selected places, ask questions, show interest, inflate streets and museums, and relate the places to their own experiences (cf. Hallin & Dobers, 2012). Obviously, the organizers choose similar places as stopovers during their tours (document study, observations). According to a Berlin guide, the aim is to stop at highly emblematic places that are well known to the plethora of visitors (observation February 2019) and that potentially arouse emotions quickly. This is sometimes done with a sense of humour, such as when talking about the famous Adlon Hotel located beside Brandenburger Tor. The fact that the building burnt down to the ground during the end of World War 2 is described as: “The Adlon hotel survived two world wars, but not a Soviet party” (guide Anna in February 2019, author’s translation). In Europe, millions of people have family histories where these events play an important part. It might be stories of war, resistance, separation or escape. This way, guided tours become a form of existential practice of history (cf. Karlsson, 1999) in which the stories directly relate to personal experiences of the past. In the passion of the stories, and the fact that the stories make visible the daily life and struggle of people during the Cold War, this resembles what Bryon (2012) calls the relational guide that look for authentically local and backstage places.

These examples suggest that free guided tours represent different forms of historical storytelling. Free guided tours perform historical stories in the form of infotainment, suggesting that guiding is as much about entertainment as it is a matter of telling a (hi-)story. There are however interesting differences between the cities related to particularities of their respective history, and the level of knowledge about them. The stories told about Warsaw and Tallinn lean more on the educational content, aiming at telling the stories of their cities and nations to foreigners with few preconceptions of the place. This study also shows that recognitions and emotions are two vital elements in engaging the tour participants, and making them understand and engage in the stories. These elements seem primarily to build on international influences on guiding practices, and on relations to internationally well-known narratives of history.

Guides as mediators of glocalization

Free guided tour organizations take pride in their guides, and this is shown by an extensive presentation of the individuals on the organizations’ homepages. The concept of place, both in relation to other places, and to different geographical scales, plays a major role when guides display who they are. The concept of glocalization is almost omnipresent. “We work with superb local guides in some of the world’s best cities” (Sandeman, 2019) it says, thereby pointing at the insistent amalgamation of major and minor geographical scales that together produce the concept of free guided tours. By combining a selection of global and local artefacts and stories, guides are continuously re-producing urban histories and cultures. For example, tours of the Kreuzberg district in Berlin combine the display of contemporary graffiti, street art, and independent music with stories of student protests in the 1960’s and of the activities of the Rote Armee Fraction (Alternative Tours Berlin, 2019). On the webpage, the RAF is called the “Baader-Meinhof gang”, giving them a somewhat romantic aura.

Being local is considered an asset when working as a tour guide. It is equated to having better knowledge and more personal experience to draw from. Accordingly, many guides are presented as locals on the webpages even if it is clear that they may not have lived in their current city a very long time. Accordingly we need to ask what it means to be local. In his seminal publication on guided tours and glocalization, Salazar (2005) identifies the local not only as a spatially limited locality, but likewise as “a space inhabited by people who have a particular sense of place, a specific way of life, and a certain ethos and worldview” (Salazar, 2005, p. 629). Locality is presented as a quality on a number of webpages, for instance “[O]ur tour guides are all top-quality, professional locals with in-depth historical knowledge” (Generation Tours, 2019). Localness is described in different ways when it comes to the presentation of guides, which will be shown in the empirical results hereafter.

In Tallinn and Warsaw, the impact of global influences on the local is quite limited. For Tallinn, all guides are Estonians except for two foreigners who have lived in the country more than seven years. The same is true for the Warsaw guides; they are all Polish. For one of the free guiding firms, Free Walkative Tours, the issue of Polish-ness is important. While the homepage promotes Polish cuisine, it renounces “expensive tours and pubs for foreigners” (Free Walkative Tours, 2019). By that, they take a deliberate stand against some of the other guiding firms. They are also part of a foundation, whose goals are to support European integration, promote Poland abroad, and to work for “maintaining and disseminating national traditions and Polish culture” (Free Walkative Tours, 2019). Thus, in Estonia and Poland, localness is interpreted as a situation without major foreign influences and, more importantly, with an emphasis on the positive value of having spent one’s life in one place: Cecilia “is a true girl of Tallinn, having grown up in a Soviet block locally [… , she] has no shortage of movie facts to share about Tallinn and Estonia, [… , like] how Tallinn harbour featured in Tarkovsky’s Stalker” (Estadventures, 2019).

When it comes to the national origin of the tour guides, the contrast between Tallinn/Warsaw and Berlin could hardly be bigger. Out of 64 Berlin guides portrayed on their respective firms’ webpages, 42 guides come from an English speaking country, seven are Germans (one originally from Berlin) and the remaining 14 have come from other parts of the world, or have unrevealed backgrounds. In Copenhagen, there is an even balance between Danes (9) and foreigners (11). The guides’ personal presentations on the homepages are full of honour to different places in the world, and to their own mobility. In Jonasson and Scherle’s (2012) words, the guides are operating as cosmopolitans with their feet in more than one culture. On the other hand, it is evident from the presentations that a large number of these guides move in a very specific culture. This is a culture of ex-pats in which English is spoken, that might be viewed as a bubble of cosmopolitan non-space, possibly with limited number of relations to the native population. Thereby, the guides themselves impersonate the inherent contradictions of glocalization.

Presentations enclose the guides’ love for travelling, and tell stories of how they gave up places in rural landscapes in favour of the melting pot Berlin, the “most exciting city in the world” (Rune, Sandeman, 2019), to state one of many quotes on the tribute to this place. The stories usually go like this: The guides have travelled dozens of places, and often there is a clear positioning, where rural places are valued less favourably than urban ones. For example, Klara was born “in the middle of nowhere” and still, after moving around through most of her life, she “gets bored”. As Eivor tried to “quickly escape the endless panorama of cabbages” she travelled the world for a while; now “Berlin is doing pretty well keeping her attention” (Sandeman). The stories are often combined with the guides’ surprise that Berlin could keep their attention for long, as in the following example. “He planned to visit Berlin for three days but fell in (unconsummated) love with the place and actually never left” (Sandeman). Such stories are often combined with individuals’ statements on finally finding their home in the world: Bengt came to Berlin and “can now call it home”, Berit “made Berlin her home”, and Ulla “found [herself] in Berlin and fell in love with the city” (Original Europe Tours).

The density of such quotes demonstrates the high status that is associated with mobility as such (cf. Gössling & Nilsson, 2010), in particular to urban places. It is in the urban that the local and the global meet and together embody developments of glocalization. Cities are often centres of arts, music and other creative industries. They attract people who wish to take part in these activities, they are often young and well educated (cf. Florida, 2005). For example, many foreign born guides are deeply involved in music, arts and other parts of the creative scene. Again, the above results suggest that we need to question the meaning of being local. Local is when a person has a close connection to the place. This is not necessarily a matter of birth or personal heritage. Localness is also to be understood in terms of involvement in the locality, and thereby chosen. The local is also where forces of cosmopolitan diversity meet with the homogenizing forces of globalization – the local is where glocalization takes place.

Conclusions

This article has posed the question of how storytelling takes place in free guided tours. It aims to explore guides’ contribution to the glocalization of urban places. Theoretically, the study departs from the three concepts of glocalization, place, and storytelling. Empirically, it builds on data from four Northern European capitals, collected by means of participant observations and document studies. The overriding results show that storytelling in free guided tours is based on recognizable narratives from the twentieth century. These in turn, relate both to local urban and national histories, and to global influences formed by free guided tours as an international business model. The global influences are also embodied in the guides and their guiding practices.

The process of glocalization takes place as stories of local history are conveyed to global visitors. Mediation is based on stories that are easily accessible, thus beforehand influenced by what global visitors have shown to be interested in. The guides play on both recognition and emotion in their stories, which leads to both cognitive and affective connections between guides and participants, and between visitors and the local place. This comes as no surprise, because free guides are dependent on large numbers of interested participants, who stay on during the whole tour and give tips in the end. Accordingly, participants on free guided tours affect urban space, as they walk through it, ask questions, and affect the urban landscape by their sheer presence. Indirectly, they also shape space in their existence as global visitors, as the routes, and the selection of stories, are adapted to them.

Guiding, as in free guided tours, has a strong influence on the practice of history. Guiding companies, and guides themselves, have the power to choose attractions, movements, and stories. In their biographies, guides accentuate their international experience as travellers. In this, guides themselves contribute to the glocalization of urban places. Based on their international background, they experience and subsequently contribute to the reconstruction of the urban image, which doesn’t necessarily resemble the identity of the “native” locals. Even though both places and guides are distinct, the concept of free guided tours still concludes with the glocalized homogenization of urbanity. Accordingly, sharing economy contributes to glocalization. The structure of free guided tours itself reinforces the local – global divide. At the same time, it is building a bridge between local and global structures. In this way it is shaping something new: the glocal. By telling many stories, situated within parallel global discourses, guided tours are contributing to urban contestation in places where this is demanded.

The glocality of the chosen places, and the storytelling thereon, is further strengthened by the large mobility capital of the guides who walk the tours, as in the cases of Copenhagen and Berlin. In Warsaw and Tallinn, global values and influences are less pronounced compared to local and national characteristics. Thus, we can only partly agree with Jonasson and Scherle’s (2012) expression on cosmopolitans with their feet in more than one culture. The same goes for our results in relation to Bryon (2012), describing his category of relational guides as “global minds” (Bryon, 2012, p. 38). This empirical study confirms the existence of such a category in Copenhagen and Berlin. Therefore, we argue that glocalization may partly describe the intrusion of global structural forces on local circumstances. Consequently, free guided tours may be a driver of a homogenizing culture of tourism (cf. Salazar, 2006), but we cannot presume this for all places. The guides are key players in this, as they can both sustain and dispute controversial perspectives. They do this on a local urban scale, but influences are global – either by guides’ global experience, by visitors’ geographical backgrounds, or by guiding firms’ increasingly global tendencies.

To summarize, we have found strong tendencies of glocalization, but these are embodied in different ways. We again assert that place matters, in that it imparts on the prerequisites for human agency. Guides act as key actors in the process of localizing stories, and thus contribute to the glocalization of urban places. The contribution of this article lies in the analysis of what such a process may look like. As the overriding result is that place is an important influence in this, we ask for more empirical studies that take the theoretical departure of place into account.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Formas, the Swedish research council for sustainable development [grant number project 2018-02238.].

Appendix 1. Homepages of free guiding tour firms investigated.

Table

Tallinn
Free tours in Tallinn	www.freetours.com
Estadventures	www.estadventures.ee
Hidden Tallinn	www.hiddentallinn.com
Riina	www.fretours.com
Epic bar crawl	www.pubcrawltallinn.com
Warsaw
Free walkative tours	www.freewalkativetours.com
Orange umbrella free tour Warsaw	www.orangeumbrella.pl
Free tours	www.freetours.com
Berlin
Civitatis	www.civitatis.com
Sandeman	www.neweuropetours.eu
Original Europe tours	www.originalberlintours.com
Free tours in Berlin	www.freetours.com
Generation tours	www.generationtours.com
Alternative Berlin tours	www.alternativeberlin.com
Brewer’s Berlin tour	www.brewersberlintours.com
Copenhagen
Copenhagen free walking tours	www.copenhagenfreewalkingtours.dk
Sandeman	www.neweuropetours.eu
Free tours	www.freetours.com