Counter Tourism The Handbook

<p>For anyone who's ever been a tourist Counter-Tourism is an invitation to completely transform our experience of the heritage-tourism industry and its many sites (castles National Trust properties etc.). It provides a set of powerful lenses designed to bend a whole world of conventional tourism into a spiral of new perspectives and experiences. Beneath those simple sounding stories in the Visitor Guide and behind the locked gates marked PRIVATE in heritage sites there lies a multitude of inconvenient stories hilarities wonders absurdities extremes and entertaining outrages. When Counter-Tourism opens the doors tourism becomes a funny shocking revealing subversive and life-changing experience rather than a deferential procession through the unrevealing stately homes of Heritage plc. Counter-Tourism upsets the sanitising efforts of the heritage industry. Counter-tourism is also a journey of mini-pilgrimages challenges and pleasures. It celebrates the multiplicities of meanings in every heritage venue and upsets all the heritage industry's attempts at meaning-control and homogenisation. With hundreds more tactics and images philosophical diversions and asides the Handbook is for anyone who wants to explore the ideas of counter-tourism in more depth. Part 2 of the Handbook has ideas on how to extend the tactics described in Part 1 into interventions that can be planned and performed in heritage sites. And Part 3 goes on to suggest open 'infiltrations' that can be used by artists performers radical tourists and even heritage site managers themselves to reinvent their own sites. Alongside this there's a photo-essay on using the tactics and a full bibliography.</p>