Tourism and Architectural Simulacra questions and rethinks the different environments constructed or adapted both for and by tourism exploring the relationship between the architectural inspiration and its reproduction within the tourist bubble.

Nelson Graburn was educated at Cambridge (1958), McGill (1960), and Chicago (PhD, 1963). He has taught at UC Berkeley for 54 years and served as Curator of the Hearst Museum and chair of Tourism Studies. He also taught in Canada, France, UK, Japan, and Brazil and China, and researched Canadian Inuit (1959-2014) Japan (since 1974) and China (since 1991). His work includes Ethnic and Tourist Arts (1976), Japanese Domestic Tourism (1983), Anthropology of Tourism (1983), Multiculturalism in the New Japan (2008), Anthropology in the Age of Tourism (2009), Tourism and Glocalization (2010), Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches (2014), Tourism Imaginaries at the Disciplinary Crossroads (2016), Tourism in (Post)Socialist Eastern Europe (2017), and Cultural Tourism Movements (2018).

Maria Gravari-Barbas has a degree in Architecture and Urban Design (University of Athens, 1985) and a PhD in Geography and Planning (Paris IV - Sorbonne, 1991). She was Fellow at the Urban Program of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA (1990). She is the director of the EIREST, a multidisciplinary research team dedicated to tourism studies, with main focus on cultural heritage, development, and urban-tourism evolutions. From 2008 to 2017 she was the director of the Institute for Research and High Studies on Tourism (Institut de Recherches et d'Etudes Supérieures du Tourisme, IREST) of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Since 2009 she is the director of the UNESCO Chair of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and the coordinator of the UNITWIN network 'Tourism, Culture, Development'. She is the author of several books and papers related to tourism, culture, and heritage.

Jean-François Staszak received his PhD in Geography at the Sorbonne University. After serving as Associate Professor in the Universities of Amiens (Northern France) and Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris), he became full Professor at the Geography Department of the University of Geneva (Switzerland). His early research focused on the history and epistemology of Geography, and then on economic and cultural Geography. His most recent work addresses geographical imaginaries in the fields of art and tourism, analysing the geographical othering process and especially the exotic. His understanding of the articulation of geographical representations, practices, and realities owes much to deconstructionist theories and to postcolonial and gender studies. Among his recent books: Quartier réservé. Bousbir, Casablanca Genève, Georg (2020), Simuler le monde. Panoramas, parcs à theme et autres dispositifs immersifs, Genève, Métispresse (2019), Frontières en tous genres. Cloisonnement spatial et constructions identitaires, Rennes, PUR (2017), Clichés exotiques. Le Tour du Monde en photographies 1860-1890, Paris, De Monza (2015).

Introduction: Simulacra, architecture, tourism and the Uncanny

Nelson Graburn, Gravari-Barbas Maria and Staszak Jean-François

1. Copysites: tourist attractions in the age of their architectural reproducibility

Bauer Bernhard and Canestrini Duccio

2. What makes Paris being Paris? Stereotypes, simulacra and tourism imaginaries

Maria Gravari-Barbas

3. Tropical and Eastern Paris: architecture, representation and tourism in Brazil and China

Felipe Loureiro and Roberto Bartholo

4. Simulacra heritagization: the Minyuan stadium in Wudadao, Tianjin

Lu Yue, Gravari-Barbas Maria and Guinand Sandra

5. Seeing is believing: miniature and gigantic architectural models of second temple

Yael Padan

6. The Musée de la Grande Guerre du Pays de Meaux - a simulacrum of the 1914-1918 war?

Bertram M. Gordon

7. Simulacra architecture in relation to tourism: Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow and Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona

Yasmin Buchrieser