Maria Gravari-Barbas is a professor of Geography and the coordinator of the UNESCO Chair "Tourism, Culture, Development" at Paris 1 - Sorbonne University.

Nelson Graburn is a professor of Anthropology at Berkeley University.

Jean-François Staszak is a professor of Geography at the University of Geneva.

List of figures. List of contributors.1 Tourism fictions, simulacra and virtualities: write, stage and play the tourist game. Part 1: Fictions 2 White lies: reclaiming Rio de Janeiro's denied slave past in the touristic redevelopment of the old port. 3 Palacy-in-progress: re-imagining East Prussian country estates in post-socialist tourism landscapes of Northeast Poland. 4 Tourist bubbles in the Alps: sliding from the sublime into picturesque worlds. 5 Iconic architecture or theme park? Seville's cinematographic reinvention for tourism purposes (1914-1930). Part 2: Simulacra 6 (Re)Presenting paradise: the Hawaiian imaginary in Las Vegas. 7 Tourism, simulacra and architectural reconstruction: selling an idealised past. 8 From the Lascaux cave to Lascaux IV: repetition and transformation of a simulacrum. 9 An oriental town patterned upon movies concepts: China City, a tourist simulacrum in Los Angeles (1938-1948). Part 3: Virtualities 10 The city of light in the city of signs: virtuality and tourism at Paris, Las Vegas. 11 To be a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. On architecture, computer games and tourist experience in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. 12 Virtualities in the new tourism landscape: the case of the Anne Frank House virtual tour and of the visualizations of the Berlin Wall in the Cold War context. 13 Iconic architecture in tourism: (how) does it work?
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Tourism Fictions, Simulacra and Virtualities offers a new understanding of tourism's interaction with space, questioning the ways in which fictions, simulacra and virtualities express tourism in the built environment and vice versa.
Since its beginnings, tourism has inspired themed built environments that have a constitutive, and sometimes problematic, relationship with the "real" world and its architectural references. This volume questions and rethinks the different environments constructed or adapted both for and by tourism exploring the relationship between the "real" and the "unreal" within the tourist bubble and the ways in which the real world inspires simulacra for tourism use. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach this book touches on a wide range of geographical areas, eras and subjects such as post-socialist tourism in Poland, the Hawaiian imaginary in Las Vegas, Rio de Janeiro's Little Africa, as well as multiple instances of virtual reality in tourism.
This timely and innovative volume will be of great interest to upper level students, researchers and academics in tourism, architecture, cultural studies, geography and heritage studies.