Geography, Marketing and the Selling of Places

Abstract

Place and region have recently been rediscovered as major frameworks of analysis within the social sciences. However, both the geography of tourism and marketing have failed to adequately contextualise the concept of place within current social and cultural theory, including the concepts of production, consumption and postmodernism. This article argues that much of the place marketing literature emerges from an empiricist tradition which commo-difies place as a product and fails to critically evaluate the implications of selling places on the people which constitute places. The paper concludes by arguing that contextualisation and the encouragement of argument within the disciplines is critical to their continued relevance to the public sphere.