Packaging liminality: the management and commodification of liminal landscapes in

tourism

Liminal Landscapes continue to provide inspiration for tourists and resources for tourism
development. From the Romantic period onwards, the tension between the natural and the man-
made, the tamed and the un-tamable, has sparked the imagination of painters, novelists, musicians,
poets and travel writers. In this paper, we break with the dominant approach to liminality in tourism
and sociological discourse and propose that the tourism industry has created landscapes of
managed liminality that offer consumable, packaged experiences of liminality and not the
carnivalesque freedoms of the romantic imagination.

This research began with a study of the seaside promenade as an architectural form and a social
space. The promenade is a liminal space, but a managed one in which the carnivalesque freedoms
and unpredictabilities of the beach were reined in and packaged; made safe for consumers and
predictable for tourism entrepreneurs, producers and municipal capitalists. The promenade sits
between public and private space, between human and wild space, and acts as both boundary
marker and connector for these different spaces.

Central to this research has been the work of Walter Benjamin, as exemplified by the Arcades
Project. In this work, Benjamin set out to break free from the classical narrative and binary forms of
sociological and historical analysis in a study of the Parisian Arcades of the nineteenth century. The
Parisian arcades were a liminal space within the broader field of early capitalist development,
marking and making distinctions between commerce and culture as well as the private and public
spheres.

Benjamin’s methods included ethnographic observation, the collection of fragments of texts from
contemporary and historical sources and the presentation of cultural texts. Placing these sources
together, without submitting them to the structures of narrative history, enabled Benjamin to
suggest new forms of analysis of particular relevance to the study of tourism spaces that combine
elements of the familiar and the strange, the commercial and the unexploited and the natural and
the man-made. We have been applying these methods to seaside promenades for two years in an
online project at http://arcadespromenades.wordpress.com . This has allowed us to develop an
understanding of the way that the liminal landscapes of the shore have been developed and
packaged by the tourism industry to create spaces of capitalist carnivalesque and managed
liminality.

In this paper we present our methods and findings from the arcades / promenades project and also
extend this to other spaces of managed liminality created by the tourism industry: the airport, the
cultural quarter and the theme park.