Urry’s Theory of the ‘Tourist Gaze

Summary: John Urry’s (1990) now-classic book The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies takes a sociological and historical approach. The tourist gaze comprises a subjectivity in the relationship between tourists and the places that are visited. Urry’s analytical foundation of the tourist gaze is based on nine points. The study’s proposal focused on the period after 1840, which the author considered fundamentally important because of the historical changes experienced by the tourist gaze. Urry notes that there are two types of tourist gaze: one is ‘romantic’ and the other is ‘collective’. The ‘romantic’ gaze emphasizes nature, landscape, countryside, the pastoral, privacy, the untouched and introspection: it is markedly individual. In this gaze, the focus is on solitude and privacy, in an individual and semi-spiritual experience with the object of the gaze. The ‘collective’ gaze, requires a large number of people for its development because it is the people who are seeing and being seen that give meaning to this type of gaze.

The greatest criticism and guiding line of The Tourist Gaze may be the study of the transformation of places that are motivated by the tourist gaze. In other words, the tourist’s desires and gaze condition the ‘sterilization’ and standardization of destinations, all in the name of receiving more tourists, thus generating more income and profit for the destinations.