Tourists at the Grand Place in Brussels

Abstract

One of the features characteristic of urban tourism is its spatial selectivity: tourist gaze and activities are gathered on a series of spaces whose landscape is transformed by the influx of visitors. Tourists and visitors take pictures of these places as well as of themselves in such places, allowing an easy identification of the tourist city. It is a way of capturing a moment of the journey that, since the birth of photography, has served as memory and support for distinction. It is a basic ritual in the visitor's behavior whose importance does not cease to grow due to the interest in sharing images on social media. Given the immediacy provided by telephones and other mobile devices, the idea of the memory becomes blurred, but not the distinction associated with travel as a contemporary social practice.