Planning For Authenticities

Authenticity resonates throughout the urbanizing world. As cities’ commercial corridors and downtowns start to look increasingly the same, and gentrification displaces many original neighborhood residents, we are left with a sense that our cities are becoming "hollowed out," bereft of the multi-faceted connections that once rooted us to our communities. And yet, in a world where change is unrelenting, people long for authentic places. This book examines the reasons for and responses to this longing, considering the role of community development in addressing community and neighbourhood authenticity. A key concept underscoring planning’s inherent challenges is the notion of authentic community, ranging from more holistic, and yet highly market-sensitive conceptions of authentic community to appreciating how authenticity helps form and reinforce individual identity. Typically, developers emphasize spaces’ monetary exchange value, while residents emphasize neighbourhoods’ use value—including how those spaces enrich local community tradition and life. Where exchange value predominates, authenticity is increasingly implicated in gentrification, taking us further from what initially made communities authentic. The hunger for authenticity grows, in spite and because of its ambiguities. This edited collection seeks to explore such dynamics, asking alternately, "How does the definition of ‘authenticity’ shift in different social, political, and economic contexts?" And, "Can planning promote authenticity? If so, how and under what conditions?" It includes healthy scepticism regarding the concept, along with proposals for promoting its democratic, inclusive expression in neighbourhoods and communities.

This book brings together contributions from authors who are actively engaged in authenticity research in a tourism context. In so doing, it demonstrates the various trajectories research has taken towards understanding the significance of authenticity.

Ethnic tourism has emerged as a means that is employed by many countries to facilitate economic and cultural development and to assist in the preservation of ethnic heritage. However, while ethnic tourism has the potential to bring economic and social benefits it can also significantly impact traditional cultures, ways of life and the sense of identity of ethnic groups. There is growing concern in many places about how to balance the use of ethnicity as a tourist attraction with the protection of minority cultures and the promotion of ethnic pride. Despite the fact that a substantial literature is devoted to the impacts of ethnic tourism, little research has been done on how to plan ethnic tourism attractions or to manage community impacts of tourism. This book addresses the need for more research on planning for ethnic tourism by exploring the status and enhancement of planning strategies for ethnic tourism development. The book develops the case of a well-known ethnic tourist destination in China -Xishuangbanna, Yunnan. It analyzes how ethnic tourism has been planned and developed at the study site and examines associated socio-cultural and planning issues. The authors evaluate the perspectives of four key stakeholder groups (the government, tourism entrepreneurs, ethnic minorities and tourists) on ethnic tourism through on-site observation, interviews with government officials, planners and tourism entrepreneurs, surveys of tourists and ethnic minority people, and evaluation of government policies, plans and statistics. This book is unique in its emphasis on planning and in its focus on China, rapidly emerging as a major player in tourism, with applications for tourism around the world.

"Authenticity," the dominant cultural value of the baby boom generation, became central to presidential campaigns in the late 20th century. Beginning in 1976, Americans elected six presidents whose campaigns represented evolving standards of authenticity. Interacting with the media and their publics, these successful presidential candidates structured their campaigns around projecting "authentic" images and connecting with voters as "one of us." In the process, they rewrote the political playbook, redefined "presidentiality," and changed the terms of the national political discourse. This book is predicated on the assumption that it is worth knowing why.

This book addresses student passivity in teacher education. Using a developed metaphor, the author critically examines the use of authentic learning to design and implement learning experiences for preservice teachers, and reveals the opportunities and limitations of a focus on authenticity. This book prepares teachers for outdoor education using practice-based exemplars of applied teaching theories. Focusing on authentic pedagogies, it applies to all teacher educators who seek to engage in high-impact learning for their students, and is relevant for in-service educators, preservice teachers and researchers in the field of self-study.

Post-Rational Planning confronts today's threats to truth, particularly after recent news events that present alternative facts and media smear campaigns, often described as post-truth politics. At the same time, it appreciates critical tensions: between rationality (prized by planners and other policy professionals) and desires for positive, socially just outcomes. Rather than abandoning quests for truth, this book provides planners, policy professionals, and students with tools for better responding to debates over truth. Post-Rational Planning examines planners' unease with emotion and politics, advocating for more scholarship and practice capable of unpacking uses of rhetoric and framing to support or counter key planning decisions impacting social justice. This includes learning from recent works engaging with rhetoric, narrative construction, and framing in planning, while introducing other valuable concepts from disciplines like psychology, including confirmation bias; identity-protective cognition; from marketing and adult education. Each chapter sheds new light on a specific topic requiring a response through post-rational practice. It starts with recent research findings, then demonstrates them with case examples, enabling their use in classroom and practice settings. Each chapter ends by summarizing key lessons in "Take-aways for Practice," better enabling readers of all levels to synthesize and use key ideas.

This book explores the notion of rurality and how it is used and produced in various contexts, including within populist politics which derives their legitimacy from the rural-urban divide. The gap between the ‘common people’ and the ‘elites’ is widening again as images of rurality are promoted as morally pure, unalienated and opposed to the cultural and economic globalization. This book examines how using certain images and projections of rurality produces ‘rural authenticity’, a concept propagated by various groups of people such as regional food producers, filmmakers, policymakers, and lobbyists. It seeks to answer questions such as: What is the rurality that these groups of people refer to? How is it produced? What are the purposes that it serves? Research in this book addresses these questions from the areas of both politics and policies of the ‘authentic rural’. The ‘politics’ refers to polarizations including politicians, social movements, and political events which accentuate the rural-urban divide and brings it back to the core of the societal conflict, while the ’policies’ focus on rural tourism, heritage industry, popular art and other areas where rurality is constantly produced and consumed. With international case studies from leading scholars in the field of rural studies, the book will appeal to geographers, sociologists, politicians, as well as those interested in the re-emergence of the rural-urban divide in politics and media. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This timely book addresses what it is to be a planner in a changing world: a world in need of transformation in the way planning is done in order to tackle social problems and ecological crises. Nicholas Low argues for the need to revalue public planning, sensitive to the social context in which it takes place.