Creating a City of the Tourist Imagination: The Case of Cape Town,`The Fairest Cape of Them All'

Abstract

Many post-industrial cities have reinvented themselves both physically and imaginatively in strikingly similar fashion. Yet a vital element of place marketing remains the attempt to advertise each city's `uniqueness'. Here the deployment of historically longstanding attractions and `brand essences' often play a central role, as this case history of one city's destination branding hopefully illustrates. It explains how different tourism sites, and thus particular tourist gazes, were constructed in Cape Town from the late 19th century onwards. One key question is why no new `Africanist' vision predominated after 1994. Answering this question is not merely a matter of understanding the nature of the city's contemporary political economy, although this is certainly important; it also requires some knowledge of past historical processes, including the historical accumulation of attractions. Place-selling experts market modern cities, but not entirely in circumstances of their own choosing. History matters, yet existing literature for South African urban tourism has focused largely on contemporary developments.