Paper short abstract:

This paper asks how changing tourism practices and ways of appropriating space affect how tourists and people of the place consider themselves and their relation to each other. The paper addresses this question through focusing on the new tourism practice of hot-air ballooning in the Cappadocia region of Turkey.

Paper long abstract:

Urry (2005) earlier posed the question as to what the implications are of tourists' increasing visual appropriation of places. Related to that, this paper asks how changing tourism practices and ways of appropriating space affect how tourists and local people consider themselves and their relation to each other.

In tourism promotions of Cappadocia in recent years the region has become synonymous with hot-air ballooning. This recently developed tourist practice in the region has grown, in other words, to the point that ballooning is now considered necessary in order to experience the place of Cappadocia properly or 'authentically'. This paper considers not only this point in itself but also the ways in which this idea has led to tourism's new appropriation of various spaces. The balloon flights are orchestrated so that tourists perform, and in turn appropriate, village-scapes and valley-scapes in new ways. Whilst floating through air-space, for example, tourists are able to look into private courtyards and upper-storey windows that were previously inaccessible to the tourist gaze. Also, since the particular points where balloons land cannot be fully controlled, any flat space, including the market-place, a private garden or farmer's field, is always a potential landing site. Ballooning practice thus creates new ideas about the relationship between tourism and place because ballooning compounds the idea that places and people are there simply to be gazed upon and consumed by tourists and that they should always be available for appropriation through new forms of tourism consumption practice.