Description
This article explores the ways in which war tourism disrupts ideas of normal space within the Sarajevo cityscape, introducing a new invisible dimension to the city, that of the tourscape. Within the tourscape the normal space of the city, that is its mundane and everyday facades, face disruption and transformation as part of the performance of tourism. A street crossing is no longer a street crossing but instead a life-or-death journey as tourists re-enact runs between a snipers’ fields of vision. Likewise, the apartment building is no longer an apartment building, it is, on account of the splatter of the shrapnel hole (now filled in) an artefact, with its greying concrete immortalised in a thousand pictures.
Rather than focussing on explicit memorial or touristic locations e.g. the Tunnel of Hope or the Sarajevo roses, the paper instead explores how tourism reveals hidden spaces of history, arguing tourism holds a power to paper new (yet old) meanings onto the cityscape for both guide and tourist alike. However it is a meaning which is visible only to those performing within the tourscape rather than the cityscape as a whole.
