The Role of Architecture in Tourism: Its potential to encourage community
Travel and tourism can be forces for good: opening minds, building understanding, creating jobs, supporting social development and motivating authorities to invest in conservation. However, tourism’s negative effects - environmental, economic, social, political, cultural - are also undeniable and long before the outbreak of Covid-19 have been driving industry reflection on the ethos and practices of tourism. Climate crisis, pandemic risk, legacies of colonialism and damage caused by over-tourism cannot be ignored. For a growing number of providers, “business as usual” is no longer an option.
In this third of five online events, we will explore possible ways that architecture can help to build positive interactions between tourist and host communities. Join the Urgent Situation team (see below) plus David Gianotten, Managing Partner-Architect at world-leading architectural firm OMA, Eleena Jamil, founder and owner of Eleena Jamil Architect (EJA), one of Malaysia’s leading architectural practices and the writer and curator Shumon Basar, co-author together with Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist of the books, The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021) and The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present (2015) to probe the ways that tourist architecture and design shape visitors’ understandings of and interactions with local communities, culture and ecologies.
The event will include a short presentation by each panellist, a panel discussion moderated by Vere Van Gool, curator, writer and former Associate Director and Curator at New Museum’s IdeasCity program in New York (2015-2020), followed by audience Q&A.
Book your free ticket here
Limited tickets available
An Urgent Situation: Rethinking Tourism through Architecture, Arts and Community is developed together with Don Lawrence Architect, Rebel Architecture Lab, artist Tanja Thorjussen and Samong Haven. For more information about the project please click here.
The project is supported by
