Making My Way Downtown
No two people experience one thing in the same manner, even when we think we do. We all engage with things slightly differently, and that affects our eventual perspective about that experience. Our interactions with cities and spaces occur similarly. Cities can be understood through different lenses depending on the person’s position in relation to it. Oftentimes, tourists and residents aren’t in consensus about their approach to a city.
On one hand, ideas of tourism within cities tend to stay rooted in the creation of history. A person visiting Delhi as a tourist would have a “must-see” list that likely includes Red Fort and Qutub Minar (among others). Implicit memory (a type of memory that is encoded and stored unconsciously) affects this process, helping us form associations with the city. These associations are formed through media or popular narratives and create an image of what tourism means in a particular place. Eventually, they are rooted in our idea of what the city stands for, even when we don’t consciously remember looking up information to make this connection.
These lists are often created as a consequence of what in a city has the most potential to create revenue, or already has some significance and value. Alternatively, what one ends up seeing of a city as a tourist is what local governance has attempted to establish as the identity of the city. Both these aspects necessitate that a particular picture of the city’s tourism opportunities begins to get constructed. This then becomes a popular narrative that gets peddled and gains permanence. Our own expectation bias plays a role in how we view a city’s potential for tourism as well — if I read about forts and palaces in Jaipur, and someone else talks to me about seeing them in person when I mention the city, surely, I must go see it then — it must be important.
By contrast, a resident experiences a place more in the present. Daily life experiences, emotional value and personal histories all form a part of the narrative of a city when one lives in it. At the same time, a healthy dose of imagination and rose- (or otherwise-) tinted glasses also influence how a resident views the city. The material city around a person is something that is collectively shared. It thus stands to reason that a collective imagination of the city also emerges — one that isn’t usually shared in the context of tourism.
These daily imaginings and the emergent collective conscious work together to build an idea of a thriving city space that has a life of its own. On the one hand, people living in a city cannot distance themselves from it and experience it from the outside. People visiting a city, instead tend to have a more distant perspective of the city given their limited access to its internal functioning.
Perhaps both citizens and tourists stand to benefit from changing their view of how one can engage with a city they are a part of — however briefly. Cities work in a manner similar to organisms; it has a pulse, its range of emotions, and problem and solution building frameworks. And just like organisms, they aren’t perfect either. This is where citizen engagement becomes crucial.
A citizen moving through a city can begin to feel desensitized to its existence. Ownership of the city combined with the keen, observant eye of the tourist can result in being able to notice specific problems within the city. These may have been previously ignored as being minor inconveniences and noticing this might not seem to add immediate or obvious value to the city. However, just through this act, a citizen can begin to engage with the idea of transforming their city space for collective benefit instead. Examples of these citizen initiatives are now beginning to be seen worldwide. For example, closer to home, Bengaluru has Bengaluru by Foot, which allows visitors to experience history and heritage through the eyes of Bengalureans.
Imaginative processes form a large part of how residents view a city. This can then be transferred to how these cities are perceived by tourists as well. By shifting away from a singular, insulated perspective of what a city can mean to a visitor, the lived experience of people can be changed as well. This does not presuppose that one stops visiting sites of importance or fame. Rather, it becomes about what can be added to that experience to make it more personal for both the visitor and the city. This can be achieved through entrusting the visitor with temporary ownership of the space of which they are a part: interacting with lesser-known but collectively loved spots, allowing for opportunities to learn from strangers, experiencing a day in the city like the resident would. This form of tourism can be facilitated through different means, for instance, curating local experiences, or living in a homestay. This alternative modality of tourism can allow for intrinsic value and worldview to be gained from being able to build a bridge between a tourist and a resident.
Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, said: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” The life and identity of a city are built through its interaction with the various lives it intersects with. Allowing tourists to become a part of the transformative meaning-making process would allow a city to become more than a sum of its people.
