Urban Tourism and Urban Change

Costas Spirou is Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at National-Louis University in Chicago and a visiting fellow at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests include culture policy, urban redevelopment, tourism, and sports in society. He is co-author of It’s Hardly Sportin’: Stadiums, Neighborhoods and the New Chicago, a book about politics and community development, and author of St. Charles: Culture and Leisure in an All-American Town.

'Accessible to a diverse audience including undergraduate students and the general public, this is also an impressive work of original scholarship. No previous book has offered such a sweeping account of the history and recent development of urban tourism, or placed it so thoroughly within large-scale social and economic processes of change.' – Dennis Judd, Political Science, University of Illinois, Chicago'As a practicing urban planner with a Ph.D. in tourism, I will assign this book to help my students understand the profound social, economic, and demographic changes that will determine the future of cities and – by extension – urban tourism in the coming years.' – Rich Harrill, Hotel, Restaurant, and Tourism Management, University of South Carolina'A powerful new framework for interpreting cities. Leisure, consumption, and tourism have been rising for decades, but no previous book has put these pieces together as Costas Spirou has done. Spirou points a spotlight at our urban past and present to illuminate a dramatic new view on the current reality of urban tourism. A perfect book to use for advanced undergraduate courses on cities and social change.' – Terry Clark, Sociology, University of Chicago"Urban Tourism and Urban Change…serves as an excellent introduction for students unacquainted with the ways in which tourism has been reshaping the urban built environment and influencing the character of neighborhoods."—Susan S. Fainstein, Harvard University"The past two decades have witnessed growing literature on tourism and cities, but Urban Tourism and Urban Change...is an important addition to the limited literature available for use as textbooks for students....Indeed, this book fills a gap in terms of scope and perspective, and its publication, a decade or two later than previous urban tourism textbooks, is overdue." —Noam Shoval, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

• 1. Changing Cities and the Commodification of Leisure 2. Globalization, Urban Competition, and Tourism 3. Tourism Policies and Urban Growth 4. The Infrastructure and Finance of Urban Tourism 5. Urban Tourism, Amenities and Human Capital 6. Residential Development and the New Face of Downtowns 7. Implications and Debates