Tourist maps unfolded in Berlin

Can tourist maps be understood as signs or symbolic representations of an already constituted destination space? No, they cannot, according to Dr. Ignacio Farias, Research Fellow of the Research Unit: Cultural Sources of Newness, Das Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), Germany.

Instead , they can be thought of as “…spatial devices playing an active role in the constitution of such space.” And, in order to grasp what the author calls the ‘generative capacity’ of tourist maps, he proposes: ”…conceiving tourist maps as diagrams, in the sense first introduced by Foucault and further developed by Deleuze and Guattari.” His paper  ‘Tourist Maps as Diagrams of Destination Space’(in the journal Space and Culture, January 11, 2011) examines tourist maps of Berlin, and identifies four diagrammatic operations through which tourist maps constitute destination space : _viz. “… extending matter, edging experience, placing objects, and folding displacement.“