Spacing Communication: Affect and the Senses in Urban Tourism Development

This research aims at assessing the role of the affective and sensory dimension of space in the communicative constitution of a touristic strategy.
Lately scholarly attention has been drawn to the constitutive relation between strategic communication and space (Cassinger & Thelander 2022). Following especially the work of Lefebvre on the production of space (1991), these studies investigate how space and meaning are said to have an effect on each other's existence, to constitute each other in their relationality. Expanding this scope, the present work looks at how the daily experience of space encompasses also elements like feelings, rhythms, affects and moods which cannot be said to fully pertain to the realm of representation (Lefebvre 2004; Thrift 2009; Stewart 2011). Working spatial thinking through communication theory, then, this study proposes an exploration onto the ways in which meaning can be shown to emerge also at the level of the everyday bodily experiences of space through communication as a constitutive transmission of affect (Ashcraft 2020). In particular, it shows how to strategically "touristify" a city does not merely mean to impact its architectural space, its carrying capacity, or to intervene on its representation, but also on its felt and pre-cognitive experience. In other words, a strategy also always implies a disciplinatization of the daily mode of experiencing, feeling and sensing a space achieved through communication as affective transmission.
Preliminary results from an ethnographic study carried out in Venice, Italy, are presented. Venice is nowadays facing a major threat in the form of exponential sea level rise, which results in a more frequent flooding of the public spaces and touristic premises. In response to the national and international discourse over climate change advanced by the media, which often depicts Venice as underwater and in danger of disappearing, the city’s management launched a communication initiative to stress the city’s ability to deal with this natural phenomenon and, especially, discourage unnecessary concerns around it. In its media channels the municipality depicts water in Venice as static, mainly absent, successfully and purposefully kept at bay. An analysis of the relation between media messages and spatial affects can help showing that such communicative depiction of water does not merely work at the level of representation, but also implies a disciplining of the sensorium, wherein people’s daily bodily encounter with misplaced water gets regulated and normalized accordingly.