Tourism, Ethnic Diversity and the City

Ethnic diversity has become a crucial component of the cultural capital of post-industrial cities. More and more travellers, leisure seekers and others in cosmopolitan cities indulge in ethno-cultural events and festivals and gravitate to the centers of immigrant ethnic commerce. In so doing, these events, festivals and centers enhance the livability, fuel the job machine and foster the branding of these cities.

Tourism, Ethnicity and the City entails an exploration of manifestations of cultural diversity by immigrant ethnic groups in cosmopolitan cities, and deals with the question of how these cultural manifestations are transformed into a vehicle for socio-economic development to the advantage of both immigrants and the city at large. The primary focus of this book is the role of immigrant entrepreneurs and workers in the emerging ethnic tourist industry as well as their interaction with public, private and civil society actors in this sector. As the opportunities of the immigrant tourist industry are contingent on national and local circumstances, the chapters cover different cities in different countries.

The book is situated at the crossroads of two fields of research, namely ethnic entrepreneurship and urban tourism. By addressing this problem from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, the book aims at a much more thorough understanding of the structural dynamics of commercial manifestations of cultural diversity by immigrants, as well as their impact on immigrants' connection to the knowledge economy and urban socio-economic development in general.