News

How place-making practices creating tourist imaginaries lead to an unequal social-spatial distribution of the waste burden on one of Vietnams top tourists islands.

Heide and Johanna explore plastic waste – tourism relations on the Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc. The island is famous for its sun, sand and sea tourism. But the growing amount of wasted single‐use plastics is increasingly shaping the appearance of island's places. Heide and Johanna analyze how this triggers a process of constant performance by local authorities and the international tourism industry to create the pristine tropical landscape tourists seeking. The qualitative empirical findings reveal that the frontstage paradise makes backstage places necessary to accumulate or store discarded items. As the research shows, this has led to increasing spatial fragmentation of the island into clean places for tourists and dirty places for residents.

Heide Kerber & Johanna Kramm (2021): On‐ and offstage: Encountering entangled waste–tourism relations on the Vietnamese Island of Phu Quoc. The Geographical Journal.