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TOWARDS A THIRDSPACE APPROACH TO TOURISM AND RELATED RESEARCH
By Melanie Smith

This paper explores new ways of conceptualising and researching the Postmodern city, focusing in particular on Soja’s (1996) development of a Thirdspace approach to the theorisation of human and cultural geography and planning. Despite its shortcomings, his work arguably has important implications for multi-disciplinary fields of research such as tourism and regeneration. Thirdspace is what might be described as a ‘ludic’ postmodern construct (Kincheloe & McLaren 2000), which enables a researcher to (re)conceptualise the ways in which a city (or other environment) can be perceived, interpreted and represented. It affords the researcher a mechanism with which s(he) can make better sense of urban spatial developments, practices and representations.

However, like many postmodern concepts, Thirdspace could be seen as overly theoretical and abstract. For example, Allmendinger (2001) questions its practical relevance to contemporary urban planning. Although Soja (1996) contests that Thirdspace thinking can lead to potentially emancipatory praxis, his own attempts at demonstrating its application tend to be somewhat eclectic and inconclusive. This paper therefore focuses on questioning the extent to which a Thirdspace approach can be applied to practical research contexts with tangible outcomes. Emphasis is placed on both policy-making and cultural planning within the framework of ‘Third Way’ politics in a UK-based case study of Maritime Greenwich.