In a world often experienced as increasingly noisy, a desire for silence is shaping new forms of travel and experience. Silence is often framed not just as the absence of sound, but as the opposite of noise in a broader cultural sense. Noise is associated with urbanity, technology, and excess, while silence is linked to simplicity, mindfulness, and presence. This binary framing is overly simplistic and obscures how silence is experienced, performed, and commodified. In tourism, silence figures as an embodied sensory experience, a metaphor for retreat and restoration, a cultural and political construct, and a marketed product within the rise of the tourism 'transformation economy'. This paper introduces the concept of therapeutic silencescape, to critically examine silence as an embodied and culturally produced experience associated with nature-based and rural environments, enhanced wellbeing, and elements of personal growth, that is also shaped by the evolving tourism market. The paper contributes to tourism geography's ongoing engagement with soundscape by foregrounding the tensions surrounding silence as restorative experience, construct, and commodity within the context of contemporary tourism.
Rural tourism is increasingly understood as a spatial process, yet limited attention has been given to how commodification actively produces rural space beyond its economic dimensions. This study examines how rural tourism space is produced through community-based multisensory commodification, drawing on Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space to conceptualise commodification as a process operating across perceived, conceived, and lived dimensions. Using a qualitative case study of Samiran Tourism Village, Indonesia, the research combines participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis to investigate how tourism reshapes socio-spatial relations. The findings show that community-based multisensory commodification operates through visual, aural, and gustatory practices that selectively reconfigure landscapes, everyday activities, and cultural expressions into tourism experiences. Rather than functioning as a purely market-driven process, commodification is continuously negotiated through uneven power relations among government institutions, market forces, and community actors. Consequently, rural tourism space emerges as a hybrid and contested socio-spatial formation in which material transformation, symbolic meaning, and lived experience intersect. The study advances tourism geography by conceptualising community-based multisensory commodification as a socio-spatial process operating across Lefebvre’s spatial triad, thereby reframing community-based tourism as a negotiated form of spatial production shaped by power relations. It further contributes empirical insights from a Global South rural context by highlighting lived space as a critical site of negotiation and potential resistance within tourism-driven transformation.
This study examines the driving mechanisms of the China–DPRK (North Korea) border tourism cooperation zones through the conceptual lens of state-led debordering in highly securitized environments. Although comprehensive trans-border tourism cooperation remains limited by geopolitical tensions, border controls, and international sanctions, the fact that state-regulated organized tours from China to the DPRK operated at various times before being currently suspended suggests that localized progress such as cross-border tourism may still be possible when conditions permit. This research thus examines how state intervention functions as a primary driver to manage these strictly regulated contact zones. Grounded Theory analysis identified thirty-three driving factors for trans-border tourism cooperation, grouped into Demand, Supply, Intermediation, and Support systems. The Delphi and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) subsequently evaluated the relative weights of the factors: Supply and Support systems received the highest weights, suggesting that experts placed greater importance on tourism resources, policies, and infrastructure than on Demand and Intermediary services. Six resource-based development scenarios and four strategic pathways for tourism cooperation zones are further outlined. This study contributes to border tourism discourse by highlighting the role of the state in developing trans-border tourism cooperation in highly securitized environments.
