Amtrak’s Sustainable Futures: Slow Tourism and Nationalization of Industrial Heritage
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Keywords: Sustainable Tourism, Industrial Heritage, Amtrak, Public Transit, Slow Tourism, Deindustrialization, Heritage
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Mark Alan Rhodes, Michigan Technological University
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Abstract
From the working-class communities left behind by the retraction of industry to the redevelopment of post-industrial chic, how might we approach the applied industrial heritage of Amtrak? Using auto-ethnographic introspection from an Amtrak-based program on landscape, deindustrialization, and tourism, this paper asks how Amtrak navigates its potential for industrial heritage, sustainable tourism, and equitable development. “America’s Track” has faced financial difficulties since its inception. The broader economic geographies of all public transit, however, must consider direct and indirect externalities beyond the false hope of financial solvency. These include cultural and historical landscapes, collective memories, and the industrial heritage potential Amtrak provides to the inner city neighborhoods it serves. In such cases, cultural resiliency and gentrification often come into conflict. This paper finds that Amtrak, while not immune to such conflict and controversy, navigates these geographies of memory and heritage via “slow tourism.” Slow Tourism asks visitors to focus on absorbing experiences rather than maximizing consumption and on concentrating their time, travel, and money and fewer and more local destinations. However, some argue that, given the neoliberal nature of slow tourism marketed as yet another romanticized form of consumption, Amtrak cannot fit such a bill to deliver both a slow tourism experience and a marketable product. In this paper, I resist the inference that slow tourism must equal slow growth. Instead, I illustrate multiple possible futures via Amtrak where we replace a growth mentality focused upon the consumption of space with a stewardship mentality valuing place.
Amtrak’s Sustainable Futures: Slow Tourism and Nationalization of Industrial Heritage
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Paper Abstract