Urban tourism is currently one of the fastest growing economic sectors in Europe and beyond. Over the last few decades, classic destinations for ‘city breaks’ such as Rome, London or Paris have been joined by Barcelona, Stockholm, Manchester and a long list of other up-and-coming crowd-pullers.Footnote 1 Between 2007 and 2014, the number of city breaks worldwide increased by 82 per cent, accounting for 22 per cent of all tourism. Pre-Covid projections estimated that the number of international city tourists would reach a staggering 1.8 billion by 2030, or about one-fifth of the projected total world population.Footnote 2 The popularity of this type of tourism is linked to deep-seated transformations in Western leisure culture, living standards and available means of transport. While middle-class tourists in the 1960s and 1970s were lucky to afford one (long) summer holiday, since the 1990s many people have become accustomed to several short breaks at home or abroad.Footnote 3 Urban destinations – within easy reach due to low-cost airline tickets and high-speed trains – have become the favourite places-to-go for these trips.Footnote 4
The effect of all these tourists on the urban economy is very real. In Barcelona, for instance, it has been estimated that in 2019 tourism represented around 14 per cent of local GDP and accounted for approximately 9 per cent of all employment in the city.Footnote 5 Not surprisingly, local urban governments, in cooperation with regional and national tourist organizations and administrations, have played an important role in this evolution over the last 40 years. Urban municipalities started to prioritize urban growth strategies based on the conversion of ‘post-industrial’ inner cities for the purpose of attracting new investors and consumers – among whom tourists loom large.Footnote 6 All over Europe, rich historical townscapes such as Venice, Dubrovnik, Burgos and many others – littered with impressive monuments and other remnants of the past – have been polished and groomed as magnets for consumer-driven heritage tourism.Footnote 7 Cities like these became unrelentingly branded and marketed as tourist destinations by city administrations, tourist information offices and professional marketing agencies. These actors unleashed an impressive array of media to draw potential tourists to their cities, including viral social media campaigns and attractive websites, or financed clever ‘product placement’ in Hollywood films or Netflix series. At the same time, local governments also invested in urban renewal and flagship architecture to draw in new visitors and investors. Neither time nor money is spared to create a unique image and brand to sell the city.Footnote 8 The ‘touristification’-strategies of a growing number of cities have been so successful that ‘degrowth’ measures are deemed necessary to suppress the ecological and social excrescences of overtourism.Footnote 9 Local urban protests against the ‘Airbnb-ization’ of inner cities, and resultant inflation of housing prices, have been on the rise everywhere in Europe. Concerns about loss of diversity and authenticity in over-sanitized historical townscapes are a recurring theme.Footnote 10
Current policy-makers, marketeers and scholars working in tourism studies often assume that urban tourism and its promotion are a relatively recent phenomenon. Some scholars even suggest urban tourism was ‘invented’ in response to the economic transitions of the 1970s and 1980s, when stagflation and global de-localization of port and industrial activities forced urban administrations to look for alternatives to revive their flagging urban economies.Footnote 11 However, historians usually locate the ‘take-off’ of urban tourism – depending on the definitions used – in the (early) modern period, the Middle Ages or even antiquity.Footnote 12 Nevertheless, with the exception of the rich literature on the Grand Tour and its main destination, Rome,Footnote 13 research on urban tourism, and especially how it was promoted in the past, remains surprisingly scarce. For a long time, the history of modern tourism and tourism promotion was firmly focused on the fluctuating fortunes of spa towns and coastal resorts.Footnote 14 There are only a handful of studies that zero in on the history of tourism promotion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cities in Europe and beyond.Footnote 15
Yet, times are changing. In Belgium and the Netherlands, research on the history of urban tourism and its promotion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been thriving in the last few years.Footnote 16 This comes as no surprise, since the Low Countries – the territories that gave rise to the nation-states of Belgium and the Netherlands after 1830 – have been one of the most densely urbanized European areas since the late Middle Ages. From the late seventeenth century onwards, these regions became a popular stomping ground for British, French and German elites who lacked the time or money to embark on a proper Grand Tour of Italy.Footnote 17 Petit voyages (small tours), undertaken to visit the merchant Protestant Republic in the Northern Netherlands or to savour the Baroque art and architecture of the Catholic Southern Netherlands, became extremely fashionable, eventually giving rise to the very urban-centred voyage pittoresque (initially: a trip to view paintings in public and private collections belonging to the renowned Flemish and Dutch schools).Footnote 18 Travel was notoriously easy in the Low Countries, with its superb system of trekschuiten (tow-boats) and diligences (fast coaches travelling on paved roads).Footnote 19 From a comparative perspective, tourism in the Low Countries coincided with an increasing ‘lust’ for travel and exploration in the Enlightenment period, which also affected the neighbouring countries of France, England and Germany. Yet, from early on, it also took a very specific form. Van Damme and Verhoeven, for instance, have recently outlined how the region mainly attracted heritage tourists, eager to discover a ‘society frozen in time’, contrasting starkly to the supposed new fashions and urban change that drove tourists to metropolitan centres like London or Paris.Footnote 20
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the attraction of the cities in Belgium and the Netherlands as tourism hubs for foreign and local visitors continued to grow, as the Low Countries were quickly opened up by a dense network of steamboat and railroad connections. Again, from an international perspective, the region was no exception, although its easy and early accessibility by water and rail had already made it into a popular, well-frequented place. For tourists coming from England to visit the European mainland, Ostend was normally the first stop from which to start exploring the continent further inland.
As already attested by Stephen Ward for Anglo-American contexts, local ‘growth coalitions’ of hotel and restaurant owners, souvenir sellers, coach drivers and policy-makers in Belgium and the Netherlands were quick to realize that urban tourism could be boosted by new and modern marketing techniques.Footnote 21 Knowledge of such marketing principles, and their application, started to spread transnationally with increasing vigour and velocity from at least the last quarter of the nineteenth century onwards. Not coincidentally, such early forms of local boosterism coincided with a recession in the global economy (the so-called ‘long depression’), requiring governments of industrializing nations to search for novel ways to boost local revenues and employment.
Political explanations played a role in these international evolutions as well. Eric Storm, for instance, points at a regionalist revival in turn-of-the-century Europe, making the construction of local and regional identities a sensible electoral strategy in emerging mass democracies.Footnote 22 As a consequence, the conscious creation of civic identities stimulated all sorts of public festivities and ritual pageants, in which the local past, the region and the nation were often celebrated for everyone to see and admire. According to Simon Gunn, urban rivalry played a key role in these evolutions, while, more recently, Tom Hulme has drawn attention to a veritable ‘civic publicity movement’ in early twentieth-century England. This was driven by intensifying inter-urban competition to attract tourists and enhance the local economic and social appeal of the cities involved.Footnote 23
For Belgium and the Netherlands, Tymen Peverelli has more or less attested to the same processes at work, also singling out the efforts of local antiquarian and (art) historical societies and loose associations of committed citizens, all eager to improve the reputation and renown of their respective hometowns.Footnote 24 World expositions also began to play an increasingly important role in this. By the 1900s, Belgium was no longer the battlefield of Europe. It had become, with ever more spectacular and popular world exhibitions held in Antwerp (1885 and 1894), Brussels (1897 and 1910), Liège (1905) and Ghent (1913), Europe’s permanent exposition terrain.Footnote 25 Recognizable forms of urban branding began to shape the character and identity of the cities involved. Antwerp, for instance, became known in this period as the City of Parades (celebrating its past and very profitable colonial involvement in the Congo), while industrial Ghent donned the sweet public moniker City of Flowers – so brushing away the harsh social polarization in the city and welcoming tourists and loyal liberal voters alike.
In this special issue, we bring together a range of experts to present new perspectives on the (early) modern history of tourism promotion in Belgium and the Netherlands. In what follows we briefly introduce their findings by situating their work within an expanding state-of-the-art in research on urban tourism promotion in the Low Countries and beyond. In doing so, we have ordered our discussion around three central research questions. Who were the policy-makers, organizers and actors behind the scenes (the ‘orgware’, so to speak), trying to sell their city to foreign and local tourists? What means (or ‘hardware’) did they use to promote places in Belgium and the Netherlands as alluring destinations? Which images, identities and ‘brands’ (or ‘software’) were being developed throughout the eighteenth to twentieth centuries to lure new visitors to cities in the Low Countries?Footnote 26
‘Orgware’ – businessmen, policy-makers and other stakeholders
Existing historiographies have indicated the place of the Low Countries in North-Western European travel itineraries from very early on.Footnote 27 Medieval pilgrims called at Bruges, Maastricht or Liège on their journey to Jerusalem, while early modern Grand Tourists usually saw the Northern and Southern Netherlands as worthy appetizers for the cultural delights that awaited them in the south. From the late seventeenth century onwards, the Low Countries increasingly became a destination in their own right, due to the growing popularity of the abovementioned small tours. These tours were the very beginnings of the more extended bourgeois travel culture that would flourish in the nineteenth century and expand into a mass phenomenon in the twentieth century. In response, a budding tourist industry started to emerge, with specialized inns and hotels, coachmen and boatmen, souvenir sellers, tour guides, writers of guidebooks and other entrepreneurs who catered for – and each in their own way actively promoted – a swelling stream of English, French, German or even more far-flung travellers.Footnote 28
In the nineteenth-century Low Countries, tourism – and the hospitality sector – boomed as never before, partly profiting from the fact that at an early stage Belgium and the Netherlands were opened up by (inter)national railway and steamboat connections.Footnote 29 Innovative for the nineteenth century, however, and increasingly pronounced from c. 1870 onwards, were the actions of Belgian and Dutch entrepreneurs. Inspired by British, French and German examples, they started to combine forces in so-called verenigingen voor vreemdelingenverkeer or syndicats d’initiatives (associations for tourism and leisure), where hotel- and restaurant owners, shopkeepers, other stakeholders and/or proud and ambitious bourgeois citizens came together to discuss the promotion of their hometowns. Although representatives of the city administration, antiquarian societies and other stakeholders regularly joined their ranks, these verenigingen or syndicats were predominantly grassroots, commercial initiatives. The idea that active marketing supported rather than downgraded a city’s reputation slowly but surely took root. Belgium and the Netherlands surfed on an international wave, as similar ‘booster coalitions’ were set up in late nineteenth-century England, France and Germany, where they tried to sell spas and seaside resorts to local and international tourists. At the turn of the century, these verenigingen or syndicats also popped up in urban settings. It is difficult to establish how widespread these urban societies actually were outside Belgium and the Netherlands, since there is a dearth of comparative research.
Although generally framed as associations for the common good, adorned with impatient yet optimistic names such as Bruxelles-Attractions, Antwerpen-Vooruit, Nijmegen Vooruit and Breda Vooruit (‘vooruit’ meaning ‘forward’), quite a few syndicates were organized along sociopolitical lines. In Bruges, Die Roya, a Catholic association founded in 1908, vied with the more Liberal Brugge Voorwaarts. Soon, similar associations started to pop up in other large Belgian and Dutch towns.Footnote 30 Such associational frenzy was not really unique to Belgium or the Netherlands, as similar grassroots organizations were established in other parts of Europe as well. Yet, such initiatives do testify to the same entrepreneurial spirit that gave rise to a ‘second’ wave of consumer-oriented industrialization around 1900 in the Low Countries. Clearly, the production and consumption of tourist experiences became integral to this process.
Unfortunately, most of these local associational initiatives did not leave an impressive paper trail, so much of the detail about their activities, membership or funding remains elusive. Therefore, research on this proto- or pre-history of tourism promotion is still thin on the ground in Belgium, the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. Posters, brochures and other media are often the only traces that remain. Many of these media campaigns were joint ventures between local associations and railway companies. From early on, Dutch and Belgian railroad companies – not unlike elsewhere in EuropeFootnote 31 – understood the power of marketing. They realized that newspaper advertisements, flyers and poster, first in black-and-white, later in full colour, about trips to Bruges, Amsterdam, Brussels, Delft or any other destination could mobilize local tourists to visit nearby towns on the weekends and – when disseminated internationally via their offices abroad – could even attract the more moneyed English, French or German tourists.Footnote 32
Most Belgian and Dutch city councils pursued a laissez-faire policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and did not actively interfere in the many grassroots initiatives. This changed in the inter-war years. Urban administrations slowly but surely took charge of local initiatives such as Brugge Voorwaarts, Malines Attractions, VVV Amsterdam and similar associations and turned them into official tourist information offices (TIOs) which were at least partly funded by government subsidies.Footnote 33 A similar institutionalization and professionalization was seen in England, France and other European countries.Footnote 34 It has been suggested that the economic slump, caused by the ravages of World War I and the Great Depression, encouraged or even forced city councils to look for unconventional ways to revive the economy. Tourism seemed a viable strategy to resuscitate the withering local hospitality industry, especially in a period when brand-new legislation on congé payé (paid leave) seemed likely to turn tourism from an upper-class privilege into a much broader social phenomenon.Footnote 35 Even if the causes of this (sometimes hostile) takeover by the city councils remain unclear due to lack of research, the effects were relatively clear. During the inter-war years, local TIOs gradually professionalized their modus operandi. Market research about target groups, efficient media and branding steadily gained momentum. Statistics and surveys were introduced, while (professionally) trained and permanent staff were hired.Footnote 36 During the inter-war years, the sector also became much more international. Marketing strategies, brands and even slogans were cold-bloodedly copy-and-pasted from local or foreign examples.Footnote 37 To pinpoint the flow of innovative ideas, campaigns and practices, more comparative research is needed to zoom in on the promotional activities of urban tourism in different European countries and beyond.
During Les Trente Glorieuses (literally The Thirty Glorious Years) – the economic boom years from the late 1940s to the early 1970s – the trends from the inter-war years continued and were intensified, as the activities of local TIOs were further professionalized and institutionalized. Tourism promotion had largely remained a local matter in the 1920s and 1930s, although some tourist associations such as the Dutch Algemeene Nederlandsche Wielrijders Bond (ANWB or the General Dutch Cyclists’ Union, 1883), the Touring Club royale de Belgique (the Royal Touring Club of Belgium, 1895), the Nationale Bond van Vreemdelingenverkeer (1896; later the ANVV or the National Association for Foreign Visitors) and the Vlaamse Toeristenbond (the Flemish Tourists’ Association, 1922) took up the challenge of promoting their countries abroad.Footnote 38 During the inter-war years, the national tourism services in Belgium and the Netherlands, which had mainly developed from the bottom-up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when local and regional TIOs combined forces, were gradually taken over by the government.Footnote 39 In Belgium, the Commissariat-Général au Tourism (CGT or General Commission for Tourism, 1939) developed a series of campaigns to promote the North Sea coast, the forests of the Ardennes and the Campine heath, not forgetting the ‘Kunststeden’ (Cities of Art). This label was a self-made brand to promote Brussels, Bruges, Liège and other Belgian towns as treasure troves of the arts, capitalizing on their medieval and renaissance architecture, Flemish primitives and Baroque sculptures, carillon music and other cultural attractions.Footnote 40
Yet, urban tourism experienced something of a latent phase in post-war Europe. Although the CGT spared neither time nor money to showcase the Cities of Art, the focus was on the promotion of the coast, the Ardennes and the Campine area, where the – predominantly social democratic – governments could effectively roll out mass tourism for the Fordist labour classes. With its intellectual and civilized tenets, the Cities of Art label remained, traditionally, a more upper-class brand and product, and thus less suitable and complementary for the goals of the emerging Belgian welfare state.Footnote 41 In the Netherlands, the ANVV (since 1968, the National Office for Tourism) deliberately promoted the Netherlands and specific regions as a whole, rather than actively promoting individual or pairs of cities: this task was delegated to local TIOs.Footnote 42
‘Hardware’ – posters, brochures, lantern slides and other media and activities
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Belgium and the Netherlands became some of the most desirable travel destinations for the French, German and British elite longing for a small (picturesque) tour. Their destinations were rarely, if ever, directly marketed but rather promoted in emerging travel literature and guidebooks. Nineteenth-century travel stories, focusing on Belgium and the Netherlands, were written by Frances Trollope, Victor Hugo, Johanna Schopenhauer, Edmondo de Amicis, Henri Havard and other (world-)famous writers, and were published by the dozen. Every nook and cranny of the Low Countries was also described in Murray, Baedeker, Grieben and other up-and-coming prominent international guidebook series.Footnote 43
Except for some occasional antecedents, such as advertisements for Ostend or Scheveningen (near The Hague) in foreign newspapers, more active promotion only gathered momentum when the local verenigingen and syndicats emerged in the late nineteenth century and started to spawn a never-ending stream of newspaper advertisements, flyers and posters to attract tourists from other regions in Belgium and the Netherlands as well as from abroad.Footnote 44 As was the case elsewhere in Europe, local railway companies were the most loyal allies in promoting new tourist destinations. Inspired by foreign examples, local syndicats and verenigingen also strategically used and co-organized all sorts of fairs, exhibitions, contests and other cultural and sporting events to bring their city into the limelight. During the Belle Epoque and further into the twentieth century the Netherlands and Belgium started to organize a series of world exhibitions in Amsterdam, Brussels, Antwerp, Liège and Ghent. Due to the activity of Belgium in particular in this domain, the country rapidly became known internationally as the ‘fairground of Europe’. Local stakeholders were, indeed, quick to understand that these ‘world events’ were an ideal opportunity to sell their city to an international crowd of potential visitors.Footnote 45
Due to the budding promotional experiments of associations such as VVV Amsterdam, Brugge Vooruit, Malines Attractions and others, local TIOs already had an extremely wide arsenal of marketing tools at their disposal when they were founded in the pre- or inter-war years. More traditional means such as newspaper advertisements, press releases and press-ready items, flyers, posters, photos and (lantern) slides were soon supplemented with mobile window exhibitions, radio commercials, (documentary) films and other new media. TIOs also moved from their original premises – often a strategically placed, yet extremely humble wooden booth – into new offices and buildings, where professionally trained staff could answer the questions of (potential) visitors in person, by letter or, an innovation, by telephone.Footnote 46 Increasingly, TIOs commissioned the publication of illustrated city guides and actively reached out to (inter)national professional organizations to sell their cities as the ideal location for major conferences. Once again, more comparative research is needed to identify how trailblazing techniques and ideas about marketing flowed from one city to another, from region to region or from country to country.
From the late nineteenth century, local syndicates also launched various campaigns to embellish their inner cities by constructing small parks and flower beds, putting down benches, organizing house façade and shop window contests or lobbying local authorities for improved street lighting or strict regulations on carpet-bashing.Footnote 47 During the inter-war years, many Belgian and Dutch city administrations also embarked on large-scale projects to renovate their city centres, often partly motivated and justified by the desire to attract more tourists. Even though measures were also taken to modernize the cityscape – in Ghent, for instance, by redeveloping working-class areas and transforming them into upper-class neighbourhoods with large avenues, lush parks and classy Art Nouveau architecture – there was also an unmistakable tendency to historicize the heart of the city. In various cities, the cathedrals, belfries, city halls and other monuments were restored to their former glory after decades of neglect, or completely rebuilt in a faux-vieux Gothic or Renaissance style. Even entire blocks of houses or neighbourhoods were cleared to give tourists the opportunity to stroll through a seemingly unblemished historical area.Footnote 48 Evidently, the idea of restoring heritage to boost tourism (and to serve other commercial, civic and political purposes) was not exclusive to Belgium or the Netherlands, as similar projects appeared elsewhere in Europe. However, the eagerness and energy with which the urban landscape was historicized in the Low Countries was unusual.Footnote 49
During the post-war years, local TIOs and the national boards for tourism intensified their multi-media campaigns through traditional channels such as posters, flyers, slide shows and (holiday) fairs, but also experimented with newer media. In 1964, the Belgian broadcasting company (BRTN) came up with Postiljon (Coachman), a weekly radio show during which Jean Lambin presented a cornucopia of alluring destinations for excursions, weekend trips or longer holidays in Belgium or abroad.Footnote 50 Later on, the BRTN developed a series of popular television shows on tourism, such as the popular Boeketje Vlaanderen (A Bouquet of Flanders) in the 1980s, where, again, the Cities of Art were extensively covered.Footnote 51 By the early 1960s, the Amsterdam VVV, together with the Dutch airline KLM, launched an unprecedently expensive campaign to attract thousands of American tourists with ‘free hospitality packages’, while in the 1980s the troubled municipality shamelessly copied the famous ‘I love NY’ brand with an ambitious ‘Amsterdam has it’ campaign.Footnote 52 It illustrates how quickly new marketing initiatives travelled from one country to another and were eagerly copy-and-pasted.
The application of all these different media also illustrates that the tourism market was changing under the influence of a slow-burn democratization. National services for tourism and local TIOs were well aware of this evolution. From its early beginnings in the late nineteenth century, promotion had always been targeted at two groups: on the one hand, the moneyed, international, bourgeois tourist from the United Kingdom, France, Germany and other neighbouring countries who spent their holidays in the Low Countries; on the other hand, the equally well-heeled Belgian and Dutch upper and higher middle class, who had the time and money to embark on frequent day and weekend trips to explore their own cities. Due to the slow but sure democratization of tourism, promotion changed tack during the inter- and post-war years to also target working-class tourists. Widening social groups had to learn to appreciate and visit the Cities of Art, and were soon also steered, even more prominently, towards the wider landscape of forests, countryside and sea dunes – green spaces, all thought to have a healing and soothing effect on prevailing class tensions. In the 1950s and 1960s Belgium’s national railway company (NMBS), for instance, launched a campaign ‘Een dagje uit naar …’ (A day trip to…) classic destinations such as Bruges, Antwerp or Liège, but also to smaller (unknown) towns such as Oudenaarde, Tienen, Herentals and Maaseik, which targeted middle- or working-class tourists.Footnote 53 From the mid-1960s, TIOs also discovered and tried to tap the growing niche market of youth tourists, especially in Amsterdam, ‘the Magical Centre of Europe’.Footnote 54
‘Software’ – frozen in time versus unbridled modernity
Foreign travellers had portrayed the Low Countries and their cities in very specific ways in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Looking through a lens that was coloured by romanticism and the ideal of the picturesque, they predominantly painted a picture of a society frozen in time. Not only the famous ‘villes mortes’ (ghost towns) along the Dutch Zuiderzee, but also Amsterdam, Rotterdam and cities such as Leiden were predominantly depicted by travel literature and tourist guides as tranquil remnants of past glory, and Amsterdam and its hundreds of canals as the ‘Venice of the North’.Footnote 55 The well-worn epithet, which was also used for Bruges and a range of other cities, perfectly illustrates the international nature of tourism promotion, although this ‘software’ remains less studied than the ‘hardware’ or the ‘orgware’ discussed above. For Belgian cities, most tourists – and their guides – focused on medieval and Renaissance architecture, Flemish primitives and Baroque sculpture, carillon music, beguines clad in their traditional attire, boys with dog carts and other charming details that carried travellers, eagerly trying to ‘unsee’ modern evolutions, back to the Middle Ages or other days of yore. Especially in Belgium, where the industrial revolution had spread like wildfire, steamboats and trains were quickly introduced, and a vibrant cultural life developed, it was quite a stretch to develop such a tourist gaze.Footnote 56
However, as recent research has revealed, from the late nineteenth century onwards, Die Roya, Malines-Attractions and other syndicats actively embraced such a framing and even wore it as a badge of honour. Flyers, posters and other forms of marketing deliberately branded the Belgian Cities of Art as time machines where tourists could take a trip back to the late Middle Ages or the sixteenth century. Urban administrations even tried to mould the urban historical ‘hardware’ into a form that would please these heritage tourists. Modernity was present, but it was always on the margins of the overpowering historical image that local TIOs tried to sell.Footnote 57 In Amsterdam and Rotterdam, by contrast, tourists were more actively stimulated to marvel at key symbols of modernity, not only the monumental buildings of the Amstel Hotel, Rijksmuseum and the Central Station (in historicist styles), but also the new harbour infrastructure, the central abattoir and the modern sewer installations.Footnote 58 Traditionally, history and modernity were the core elements used to brand a city as an alluring tourist destination, although the perfect blend between these two ingredients varied across time and place.
Both aspects – the historical and the modern city – reappeared in the post-war marketing of Belgian and Dutch towns. Due to a lack of research, it is difficult to determine how local TIO policies changed in the 1950s, 1960 and 1970s. But a quick scan of the posters, flyers and other promotional materials reveals that the same old tropes were slowly but surely squeezed dry. For instance, in Mechelen, the local TIO tried to lure foreign and local visitors with dreary (photographic) representations of the spire of St Rumbold’s church or the Gothic façade of the city hall, while the summer carillon concerts were placed in the limelight. It was a slightly modernized version of the marketing campaigns that had been appearing since the 1930s.Footnote 59 In a similar vein, Ghent tried to attract international tourists and local day trippers with the (outdated) brand of a ‘Bloemenstad’ (City of Flowers).Footnote 60 It remains a moot question whether these cities were really successful in tapping new markets – or even maintaining the status quo – with these anaemic campaigns. Figures speak volumes. During Les Trente Glorieuses, the market share of the Belgian Cities of Art barely grew. Amsterdam actively tried to broaden its reputation by selling the city as a mecca of creativity, tolerance and permissiveness – starting with a ‘Meet the Provos!’ campaign in 1966. But the increase in sex and drugs tourism also came at a price.Footnote 61 It would take new images (‘software’), innovative media (‘hardware’) and novel organizations (‘orgware’) to boost cities in a more successful way, and to turn them into a premium tourist product. That, however, is predominantly a story of the twenty-first century.
New perspectives: this special issue
This special issue presents new research on Belgian and Dutch urban tourism promotion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather than diving deeper into well-established themes, the articles explore new directions of research by focusing on the significance of hitherto- unfamiliar and under-researched strategic occasions (world expositions), new media (lantern slides and shows), institutions (art museums), professional actors (architects) and political and social contexts (German occupation during World War II). Methodologically, the articles build on extensive archival research and discursive analysis to innovative methods in digital humanities. They explore urban tourism promotion in capital cities such as Amsterdam and Brussels, ‘second cities’ such as Antwerp, Ghent and Liège as well as smaller cities such as Spa and Namur.
Since London’s Great Exhibition in 1851, world fairs have played a major role in promoting tourism to global metropolises. By the end of the nineteenth century a wide variety of ‘second’ and ‘third’ cities eagerly started to organize them, too, as a means to attract international attention and visitor flows. In her contribution to this special issue, Silke Geven illuminates how world fairs in Belgium were not actually used just as a touristic flywheel for the receiving host city. Other Belgian cities and their local promotional organizations got, and took, the chance to touristically promote ‘their city’ at the world fairs as well. In the first decades of the twentieth century, more and more Belgian cities made use of these moments of exceptional international attention to promote the tourist attractions that urban places in Belgium could offer. Such ‘city pavilions’ were almost exclusive to Belgian fairs and underline the importance given to local associations and governments in building up national – Belgian – tourist promotion from the bottom up. The abovementioned notion of ‘Kunststeden’ (Cities of Art) was central here as a brand that could be successfully employed by the nation-state only with the full participation and support of the different local organizations in Belgium.
The development of and shifting representations of cities in the increasing variety of promotional media – from newspaper advertisements and posters to Hollywood films, identified as ‘hardware’ above – have attracted substantial historical attention. In their contribution Margo Buelens-Terryn, Ilja Van Damme and Thomas Smits focus on the development and significance of a new medium which until now has remained unexplored: lantern slides and lantern lectures. Organized by a wide variety of elitist clubs, educational institutions and other associations active in Belgium society life at the turn of the century, illustrated lantern lectures on Belgium cities and towns became a respectable form of educational entertainment in Belgium, offering both explanations and photographic views of Belgium cities to interested attendants. Buelens-Terryn, Van Damme and Smits argue that lantern slides should be reappreciated as important media in popularizing and defining key touristic imagery used for branding and civic identity construction at the start of the twentieth century. The authors demonstrate the continuous dominance of a rather stereotypical picturesque representation of the Belgian urban landscape. With few exceptions, lantern slides depicted the unavoidable Cities of Art as somewhat quaint historical cities near canals and waterways – clearly aligning with other media and activities of tourism promotion at that time. As a result, the ‘new’ medium of lantern projecting primarily promoted and solidified rather ‘traditional’ images of historical cities in a swiftly changing world, as destinations to be consumed primarily by tourists of higher social status.
By the first half of the twentieth century, the traditional medium of urban guidebooks developed new ways to see and appreciate cities, for both traditional and new types of visitors. In her analysis of Amsterdam guidebooks, Sophie van Ginneken shows how the seventeenth-century buildings dating from the ‘Golden Age’ continued to be prominently represented, but how, increasingly the historical city was represented and appreciated in the form of urban ensembles, including the canal zone. In the inter-war period, guidebooks also steered the tourist gaze to new social housing projects and public buildings constructed by architects of the Amsterdam School and the modernist movement in the 1920s and 1930s. In both developments, Van Ginneken argues, contemporary Dutch architects played a stimulating and indeed significant role, not only by giving authors of guidebooks new information or by co-authoring guidebooks themselves, but also by connecting tourism promoters directly and indirectly to the international network of modernist architects and turning their professional and tourist gazes on the Dutch capital.
Indeed, with the increasing attention historians are devoting to the role of commercial and state-sponsored tourist associations and TIOs, the role of professionals in the artistic and heritage sector in urban tourism promotion definitely deserves more attention too. In his contribution to this theme issue, Gerrit Verhoeven studies the promotional activities and media images developed by the Musées royaux du Cinquantenaire (Royal Museums of Art and History) in Brussels to both market themselves and Brussels between 1919 and 1939. As the gradual democratization of tourism, hyperinflation in the 1920s and the depression in the 1930s made Belgium a relatively ‘cheap’ country for foreign tourists, the Royal Museums developed a new, proactive media campaign aimed at drawing in ever more, and more socially diverse, visitors. To do so, it increasingly looked to the United States: not only to bring in wealthy tourists, but also for inspiration in devising original publicity stunts and marketing campaigns. The innovative cooperation between the Royal Museums and the fashionable Brussels department store Le Bon Marché successfully helped to pave new avenues for urban tourism promotion, which became much more dominant in the post-war age.
At the start of World War II, foreign tourism to Belgian and Dutch cities came to a complete standstill. The promotion of urban tourism, however, did not. In the final contribution to this special issue, Jan Hein Furnée discusses how during the German occupation the Amsterdam tourist association VVV continued to ceaselessly promote domestic tourism, achieving quite remarkable results: between 1940 and 1943 the number of domestic tourists and overnight stays in the city rose by no less than, respectively, 43 and 28 per cent. Yet much more important, he argues, was the changing role of the tourist association in the local society of Amsterdam. As the institutional nexus between the German-controlled municipal authorities, local entrepreneurs, tourists and local citizens, the VVV played a significant role in promoting the return to ‘normality’ and an acceptance of aspects of a new normal in the Dutch capital. In a wide variety of initiatives, it encouraged domestic tourists and local inhabitants – largely ignoring the gradual exclusion of Jews – to continue a public life of amusement, cultural enrichment and identification with local and national heritage. The significance of urban tourism promotion as a topic of historical research, we might conclude, extends beyond the history of tourism or shifting representations of cities: it also, and fundamentally, concerns creating urban societies at large.
Open access
