Open AccessCity Tour Guides: Urban Alchemists at Work
Author(s) -
Wynn Jonathan R.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
city & community
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.973
H-Index - 35
eISSN - 1540-6040
pISSN - 1535-6841
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-6040.2010.01322.x
Subject(s) - vision , sociology , serendipity , alchemy , ethnography , narrative , fieldnotes , aesthetics , urban landscape , scale (ratio) , mythology , work (physics) , archetype , media studies , social science , history , geography , epistemology , anthropology , art , art history , cartography , engineering , literature , philosophy , environmental planning , mechanical engineering , classics
Urban sociology, often and quite reasonably, emphasizes the effects of large‐scale and corporate cultures of cities and yet, at the smaller scale, there is a diverse and complex set of practices that reinvigorate the urban landscape. By pairing ethnographic fieldnotes with interviews, this paper offers a limited rejoinder to these narratives, evincing the lived interactions of one set of characters that reenchants cities. For the purposes of this article, walking tour guides serve as examples of “urban alchemists,” and three of their practices are advanced for discussion: their use of myths and revelatory stories to uproot banal visions of the city; their aim to incorporate chance and serendipity into their interactions; and their attempts to transform their participants into “better” urban dwellers.