From landscape to mindscape

Abstract

The cultural attributes of architecture in touristic cities are vital to city image building, city branding, and rebranding, as well as generating more economic profits for sustainable urban development, and protecting cultural sustainability. However, many studies on this theme focus on the singularity of architecture referring to its stylistic or morphological definitions, lacking attention to visitors' cultural experiences in the architectures. Considering the importance of personal experience involved in cultural activities as a process of spatial narration through which architecture makes sense to visitors and generates cultural values, the aim of this paper is to reveal the respective correlations between different types of architecture regarding the cultural experience it imparts and the non-positive dimensions of the city image. This research builds a categorization system of three cultural types of architecture, and designs a questionnaire to collect tourists' personal opinions concerning architectures and the city image of Amsterdam's waterfront in order to calculate such correlations statistically. The results associate architectures with 'tourism-oriented', 'present/process-based', and 'mass' cultural types with non-positive dimensions of city image, which leads to further discussions of 'authenticity', 'identity', and 'mass culture', suggesting the significance of urban cultural policies and local communities in terms of city rebranding.