by Aditya Luthra

Today, tourism is among the world's largest industries. Millions of tourists traipse around the globe, visiting sites, taking photographs, reading guidebooks, straining to listen to tour guides and purchasing postcards and souvenirs. The past two centuries have witnessed an increase in the co modification of tourist sites across the world. Everything from historic monuments to exotic holiday destinations have been redesigned and packaged for mass consumption via various venues of mass media, scholarship and popular myth. As a result, the histories of specific structures, spaces and sites have been reconceptualized. Some have been preserved and celebrated, whereas others are left to decay. In this process of amplification and suppression, buildings, cities and entire countries have been remapped by Tourism initiatives to serve political, cultural, economic and scholarly goals.