Building the Post-Bilbao City by Wrecking it: Disaster Tourism on the Rise

I have long been suggesting that the affective city will one day tire of Guggenheim-Bilbao style formalist architecture. If the urban screen was a threat, it seems increasingly clear that if you want your city to succeed, you need to destroy buildings, not build them. At Joi Ito’s blog, Thomas Crompton points us to a piece he wrote for the International Herald Tribune on the newest form of tourism: Disaster Tourism. In London, Ufi Ibrahim, vice president of the London-based World Tourism and Travel Council writes of the period after the London bombings, "It was almost as if people who stayed away after the bomb attack then decided to come back twice." Tsunami-inundated areas are reporting an upswing in tourism over pre-tsunami levels.

I have long been suggesting that the affective city will one day tire of Guggenheim-Bilbao style formalist architecture. If the urban screen was a threat, it seems increasingly clear that if you want your city to succeed, you need to destroy buildings, not build them. At Joi Ito’s blog, Thomas Crompton points us to a piece he wrote for the International Herald Tribune on the newest form of tourism: Disaster Tourism. In London, Ufi Ibrahim, vice president of the London-based World Tourism and Travel Council writes of the period after the London bombings, "It was almost as if people who stayed away after the bomb attack then decided to come back twice." Tsunami-inundated areas are reporting an upswing in tourism over pre-tsunami levels.