M.A. (Tourism & Hospitality Management) / Urban tourism is a growing sector of the tourism market therefore many large cities in developed and developing countries have adopted tourism-led approaches to urban regeneration. Urban tourism now forms part of the South African local and regional economic development strategies of all major cities such as Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, East London and Bloemfontein. Cultural tourism in turn is perceived as the fastest growing type of tourism in the world, and can function as a powerful tool in urban regeneration and transformation. Urban regeneration has the potential to produce economic benefits, improve physical environment, inner-city image and the welfare of city residents. The focus of the study was to explore the role of Newtown Cultural Precinct as a tool for urban regeneration, local economic growth and increasing tourist flows to the Johannesburg inner-city. Data was collected using mix-methods designs. In the first phase qualitative data was collected from various stakeholders involved in the development and management Newtown Cultural Precinct, and in the second phase quantitative data was collected from both domestic and international tourists visiting the cultural precinct. The result of the study reveals that Newtown Cultural Precinct serves as a ‘catalyst’ for urban regeneration and shows great potential in stimulating local economic growth and attracting a greater number of visitors into the Johannesburg inner city. Newtown Cultural Precinct has achieved, so far, some of the benefits of urban regeneration such as turning Newtown into a safe, secure, vibrant and friendly environment, improving social dimension of city residents, creating easy access into Newtown as well as positive perceptions of the image of Johannesburg inner-city.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Urban Studies, Johannesburg 2016 / Like many cities around the world Johannesburg began marketing to attract tourists in the 1990s. Johannesburg has in the last couple of years become a ‘hot’ tourism destination and is increasingly ranked among the top global tourist destinations. Tourist cities market their cultural, historical shopping, entertainment and lifestyle attractions to attract tourists and wealthy residents. They also regenerate older historical districts or build new attractions in the form of high profile infrastructure and architecture. To attract tourists, cities use discourse to represent themselves in certain ways to the prospective tourist. This discourse found in tourism marketing and other communications; creates certain expectations or commonly held imaginings of a city as a tourism destination. These are referred to as tourism imaginaries. In cities these ‘tourism imaginaries’ become absorbed as urban imaginaries that shape not only tourist spaces, but the whole city. The research aims to deconstruct the imaginaries represented in Johannesburg’s tourism marketing to understand how tourism is shaping Johannesburg in line with this view. Discourse analysis is used as a method to achieve this. Michel Foucault understood discourse as a system of representation, where discourse is a way of creating meaning by representing knowledge and exercising power around a subject at a certain time in history and in a particular way. Besides the content analysis of the tourism marketing, the discourse analysis also captured how tourism businesses in three case study sites namely Newtown Precinct, Vilakazi Street and Montecasino Entertainment Complex have responded to the discourses in the City’s tourism marketing. A central argument made is that the drive to create tourist cities reinforces rather than reduces power inequalities and creates further fragmentation by creating pockets of exceptionalism reserved for tourists. The research contributes to the recent interest in the cultural and political understandings of cities which considers the often invisible or overlooked manifestations of power that shape cities. In the research tourism imaginaries are conceptualised as central in the generation and shaping of social practices in the City. It was concluded that the move to create tourist cities has given tourists and other tourism actors symbolic power, shaping the city by remote control, and therefore reinforcing global power dynamics that have shaped the world since colonial times. / XL2018