Tourism and Voyeurism in Heterotopia’s: The Role of Perception and Information in the Behaviour of Visitors to Amsterdam

Abstract

Tourists are not only regular visitors of important distinct places of interest. In making their decisions what or where to visit, they are also influenced by the (expected or realized) observed behaviour of others. A particularly interesting case of such social externalities is formed by so-called ‘voyeurism’, the phenomenon that visitors are visibly interested in—and attracted by—the preservice and spatial motives and behaviours of other visitors. Essentially, voyeurists derive their visitor utility from the observable behaviour of others, e.g. by watching them or speculating on their motives when they pass by. The present paper offers a novel empirical approach to these issues; it focuses on tourist voyeurism in the Red Light District of Amsterdam, with an emphasis on two well-known characteristic phenomena in this area, viz. prostitution and soft drugs. On the basis of existing literature that has demonstrated the importance of tours as an educative tool for tourists, we analyse if and how the perceptions of visitors have changed, through a panel study of 29 foreign students, and identify changes in their perceptions, after they have been exposed to real-world and site-specific factual information on this area, inter alia through a professionally guided field tour. Tools used in the present paper to analyse the voyeurism phenomenon—based on a before and after experiment—are multivariate analysis and regression techniques, while as a start a content cloud analysis is employed as an introductory exploratory tool. It turns out that information provision by a tour may change the site perceptions of voyeurists, but less so their value systems on the objects or people observed.