Distant at Your Leisure: Consuming Distance as a Leisure Experience

Abstract

Leisure is frequently portrayed as an activity that takes place somewhere specific, such as the home, a sports club or a theme park. It should therefore be reasonably straightforward to argue that physical distance plays a role for leisure, and that leisure has an obvious spatial dimension when leisure is understood as physical activities that people undertake in their free time. But other than leisure being the activities that people undertake in their time off work (Appadurai, 1986), leisure is also discussed as the perceived voluntary engagement in an activity (Neulinger, 1981). Here the leisure label is a result not of the type of activity undertaken, nor of the place where it is conducted, but is dependent on the state of mind in which any given activity is performed. This understanding of what it means to be at leisure challenges a discussion of what spatiality of leisure is, and accentuates that the relationship between distance and leisure is one that needs unpacking for the purpose of painting a clearer picture of the spatiality of leisure. In this chapter, the argument is brought forward that understanding the spatiality of leisure unavoidably involves positioning leisure and distance, whether this distance be physical or relative (a distinction that shall be made clearer through the cause of this chapter). This chapter will present a contribution to a discussion of the spatiality of leisure through a focus on exploring what role distance has for leisure experiences.