THE PHENOMENA OF URBAN NOSTALGIA UNDER THE BACKGROUND OF GLOBALIZATION AND ITS GEOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE
LI Fan1,2, HUANG Wei1,2
1. Tourism Departmen, Foshan University, Foshan 528000, China;
2. Center for Land Resources Environment and Tourism Research, Foshan University, Foshan 528000, China
Abstract Modernity, globalization and urbanization have worked together in gendering contemporary nostalgic phenomena as urban nostalgia becomes a prevalent socio-cultural landscape and an important topic which has drawn scholarly attention both at home and abroad. The paper reviews domestic and foreign literature, comments on and summarizes the current situation of researches on urban nostalgia both at home and abroad as well as progresses made in them from the perspective of cultural geographical studies. Previous researches indicate that studies of urban nostalgia have penetrated into many fields as researches taken on urban nostalgia from multiple perspectives by overseas scholars of cultural geographical studies include the forming and working mechanism of urban nostalgia space in nations going through their post-colonial and post-communist periods. However, geographical researches on urban nostalgia are relatively rare nationwide. The paper points out that against the background of globalization and rapid urbanization in contemporary Chinese cities, social cultures have been undergoing tremendous changes and a re-surge of urban nostalgic power has just begun to envelope many of these cities, which offers an excellent perspective to urban cultural geographical researches. We propose that researches should integrate cultural geographical studies with relevant theories and by adopting the perspective of man-land relationship, analyze the forming, classifying, characterizing, temporal-spatial evolving mechanisms and dynamics of urban nostalgia space and interpret the reading of urban nostalgia space through urban nostalgic cultural landscape and the influences of place identity, so as to uncover the interrelationship among urban memory, geographical imagination, place identity and its construction in the forming and evolving processes of urban nostalgia space.
2012, Vol. 27 
