Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

1 Setting the Scene

The terraces on the Ramblas in Barcelona or the Champs-Elysées in Paris attract every day thousands of visitors. Notwithstanding the relaxed atmosphere on these beautiful boulevards, it is hard to imagine that these massive volumes of visitors are exclusively attracted by the urban cultural-historical amenities of these boulevards. Both Barcelona and Paris have clearly much more to offer outside the Ramblas or the Champs-Elysées. But the terraces on these places are every day jampacked with tourists. If cultural-historical assets are not the main drivers of these tourists, what else can then be the explanation for such high concentrations of visitors?

The proposition put forward in this paper is that a specific form of social capital, viz. a continuous flow of visitors passing by and to be seen by others, offers a major explanation for tourist density. This phenomenon—known in economics as social externalities—is called voyeurism, which refers to the desire of a specific group of visitors that aims at observing the visible behaviour—or speculating on the intentions or features—of other visitors, even without necessarily identifying themselves with their behaviour or their intentions and without explicitly revealing their objective to observe others. The phenomenon of voyeurism has often a negative connotation, but in reality it may be seen as a normal social perception phenomenon. Voyeurism refers essentially to a meta-experience obtained by watching others, and may lead to a subjective interpretation of—or speculation on—the behaviour of other visitors. What are the motives and intentions of other visitors? It is of course an intriguing question to know what happens if full information were available on the real behaviour, goals or motives of the observed visitors. Would full information change the perception of observers? This would normally call for a panel study, based on a before and after experiment. But in reality, it is difficult to get tourists or visitors involved in a time-consuming panel experiment on their motives and intentions.

Voyeurism in the tourist sector is often also related to watching illegal or unconventional behaviour of others, for instance, of football hooligans or anarchists. Clearly, there is a wealth of literature on the statistical relationship between tourism and illegal activities in general (see e.g. Barker et al. 2002; Brunt et al. 2000; Pelfrey 1998; Walker and Page 2008), but another strand of literature, i.e. the attractiveness to visitors of places offering a sense of criminality, scariness or illegality, is much less developed (see e.g., Meschkank 2011; Mura 2010; Thurnell-Read 2009; Zerva 2013).

This phenomenon is sometimes called gang tourism, slum tourism, gaze tourism (Maoz 2006) or even—in a mild way— adventure tourism. The idea behind this type of tourism is that visitors have the opportunity—normally in the form of a supervised or guided tour—to be spectators of unconventional behaviour of others. The places or districts in a city where less conventional or less standard type of behaviour can be seen or perceived are sometimes called ‘heterotopia’s’ (Foucault 1984, 1986), or also ‘backstages’ (Goffman 1959).

The present paper aims to shed some light of the perception change of tourists visiting heterotopias under a voyeuristic spirit. Adding the information provided by a professional tour guide, how does this service change the voyeur’s perception and values on delicate matters such as prostitution and soft drugs consumption? An application of the analytical framework is offered for the city of Amsterdam, based on a systematic interview experiment with a participation of foreign students, in which prior and posterior perceptions and views are compared, after a guided information field tour on the organization of ‘unconventional’ tourist attraction sites was organized.

It is of course an intriguing question to know what happens if full information were available on the real behaviour, goals or motives of the observed visitors. Would full information change the perception of observers? This would normally call for a panel study, based on a before and after experiment. But in reality, it is difficult to get tourists or visitors involved in a time-consuming panel experiment on their motives and intentions.

The reason to choose Amsterdam is that the city has the reputation of unusual freedom, in the sense that many visitors perceive the climate in the city as something which is ‘illegal’ or ‘not done’ in their home countries. The Netherlands—often symbolized by Amsterdam—has a liberal legalized framework for often marginalized social activities, in particular, prostitution and soft drugs (see Korf 2002; Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2007). Visitors from all over the world perceive this phenomenon as a high degree of tolerance and enjoy visiting these places in mass volumes, usually without using these services. They just watch the behaviour of the other visitors (Dahles 1998; Beedie 2008). This has even led to many organized tours for tourists in these unconventional areas. Therefore, Amsterdam may be regarded as an ideal place to study voyeurism under particular conditions.

The present study on tourism and voyeurism is organized as follows. After the introductory section which has outlined the aims and scope of this paper, we offer in Sect. 17.2 a concise overview of city marketing or branding for visitors in which some selected relevant studies are briefly described. We then zoom in on the case of Amsterdam as an interesting ‘heterotopia’, from both a behavioural and policy perspective. For our case study, two internationally well-known features of the city are highlighted, viz. window shopping (i.e. prostitution in the Red Light District) and coffee shopping (i.e. sales of soft drugs in a controlled setting). This information is contained in Sect. 17.4. Next, we provide a short description of the respondents (interviewees) in our empirical case study and of the three-stage research approach adopted in regard to a specific class of visitors, viz. foreign students in Amsterdam (Sect. 17.5). Descriptive statistical results of our field work are offered in Sect. 17.6, including pattern recognition results from the survey questionnaire based on a content cloud analysis. Further statistical results from a multivariate principal component analysis and an econometric modelling experiment are given in a subsequent Sect. 17.7, while Sect. 17.8 contains concluding remarks.

2 Concise Review on City Branding in Tourism

The tourism industry has over the past decades turned into a highly dynamic and competitive sector. It has become an international trade sector with a permanently rising economic importance (see Matias et al. 2013). Tourist destinations are increasingly and intensively competing for the favours of tourists, in order to maximize the economic revenues from an ever rising volume of both domestic and foreign visitors. City branding is an important vehicle in this context.

City branding—and the creation of an unique and uniform city image—focuses on the design of an attractiveness profile of the city, to be imagined as an attractive place for working, living, visiting or entertainment, as well as for global investment, while creating a competitive advantage compared to other regions (Neuts et al. 2013), through the reinforcement and smart management of visitors’ perceptions of these cities by relevant target markets (Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2007). Amsterdam has been considered as a city that in the past decades has had many vague slogans branding it without a uniformity in style (“Amsterdam has it”, “Cool City”), until the introduction of “I Amsterdam”, slightly similar to the successful “I ♥ New York” slogan (Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2007). Various investigations have analyzed the image of Amsterdam, characterized as a thematically cohesive inner city (or “waterland”) with its popular windmills and tulips in its surroundings, relating the capital of a seafaring nation and trading empire (Dahles 1998; Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2007), to creating expectations of Vermeer townscapes with tightly packed canal houses and buildings. On the other hand, the city is also known for being the home of a socially and politically tolerated culture of sexual and soft drugs liberalism. The lack of a landmark in the form of e.g. the symbolic importance of the Eiffel Tower is Paris, has directed the promotional marketing of this tourism destination towards the concept of the Holland experience, based on an organized diversity of a city culture, which represents an amalgam of cultural structures and practices localized within a specific space and forming Hannerz’s (1992) organization of cultural diversity among local, national and global products. This dual image between a “wealthy ‘Golden-age’ trading city” and a “radical hippie-Mecca” (Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2007: 17)—which has also revealed a gap in ambitions between the private and public sector—is the basic attraction for tourists (Dahles 1998), as it has been branded as a place where anything may be possible (Van Straaten 2000). This form of ‘mental adventure’ tourism has become an important trade mark of Amsterdam.

Dominated by youth tourism and backpackers, especially from the 1970s onwards, in recent years the city of Amsterdam—being economically and politically interested in attracting more high quality tourism (Neuts et al. 2013)—tries to reorient its present demand away from sex and drugs tourism through urban gentrification. This trend towards more high quality tourism refers to middle-aged, well-educated and economically well-established tourists, who keep a distance from what is considered by some as inappropriate liberalism—which has established a city image of vandalism, personal insecurity and public disorder (Dahles 1998; Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2007)—and who wish to learn about and to experience the motives of the cultural identity of the local residents; that is, these visitors’ objectives refer to cultural tourism (Dahles 1998). Yet, for Neuts et al. (2013), this goal has three handicaps, namely, the possible loss of a unique selling point, the achievement of capacity limitations of existing cultural resources, and the loss of destination competitiveness, since on an European scale and from a cultural perspective, Amsterdam then has to compete with cities like Paris, London, Berlin, Barcelona and Prague, to name a few, while from a regional perspective, it mostly has to compete with The Hague and Rotterdam. Thus, there is a dilemma for tourist policy in the city: abandoning the image of a free haven for sex and drugs means an upscaling of the local tourist market, but perhaps with less of visitors in a competitive European setting. Can Amsterdam maintain its high rank in the European tourist industry, by changing its distinct profile? Amsterdam as a heterotopia will be discussed in the next sector.

3 Amsterdam as a Heterotopia for Voyeurism

Place identity is a major challenge in the tourist sector. It refers to a common sharing of public space reflecting a certain image among locals and visitors. The contribution of a certain space to wealth creation of cities has interested many researchers in the past. Representing a geographical context within which individuals develop their own behavior and interact with each other, space is a product of social structure and role-playing relations (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Andriotis 2010). This context can “give theoretical stories veracity and texture” (Arnould et al. 2006), while it can be sub-divided in as many categories as social structures can allow. Within these spaces, there are particular settings where individuals are liberated from the pressures of everyday life (Andriotis 2010); the tourism industry has been in a constant search of these settings so as to transform them into touristic products supported by city branding.

This type of social space different to other spaces has been called by Foucault (1984, 1986) a “heterotopia”, meaning real places “outside of all places” (p. 24) working as counter-sites of illusion where human life is partitioned and where reordering is possible (Topinka 2010). For Foucault (1984, 1986), heterotopia’s can function in different fashions according to the synchrony of the culture in which it develops; they can juxtapose in a single real place, or in several incompatible spaces; they open into heterochronies, where an individual has an absolute break from traditional time perceptions; they presuppose a system of opening and closing, where access is not free like a public place and entrance requires a certain permission; they function in relation to all the space that remains either by creating a space of illusion or of compensation; and finally, they exist in every culture in the form of crisis or deviation. This last form is of most interest in our case, where individuals express a behavior that deviates from the required or officially adopted norm. In the investigation of Andriotis (2010), a particular case of beach heterotopia was studied, where the physical space of the beach, the behavior of its users deviating from the heterosexual norm, and a community tolerance towards that activity left grounds for that space to be interpreted as heterotopia.

For Foucault (1986), some of the visitors of these heterotopia’s are called ‘guests in transit’, meaning visitors with no involvement in the culture they visit, observing behaviours and activities foreign to what s/he is accustomed to. These guests are not engaged in activities with locals, remaining out of contact with them through sightseeing (Boorstin 1961). As outlined in Sect. 17.1, one way of sightseeing is known as ‘voyeurism’. A voyeuristic personality is defined as “one who seeks stimulation by visual means” (Blazer 2006: 379). For Calvert, western countries have become nations of voyeurists, where the individual “gets pleasure from watching other’s lives without having to interact with them” (2000: 80), influenced by television programs, such as reality shows, that appeal to their curiosity and make them passive spectators. The more deviated from the norms the lives of the people observed are the higher the voyeuristic tendency is; and the more frequent the contact with such a content is, the lower the empathy of the voyeur is (Landwehr 2011), while new technological devices allow voyeurist to easily record their subject (Carvert 2000).

4 Two Attractiveness Vectors of Amsterdam

Although the city of Amsterdam has a wealth of tourist attraction forces (architecture, political history, water management, arts and culture etc.), it has over the past decades gained a reputation as a free haven for tolerance and liberalism, in particular in regard to two functions of its Red Light District, viz. prostitution and soft drugs. These two facts will now briefly be described.

4.1 Red Light District and Prostitution

Amsterdam accommodates one of the most famous red light districts in Europe, called De Wallen or De Walletjes (Aalbers and Deinema 2012). Representing the sex capital of Western Europe (Ashworth et al. 1988) or adult theme parks (Aalbers and Sabat 2012; Neuts 2016), De Wallen has developed into a visible, safe and legal area of sex-related activities in the zone of Zeedijk, on the south-east part of the city, between and next to the Central Station and the symbolic city square De Dam.

The geographic setting where prostitution generally takes place depends on conflicting powers within cities (Aalbers and Sabat 2012), raised by how it is being socially perceived (Hubbard and Whowell 2008). We will offer here first a concise general description of this complex force field.

In general, in most societies, prostitutes have been marginalized as the exotic, erotic and demonized feminine Other (Hubbard 1998; Aalbers and Sabat 2012), characterized as fallen women or bad girls, and a threat to male bourgeois values (Roberts 1992), since they play with their fears and fantasies, challenging the dominant notions of socially respectable feminine sexuality, and defile the purity of the streets. The body and its parts are the basic instrument that expresses the other, and through commodification, prostitution transforms it from a human category into an object of economic and emotional desire (Sharp 2000). This body commodification of window prostitutes is highly visible in the Amsterdam Red Light District (Hubbard 1998), where the pleasure if looking at the Other as an erotic object endorses voyeurism, often in a passive form but also in a participative one (Ryan and Martin 2001).

Thus, the prostitute (mostly—though not exclusively—a female one), often considered aesthetically and morally offensive, stigmatized and stereotyped as the cause of environmental and social problems of inner city areas, is associated with dark and dangerous areas, where she is being contained, monitored and regulated, either in the form of ‘out of sight’ or on the street in red light districts (Hubbard 1998). These districts represent liminal spaces, known to be poor, dangerous and deprived, as well as rapidly transformed, where there are blurred boundaries between visibility and invisibility, forming what is named as ‘zones of transition’ (Burgess 1928; Aalbers and Sabat 2012). This moral geography designates where each member of a society appropriately belongs according to the established moral and social structure of that society (Hubbard 1998; Aalbers and Deinema 2012).

Ever since the fourteenth century, the former inner-harbor of Amsterdam was the main reason for the attraction of prostitution and an important commercial activity in the area. In the year 1413, one of the first bye-laws of the City of Amsterdam claimed that prostitution was necessary in big commercial cities (Brants 1998), while the appropriate place for it to develop was the brothel, licensed by local authorities, which determined its location and visibility (Aalbers and Deinema 2012). Since then, social tolerance of the activity of prostitution became a fact in the Netherlands, creating a long social, political and legal tradition, which is the reason why culturally the ‘Dutch solution’ cannot be easily applied in other countries (Brants 1998).

Throughout time, an interplay between pro and against prostitution regulation has taken place in the Netherlands, whether for medical issues of the prostitutes and their clients, or the general image that was created, relating the Netherlands with crime and other vices that went together with prostitution. In 1850, brothel regulation was propagated, while in 1911 the keeping of brothels was criminalized, but not the prostitutes (Brants 1998; Aalbers and Deinema 2012), who were seen as entrepreneurs for their own protection. In the 1950s and 1960s, prostitutes were approached as vulnerable professionals that needed protection and to be re-socialized (Boutellier 2008). The Red Light District of De Wallen became a tolerated spectacle for the remaining residents and the non-related sex entrepreneurs on the area, combining danger and crime with excitement and freedom. This de facto decriminalization of window prostitution (as well as the use and selling of marihuana) is known as ‘gedogen’ in Dutch, meaning a regulated or pragmatic tolerance or a political compromise, under the shadow of criminal law (Brants 1998; Aalbers and Deinema 2012; Aalbers and Sabat 2012).

On October 1st, 2000, the controversial matter of prostitution was legalized (Aalbers and Deinema 2012), accepted as regular labor, governed by market forces (Brants 1998), withdrawing the brothel ban. In time, regulated tolerance came back transforming many old-fashioned brothels to the so-called window prostitution, attracting immigrant prostitutes from the Third World, former Dutch colonies in the West Indies as well as former East-block countries (Brants 1998), while opening lucrative sex clubs and theatres. Prostitutes are now required to be registered to the Chamber of Commerce, declare their earnings and pay taxes, while non-EU nationals need to have a valid working permit (Neuts et al. 2013). Yet, legalization of window prostitution had resulted in illegal and underground prostitution, with an increase in the number of undocumented migrants and under-aged prostitutes (Aalbers and Deinema 2012; Neuts et al. 2013). The passing of prostitution into big business meant the creation of various organized networks which controlled the area through illegal and semi-legal activities, transforming De Wallen from a romantic and safe part of the city during the 1960s to a no-go area during the 1990s.

A governmental entrepreneurial strategy to spatially redevelop the historical core of Amsterdam is reflected in the so-called Plan 1012 (or ‘Operation 1012’ or ‘Coalition Project 1012), launched in 2007 and named after the zip code of the district (Aalbers and Deinema 2012). This Plan focuses on the rebranding of Amsterdam’s destination image so as to attract upper-scale cultural tourists, and more particularly on the reduction of criminal and abusive activities realized by marginalized social groups (such as prostitutes, junkies and enterprises like coffee shops and cheap tourist shops), and on the economic upgrade of the area, through gentrification based on public-private partnerships, like NV Stadsherstel, Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky, ING Real Estate and many more (Aalbers and Sabat 2012; Neuts et al. 2013). Prostitution, despite its tolerance and social recognition, has always been surrounded by the aura of illegal and, thus, the basic aim of the Plan is the reduction of its presence in De Wallen, closing down three-quarters of the windows, a target renegotiated constantly with the City of Amsterdam (Aalbers and Deinema 2012). The licensing system of window prostitution has been regulated, making sure that no more licenses can be offered.

Since the year 2007, window prostitution is reduced by 23 % through a windows exchange for a municipal zoning plan, and property sale to public or private cooperatives (where financial compensation of approximately 150,000 euros per window is given to the brothel owner), and expropriation (Neuts et al. 2013). Nonetheless, the desired and programmed situational improvement is not that evident and the reason for that is gentrification, because it can destroy the basis of attraction of a particular space. The decline of window prostitution is not the result of the decline of prostitution in general, but of its displacement from De Wallen, and its spatial—and occasionally short-term—substitution by the creative industry (meaning shops, ateliers, galleries, exhibitions and minimalist restaurants) in the center of the De Wallen (Aalbers and Deinema 2012). What many refer to as ‘restoring the balance’, basically has to do with hiding prostitution from the public eye, that is, making the relationship between sex, power and money no longer visible (Hubbard 1998, 2004), which is one of the most important tourist attractions of the area (Ashworth et al. 1988; Wonders and Michalowski 2001; Hubbard and Whowell 2008).

There is a clear connection between the sex and the tourism industry, which coexist spatially and economically, since prostitution has been considered as a leisure activity (Rojek 2000; Ryan and Martin 2001; Aalbers and Sabat 2012), while its clients, who are to an important degree tourists, need accommodation, restaurants and other tourist services. The economic profitability of the window brothels and the power of this ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999) is without doubt the reason why new industries (unrelated to the sex industry) are reluctant in investing in the area and in achieving the profit levels of red light activities (Neuts et al. 2013). The Red Light District in Amsterdam is attracting approximately three million visitors a year (Hubbard and Whowell 2008), while many tours are in charge of guiding tourists and voyeurists around the district, explaining the actual local situation of prostitution and its related unconventional activities.

4.2 Red Light District and Coffee Shops

The control and concentration of cannabis markets in the Netherlands became a vital issue for the local authorities and civic movements willing to protect middle-class youth from an uncontrolled contact with the drugs market, and particularly becoming marginalized and stigmatized. The nation’s alternative as well as pragmatic orientation on the particular matter was called ‘learning by doing’ (MacCoun 2011), establishing the above mentioned so-called ‘gedogen’ policy (as previously mentioned in the case of prostitution), which in this case would refer to a certain degree of legal protection and tolerance of some segments of the soft drugs market in exchange for an unproblematic social behavior (Van der Veen 2009). The priority of the police and judicial authorities is focused on large-scale drugs trafficking and production (Monshouwer et al. 2011). In an effort to separate the hard and soft drugs market, distancing the cannabis buyer from hard drugs users and sellers (called the ‘getaway theory’, see in MacCoun 2011), and to standardize an economic sector what was formally illegal, Dutch authorities invented the coffee shop system. The latter began from the beginning of the 1970s, where some houses in Amsterdam that sold cannabis and hashish were developed into coffee shops (Van der Veen 2009). Their number increased during the 1980s, due to official non-enforcement guidelines and unclear directions from the government, leading during the 1990s to less desirable features of tolerance, that is, criminal activity. For this reason, many municipalities have decided to have no coffee shops within their jurisdiction (Van der Veen 2009). On an international level, though similar initiatives have been applied in countries like Canada, Switzerland, Thailand or the Amazon region (Uriely and Belhassen 2006; Van der Veen 2009), the transmissibility of the coffee shop system is highly influenced by cultural perceptions of the state, citizens and market actors in regard to drugs production and consumption.

Coffee shops represent coffee-like places—of a variety of styles and atmospheres—in the Netherlands where the sale of cannabis is tolerated when meeting the so-called AHOJ-G criteria (established in 1996); that is, no advertising, no sale of more than 5 g per person per day, no sale to persons under the age of 18, no sale of hard drugs and no nuisance in the vicinity, while each coffee-shop has a 500 g stock limit (MacCoun 2011; Monshouwer et al. 2011). Yet, in reality, they always have more supplies, renting tax-deductible safe-houses, while for their daily cash flow and administration they have legitimate bank accounts (Van der Veen 2009). Though being a widespread phenomenon in the country, their number is decreasing due to the so-called Damocles’ Law, which allows local governments to close down coffee shops when they do not comply with the rules (Van der Veen 2009; Monshouwer et al. 2011). For example, in 2007, the national government decided to close coffee shops that were too close to schools, eliminating half of the coffee shops in Rotterdam (Van der Veen 2009). Their number reached at the end of 2011, 661 in a total of 104 municipalities, compared to 702 in 2007 (Bieleman et al. 2009, 2012). About half of them are located in the city center of Amsterdam, catering mainly non-locals, since residents will choose to purchase soft drugs in their own neighborhood for reasons of quality and price (Van der Veen 2009).

Quality control from the retailers’ part is a matter of expertise, trust in suppliers and trial, while some have their own plantations or work with specialized wholesale offices (kantoortjes). Generally, the supply of coffee shops with cannabis is known as the “back-door problem” (Monshouwer et al. 2011; MacCoun 2011), based on the need to control intensified cannabis cultivation and trade. In this case, there are no formal regulations regarding the precise conditions under which it can operate properly (Van der Veen 2009). Prices on the other hand, are rather high, especially in touristic areas, in order to cover the owners’ costs of operating retail outlets, taking also in consideration the effects of the ‘gray market’ that exists between the higher level of the supply chain (growers and traffickers)—where the Dutch law enforces prohibition—and the user level—where there is ‘de facto’ legalization (MacCoun 2011; Monshouwer et al. 2011).

Yet, the establishment of the coffee shop system does not mean that in the Netherlands necessarily more cannabis products are consumed than in other countries. The Netherlands occupies a middle position in cannabis consumption by the adult population within Europe (Monshouwer et al. 2011), while countries like France, UK and Germany either match or exceed marihuana use of the Netherlands (Van der Veen 2009; MacCoun 2011). The difference is the open access to what is called in other countries as the forbidden fruit, converting this symbolic social meaning of the coffee shops into an important tourist attraction of the Netherlands (Van der Veen 2009), delivering enhanced economic and social benefits for the hosts, as well as a reputation for deviant tourism-related behaviors and a negative social impact upon the local community (Buultjens et al. 2013). Estimations indicate that a quarter of the 4–5 million tourist visitors in Amsterdam, visit a coffee shop, while 10 % of them state that as a reason of the travel (Amsterdam Tourist Information 2007). Considering that tourism in general is perceived as a legitimate departure from day-to-day behavioural constraints (Goffman 1959), this tourist profile represents what is known as ‘drugs tourism’, meaning the phenomenon of being attracted to locations of permitted access to licit or illicit drugs (Valdez and Sifaneck 1997; Korf 2002). Consumption of drugs is included as a possible activity—studied in terms of risk-taking and ‘controlled decontrol’ behaviour during a tourist visit (Uriely and Belhassen 2006)—, but it is not a necessary condition in order to practice drugs tourism.

4.3 The Role of Tour Guides

Within the tourism industry, one of the most known and safe ways to quickly gaze particular settings of the destination is taking a tour. For Pearce (1984), tourists retain global impressions of the setting they visit through the tour, concerned without necessarily experiencing a radical change of concepts. Yet, the topic of the tour, its setting as well as the role of the tour guide could play an important part in the way tourists end up perceiving the culture visited. Tour guides, usually local ones, are front-line employees responsible for the success of the tour (Geva and Goldman 1991), considered as key actors in providing access to Goffman’s (1959) front stage as well as backstage tourism settings (Holloway 1981) and “localizing” a destination (Salazar 2005), through personal interaction with tourists for a considerable amount of time (Geva and Goldman 1991). The complex content of being a guide is defined in various ways, for example, as one “who leads or shows the way, especially to a traveller in a strange country” (Oxford 1933: IV/490), or “one who directs a person in his ways or conduct” (p. IV/491), or one “who interprets in an inspiring and entertaining manner, in the language of the visitors’ choice, the cultural and natural heritage and environment” (IAMT, EFTGA 1998). The guiding role is multifaceted; a guide can be a pathfinder or a mentor, a leader or a mediator (Cohen 1985), an information-giver and fount of knowledge (Cohen 1985), acquired whether from training or from ‘know-how’, an ambassador for one’s country, a host who creates a comfortable environment for the guest (Pond 1993), or an entertainer for the group (Holloway 1981). Their mission is to provide a deeper insight and understanding of the attractions tourists observe during the tour, solve problems that may occur during the tour (Geva and Goldman 1991), but also they could be more business-oriented, interested in selling particular images, information, or souvenirs in order to receive commission (Salazar 2005).

When tour guides mediate between tourists, locals and the environment, bridging and linking groups of different cultural backgrounds in order to reduce conflicts and enhance understanding on matters that can be interpreted in various ways, they are cultural brokers (McKean 1976; Leclerc and Martin 2004; Reisinger and Steiner 2008). Understanding different cultural systems while mediating cultural incompatibilities allows tourists to gaze—even momentarily—a different cultural context through the eyes of the local. Nonetheless, this is not an essay task, considering that tourists are not an homogeneous group of people, but a mixture of various national cultures, which previous investigations have shown to perceive and react differently to the same information given by the tour guide (Pizam and Sussman 1995; Pizam and Jeong 1996). This process of cultural broking is also known as ‘glocalization’ (Robertson 1994), a term used by Japanese businessmen to express “a global outlook adapted to local conditions” (Tulloch 1991: 134). For Moscardo et al. (2004) this happens, because tourists make links between their current knowledge and perception, and someone else’s interpretations. Perceptions of a destination depends on the information exchange that occurs from an amalgam of sources such as previous guests to the destination, local tourism authorities, local tourism businesses, popular media, and, today, electronic word-of-mouth (Buultjens et al. 2013). According to Geva and Goldman’s investigation (1991), the guide’s influence on the consumers’ perception in terms of conduct and expertise is highly important. Based on marketing strategies which support that “diversity sells”, globalization leads to the construction of new consumer traditions (Salazar 2005), focusing on what tourists have seen, heard, experienced and interpreted.

In the remaining part of this paper we aim to find out which perception tourists from different cultural contexts have on Amsterdam and particularly the Red Light District before visiting it, how they feel about the tolerant liberal policies regarding prostitution and soft drugs consumption, and how they change their perceptions about these sensitive policies after taking a guided and informed tour, taking into consideration that they do not represent sex or drug tourists but ‘voyeurists’. Is the educational role of a tour in the heterotopia visited sufficient to change the tourists’ pre-established perception of the importance of tolerance and legalization of social practices that are experienced differently in their home countries or culture of origin?

5 A Triple-Layer Research Design

The empirical part of the voyeurism research in this study focuses on the information perception and treatment by visitors of the city of Amsterdam. To that end, a dedicated survey questionnaire was designed, which contained both personal items (age, place of origin, etc) as well as perceptional items (on Evaluation of Red Light Phenomena). This survey was next used as a source of information from the participating visitors (i.c., foreign students). In this process, we adopted a triple-layer approach, which means that, once a group of visitors has been selected and been informed on the aims of the research, an extensive survey questionnaire is sent to each of these visitors individually to be filled out by everyone. This questionnaire contains in a systematic form a range of open-ended questions on:

  • general ideas and specific perceptions on the city of Amsterdam prior to their visit (including information sources, assumed behaviour of tourists etc.)

  • specific questions on the Red Light District of Amsterdam, subdivided into items on substitution and on soft drugs (including information on perceptions and rules of conduct in their country of origin).

Next to general informative questions, there was also a set of items to be responded to through close-ended questions, by using a 5-point Likert scale, e.g., on the importance of cultural heritage for tourists, on social policy in the city, on the perceived level of danger in the Red Light District, on information and marketings, on repeat visits etc. This step was the first stage in the triple-layer approach.

The next stage was to organize—a few days after the completion of the prior survey questionnaire—a professionally of 1 hour and a half guided tour through the Red Light District, where a local, qualified expert was providing all relevant and detailed information of the history, the local policy, the social circumstances and much more empirical information on the area concerned.

Finally, in the last stage all participants were asked to fill out a posterior survey questionnaire—of 16 open-ended and 16 close-ended questions, with largely similar items, to test whether the perceptions and value beliefs of these visitors had changed, after they had participated in the field tour and had a chance to discuss all relevant issues among themselves.

Thus, the final data baseFootnote 1 of these visitors comprised two fully completed survey questionnaires on largely similar issues, so that it could be tested whether real information (obtained through a guided tour and information exchange) really mattered for their perceptions on the Red Light District. This was essentially a panel study with two or three waves. We only used in our analysis the survey questionnaires from these visitors who had participated in all three stages.

It goes without saying that it is hardly possible to perform such a panel study in three layers over a time span of approx. a week for regular tourists. And therefore, we used a panel of recently arrived 29 students, mostly from foreign countries all over the world. This means of course a limitation of the class of tourists to students, but this option appeared to be the only realistic possibility to undertake this study on voyeurism in the tourist sector in Amsterdam.

The next section (Sect. 17.6) will be devoted to a descriptive statistical presentation of the main findings from our research.

6 Empirical Research

6.1 Descriptive Statistics of Empirical Findings

The findings from our—prior and posterior—survey questionnaire regarding the 29 participants in our panel of students are now briefly presented and commented on. We will first offer some descriptive statistics in the form of frequency tables and histograms.

Table 17.1 presents some socio-demographic characteristics of the students concerned from all over the world. Most of the respondents examined in our research appear to be male (55 %) (the share of male students from European countries appeared to be 40 %, though).

Table 17.1 Respondent profile
Full size table

In the pre-visit stage of our research, Gender and Country characteristics did not show significant differences in preferences for living in Amsterdam among males (μ: 4) and females (μ: 4), from European and Non-European countries (see Fig. 17.1). Next to Gender and Countries features, this study also shows that more than half of the respondents were between 19 and 21 years old.

Fig. 17.1
figure 1

Frequency of preferences for living in Amsterdam among males and females from European and non-European countries

Full size image

In the survey questionnaire, the respondents were also asked to indicate on a Likert scale (1–5) how they perceived the overall image of Amsterdam as a living and tourism destination, before and after the guided tour in the city of Amsterdam. In the pre-visit stage, the majority of respondents in the categories Gender and Countries (90 %) expressed a strong positive perception (μ: 4) on the overall image of Amsterdam and of the importance of cultural heritage (CH) in the city of Amsterdam (see Table 17.2).

Table 17.2 Pre-visit and post-visit perception on the importance of CH in the city of Amsterdam
Full size table

Their general perception was expected to support mostly tangible CH, such as small charming ‘grachten’ houses, ancient and typical European architecture flavour of styles, historical canals, arts, museums, bridges, churches, buildings, parks, windmills, monuments, Dam square, etc. and to interfere with homogeneous modern socio-economic life, that creates harmony in the city. Their positive perception on the overall image of Amsterdam did not change dramatically after the guided tour. The positive imagination on the overall image of Amsterdam and the important role of CH was highly confirmed by the majority (60 %) in the post-visit stage (see Table 17.3).

Table 17.3 General observations—pre-visit and post-visit perception on the general image of Amsterdam
Full size table

In the post-visit stage the visitors demonstrated much respect and were interested in legendary, protected and isolated areas, downtown areas, the Red Light district, leisure activities or recreation, churches, legislation of drugs and prostitution, bikes, coffee shops, flowers, fishery, nature, parks, landscape, and canal and dike systems. Most of them were also attracted by intangible CH such as art and artists on the streets, diversity, languages, dynamic culture, fashion, freedom, social beliefs, people, vibrant nightlife, tolerance, religions, symbolisms, richness of lifestyles, food, beer, cheese, living, simplicity, and a mixed variety of classic and modern (hidden) architecture style (sometimes related to religious values) and atmosphere of the city of Amsterdam.

The majority of the respondents (69 %) strongly expressed their feeling that the guide did not influence strongly the level of their highly positive perception of the image and the CH in the city of Amsterdam in the post-visit stage, because most of them used various sources of information on Amsterdam in the pre-visit stage.

6.2 Pre-visit and Post-visit Stages: Two Attractiveness Vectors of Amsterdam and the Legal Framework

In this subsection specific questions on the Red light District of Amsterdam, subdivided into items on prostitution and on soft drugs (including information on perceptions and rules of conduct in their country of origin) will be presented. The questions used across all stages for different attractiveness vectors of Amsterdam were the same. This fabricated a framework approach which enabled us to combine and compare findings in our research. Table 17.3 presents the values and beliefs of voyeurists in the pre-visit and post-visit stage regarding their expectations and experience questions surrounding the two attractiveness elements of Amsterdam and its legislation.

  • Pre-visit and post-visit stages comparison: Red Light District and Coffee Shops of Amsterdam

    Pre-visit and post-visit information appears to have a certain impact on the visitors’ perceptions of the various items related to the Amsterdam Red Light District. From Fig. 17.2, it appears that the value and belief of voyeurists in the pre-visit and post-visit stage regarding an appropriate promotion of the Red Light District and Coffee Shops indicate an average perception and belief of μ = 3.00 and μ = 3.67 from a scale 1 to 5, respectively. The average score of the voyeurists indicates that the use of information and the role of tour guides in the two stages still shows more space for improvement to promote adequately the Red Light District and its surroundings. So, even though the tour guide was considered as an information-giver (Cohen 1985) or even a cultural broker (McKean 1976; Reisinger and Steiner 2008) in communicating different cultural systems to a heterogeneous group of tourists, in contradiction to Geva’s and Goldman’s research (1991), his mission to provide a deeper understanding was not fully satisfied. In the pre-visit stage, the majority of the voyeurists (55.5 %) imagined the place to exhibit a ‘Las Vegas’ happy-effect (a surrealistic weird place with prostitutes everywhere in Coffee Shops, pubs and bars and a happiness atmosphere, full of tourists, a night life with sexual and soft drugs-related activities in narrow streets).

    Fig. 17.2
    figure 2

    Pre-visit and post-visit stage: image of Red Light District and coffee shops and its legislation

    Full size image

    Clearly, in the post-visit stage, the value and belief system of voyeurists (62.1 %) regarding the image of the district and its activities regarded the Red Light district and Coffee Shops after the guided tour more as a safety and special open-minded atmosphere with a diversity in styles and themes, and sometimes confusing aspects. In particular, this is a crowded and enjoyable open place with a lot of large windows—where people respect people (high tolerance and freedom of choices) and a professionalism in prostitution (strict regulated by the government)—and rather weird attractions (e.g. ‘eye candies’) and touristic expressions; a well-structured must-see controlled attraction of Amsterdam integrated with businesses, public institutions and surrounded by beautiful facades.

    The value level of safety linked to dangerous images and negative expectations and experiences of voyeurists in the Red Light District and Coffee Shops, as expressed in our questionnaire, was mostly related to consequences for health safety (e.g., addictions) and less to danger (apart from pickpockets) in the area. Their perceptions of danger in the Red Light District and Coffee Shops were generally below average (μ = 2.0), in both stages (pre-visit: 86.2 %; post-visit: 93.15 %) lower than their general imagination and reality experiences of the places and their knowledge of the history of Amsterdam. Therefore, considering the overall value of visiting the Red Light District and Coffee Shops, the majority (72 %) did not express a negative view on incorrect morality (pre-visit μ = 3.7) for site-seeing. This clear preference (post-visit μ = 4.3) was confirmed by the majority (74 %) in the post-visit stage due to the Dutch ‘non-taboo’ culture and the unique character, different atmosphere, new educational experiences, open-minded freedom of choice, high tolerance, safety (also in terms of knowledge of a quality product), and localized and controlled recognized profession and legalization.

  • Pre-visit and post-visit stages comparison: policies on prostitution and soft drugs use

    As a final check on value and belief system, voyeurists were asked if the visit had met their expectations on the social situation of prostitution and soft drugs consumption. A total of 72 % considered the social policies and strictly management (i.e., rules and regulations) related to prostitution and drugs in Amsterdam effective and successful (pre-visit μ = 3.9). This would mean a support for the city’s policy on the new generation with transparency, better control and more possibilities to avoid crime and an illegal economy and the increase in safety and quality of local life and working conditions (i.e., hygiene and health, good image, free market, inclusive part of society) and services (i.e., customer protection). However, 48 % still believes, beside their optimism (post-visit μ = 3.7), that the tour had exceeded their perception, that there is always space for improvement regarding diversity in entertainment, facilities, understanding and knowledge of the use effects and health regulations in the city centre of Amsterdam.

6.3 Content Cloud Analysis on Branding Words as Information Sources on the City

The results from Sects. 17.6.1 and 17.6.2 are further supported by a visualization tool based on a ‘content cloud’ analysis of key elements of the city Amsterdam. A ‘content cloud’ offers a hierarchically decomposed and visualized presentation—often in a multi-colour format—of the most relevant terms used in a scientific text, based on the frequency of their use (see also Kourtit 2014: 177; 2015: 368). It is not a research tool in itself, but merely a visualization method of qualitative information contents. The ‘content cloud’ related to the overall unique selling points (USP) expressed in the pre-visit and post-visit stages promoting the city Amsterdam is presented in Fig. 17.3.

Fig. 17.3
figure 3

A ‘content cloud’ of the key words for the city of Amsterdam, in the (a) pre-visit and (b) post-visit stages

Full size image

Figure 17.3 offers a content cloud mapping of important concepts from the survey questionnaires often used in the city marketing of Amsterdam, such as historical assets, architecture, museums, canals, liberal lifestyle, etc. They more or less confirm the prevailing international image to promote the city of Amsterdam among visitors.

Furthermore, various sources of information on the image of the city Amsterdam are used in the pre-visit stage. The ‘content cloud’ related to information sources regarding the image of the city Amsterdam is presented in Fig. 17.4.

Fig. 17.4
figure 4

A ‘content cloud’ of the key sources of information on the city of Amsterdam, in the pre-visit stage

Full size image

Figure 17.4 demonstrates a variety in the use of information sources, in particular, social networks (e.g., friends, family), professional networks (e.g., international offices at universities, schools, (exchange) students, coordinators), ICT-tools (e.g., Internet, Google Search, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Youtube, Tripadvisor, Iamsterdam, Blogs, university websites, tourist websites), (national and international) travel agencies and journals, books (e.g., ‘One Month Trip to Amsterdam’, Petit futé Amsterdam (French)), followed by words-of-mouth. These sources help the majority (i) to receive reliable and specific information, and (ii) to get a broad understanding and perception on the city and its hidden treasuries, daily liveability and local legislations. A small group did not search for any information in the pre-visit stage, but wanted to experience it all by themselves.

7 Statistical-Econometric Analysis

7.1 Multivariate Analysis

The focus of our survey questionnaire was to understand the value system of tourist voyeurism from different cultural contexts regarding the general image of the city of Amsterdam and its information sources on the city in different time-stages. Tourists are not only standard visitors of important or popular places of interest. In making their decisions what or where to visit, they are also influenced by the expected or realized behaviour of others and the use of information sources on the issue. Despite the relatively small sample in our research, it is interesting to try out some further statistical analysis on the critical importance of various types of social externalities that influence the motives and behaviours of the voyeurism phenomenon in the city of Amsterdam, with an emphasis on two well-known characteristic phenomena in this area, viz. prostitution and soft drugs. Tools used to analyse the voyeurism phenomenon—based on a before and after experiment—are multivariate analysis and regression techniques. Given the small sample size of 29 visitors, our results are to be seen as purely indicative.

A Principal Component Analysis (henceforth, PCA) approach was employed on the various types of social externalities variables, in order to identify important elements in the value system that cause changes in tourist voyeurism perceptions using a 1–5-item scale and open questions, after they have been exposed to real-world and site-specific information on the heterotopia’s of Amsterdam.

First, normality was verified through a Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, as was the quality of the factor analysis through a Barlett’s test and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (above 0.5). These tests all yielded satisfactory results. The factor analysis of the image of Amsterdam in the pre-visit and post-visit stages yielded two factors, with an eigenvalue higher than one, explaining 50 % of the variance of the destination image scale, as depicted in Table 17.4.Footnote 2 A Varimax rotation was applied, to secure a less ambiguous condition between factors and variables (Hair et al. 1998; De Waal and Kourtit 2013). Communalities reproduced the stated variance in the variable through the number of factors in the factor solution. Several variables with a communality lower than 0.4 were removed from the dataset (see also De Waal and Kourtit 2013).

Table 17.4 Factor analysis of image of Amsterdam
Full size table

Table 17.4 allows us to identify the applied varimax-rotated first important factor pattern for the pre-visit stage which may be interpreted as “Governance and Ethical Aspects” (TandEA) (three items) regarding the Red Light District and the use of soft drugs. The second important factor refers to a factor, which may be interpreted as Safety-Health and Tolerance (SHandT) (four items). In the post-visit, the results show an opposite pattern in priority of the main factors. In the post-visit, Safety-Health and Tolerance (SHandT) (three items) is now considered as the most important factor regarding the Red Light District and the use of soft drugs followed by “Governance and Ethical Aspects” (three items).

7.2 An Econometric Experiment

In this section, we analyse the change in the general pre-visit and post-visit value system (a person’s mental imagery of knowledge and overall feeling and perception (see Crompton 1979; Fakeye and Crompton 1991) of voyeurists based on the absorbed selective information regarding the attractiveness vectors in the city of Amsterdam, by using a regression model framework. We aim to test the hypothesis whether generally the beliefs and perceptions of the voyeurists from different cultural contexts in the pre-visit and pro-visit stage tend to attain a positive higher value level of the general city’s image, after participation in a guided and informed tour on the attractiveness (and its legislation) of the city of Amsterdam.

The framing of the ‘pre-visit and post-visit value system’ is related to the general destination image. Accordingly, we consider two distinct indices to test the pre-visit value system regarding the general city image of Amsterdam. These are included in a simple regression model estimated by means of ordinary least squares (OLS) using the database described above, with the original variables measured on a Likert scale. The main—mutually independent—factors from the PCA (see Table 17.4) were used as measurable transformed explanatory variables in our regression model:

$$ {\mathrm{g}}_{\mathrm{i},\mathrm{post}} = \mathrm{f}\ \left({\mathrm{Z}}_{1\mathrm{i}}{,}_{\mathrm{post}},\ {\mathrm{Z}}_{2\mathrm{i},\mathrm{post}},\dots \right), $$

where gi,post is value of a posterior perception of the city image of Amsterdam by respondent i, and where Zji,post is the posterior value of the explanatory variable j (j = 1,2) extracted from the multivariate analysis (see also particular the definitions provided in Sect. 17.5). Given the insights obtained from the PCA analysis (see right-hand column of Table 17.4), we included the two prominent post-visit stage measures; these appeared to show clearly a significant and positive relationship regarding the general image of the city Amsterdam.Footnote 3 The econometric results for our sample are shown in Fig. 17.5.

Fig. 17.5
figure 5

Multivariate econometric modelling results

Full size image

Figure 17.5 shows that the t-values for Morality visiting the Red Light District and Repeat visits to the Red Light District/Coffee Shops were found to be significant (on the basis of a significance level of p:.005) regarding the general image of the city of Amsterdam, while also the t-value for Appearance of the Gay Culture in the Red Light District was found to be also significant (p:.005). We will now offer an interpretation for these indicative findings.

In the post-visit stage, the voyeurists were exposed to—and were well informed on—the attractiveness of the Amsterdam heterotopia’s, viz. the Red Light District and the Coffeeshop District, and the legislation of the city of Amsterdam. These items are described here as Safety-Health and Tolerance (SHandT) and Governance and Ethical Aspects (GEandA), but these are to be understood in a broader context of history and policy. The Red Light District and the CoffeeShop District have their own historical positioning story to tell, with their open culture, arts, architecture, fashion, tolerance and open mindedness towards prostitution, drugs, open sexuality, etc. So there is a maintained long history with an intangible cultural heritage in each heterotopia in the city which reflects the image of Amsterdam, that is also well protected through long-standing policies by the local government. This means that each district with its own identity and characteristics (‘brand’) is unique, as the director of the Rijksmuseum, Wim Pijbes, mentioned in an interview on a blogFootnote 4 “the Red Light District is RED and not PINK!”, because of its codification in the sub-historical en cultural system of the city Amsterdam.Footnote 5

Tourists do not always share the same values and preferences of what is happening in the practice of legalized prostitution or drugs (even sometimes not in their home country). However, through fairly strict regulations regarding safety, health and ethical aspects in combination with an unique history behind these places and their surrounding inimitable streets, canals, recreational places, churches, tolerance, markets, safety, good opportunities and quality of life, and creative and cultural ambiance in the city of Amsterdam, the majority of the visitors may find it morally correct and may encourage repeat visits to learn and find more in these extraordinary places in a broader context. These factors act as important drivers to stimulate tourists to look at other places and strengthen their thoughts in a broader sense regarding the identity and the general image of the city of Amsterdam: ‘a place 4 all’(see also Nijkamp and Kourtit 2013).

8 Epilogue

Tourist destinations have often a branding that emphasizes unique and attractive features of a city. As a consequence, millions of visitors are pulled into these destinations, but in various cases many visitors are not only attracted by the touristic specificities of a given destination, but also by the presence of a great many other visitors. Watching each other—especially in an unconventional or folerant setting—is a common characteristic of a heterotopia. The inner city of Amsterdam—with a diversified culture and a variety of gazing areas—is a glaring example of a heterotopia that attracts millions of tourists. This forms the basis for the phenomenon of voyeurism analysed in the present study.

Our study has examined various aspects of voyeurism among tourists who do not wish to consume the tourist services, but to experience opposite interpretations of reality as tourist attractions, in particular, legalized forms of prostitution and soft drugs consumption in the Red Light District of Amsterdam. In our field work, we had to resort to a limited sample of recently arrived students, who participated in a pre- and post-visit survey questionnaire experiment, complemented with a full-information professional guided tour. The main focus of our research was on the intriguing question whether objective information on seemingly illegal activities of visitors would change the perceptions—and the underlying value systems—of visitors, based on a pre- and post-survey stage. It turned out that the place perception of voyeurists was influenced by professional information, but that their value systems appeared to be rather robust. It seems that tour guides may act as filters so a to inform visitors on factual conditions (and hence, are abe to influence their perceptions of tourist sites), but they are unable to change the visitors’ value systems. It goes without saying that in a city branding the role of tour guides in shaping images of the city ought to receive due attention.

Particularly, we show evidence that the positive perception of Amsterdam’s image and its cultural heritage does not change much after the tour, highlighting that the informational sources they used before visiting the city, like social and professional networks, had a higher influence than the tour guide himself. Thus, the importance of the guide in the tour product in the influence of existing tourist perception (Geva and Goldman 1991) is in jeopardy in comparison to the rest of the sources that tourists use in order to get information on a destination (Buultjens et al. 2013). Nonetheless, regarding the particular issues of Red Light District and Coffee Shops, participants notice the transition from a “Las Vegas” happy setting (pre-visit) to a more safe and open-minded atmosphere, with respect and professionalism on prostitution and soft drugs consumption, while indicating a need for improvement of the actual promotion of the Red Light District in general and within the tour setting in particular. On a value level, whether before of after the tour, the grand majority did not connect immorality with site-seeing. All these factors support their claim to wish to repeat a visit to Amsterdam.

Considering the limited number of participants in this research, the basic objective was to put into question the effectiveness of a tour as an educational tool in tourism, after choosing delicate social issues of voyeurism, where the tour guide’s interpretation is fundamental for the comprehension of these heterotopia’s. Further investigation should be conducted so as to demonstrate up to which level the touristic service of a tour needs improvement in order to promote adequately—and add new information about—a touristic destination.