| Summary: | Market capitalism sets the conditions for how the world is conceived, experienced and organized at various spatial scales (global to local). Currently, competitiveness, entrepreneurship and economic growth are key values that shape how the world is conceived, experienced and organized. Discourses of place marketing, place branding, and the construction of places as (economic) products, are part and parcel of the heightened commodification of space. Tourism has been a major factor in the commodification of place and space. More often than not, tourism has been seen as a possibility for peripheral places, in their struggle finding new ways towards development. The essay studies the construction, representation, and marketing of tourist places in a peripheral area of Sweden. The purpose with the paper is to examine how tourism marketing creates ideas and perceptions of the space in the region of Dalsland, and how tourism shapes the material spatial practices, conceptions of space as well as lived spaces in Dalsland. The material for the study comprises of representations of Dalsland in tourist brochures published by the regional tourist organization. Lefebvre’s trailectic model of space forms the basic theoretical and methodological perspective for this study. The empirical analysis is based on visual and semiotic content analysis of representations and marketing of places for the tourism. Four categories of tourism marketing are identified and comprise four different spaces of “The touristified space of Dalsland”. As a touristified space, the region of Dalsland has been constructed as a “nature based experience space”. One implication of which is changed material spatial practices, such places with a “high touristic value” are given priority in infrastructure and other public recourses development plans.
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