Oriental Marco Polo Plaza Encounter: Choreographing Place and Placelessness from a Phenomenological Perspective

The notion of place has raised great concern within weaving tourism studies in recent decades. Nevertheless, dialectical indigenous considerations of Edward Relph’s phenomenological concepts of place and placelessness are still insufficient, particularly in non-Western countries. Phenomenology, as an immersive approach, provides an open and descriptive examination of the diverse perceptions and constitutive meanings of a place. From a phenomenological perspective, this article aims to explore the dynamic grasping of place and placelessness in tourism experiences. Twenty-four tourists participated in the research in Marco Polo Plaza in Italian Style Town, a concession for a particular historical period, in Tianjin, China. The findings suggest that tourists’ experiences could be ordered into three themes: (1) encountering a place labelled recreation and entertainment, (2) encountering an exotic heterogeneous place, and (3) encountering a lived place in the lifeworld. These results emphasize that place and placelessness are intertwined paradoxically beyond the binary, and such a nonlinear, dialectical, and subtle dimension is the possible inspiration that the phenomenological perspective brings to tourism research. Drawing on the inevitability of tourists’ diverse perceptions, we advance that an open multi-sensuous engagement and inclusive geographic practices offer an insight into the understanding of sustainability.