Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Articles by Mark Rhodes
UNESCO, mining heritage and the scalar sustainability of tourism geographies at industrial World Heritage Sites
Journal of Tourism Futures, 2024
Purpose
Industrial heritage works within a world of contradictions, contentions and scalar limina... more Purpose
Industrial heritage works within a world of contradictions, contentions and scalar liminality. Archaeologists and historians focus upon oral histories and discourses of tangible and intangible memory and heritage while planners and economists see industrial World Heritage, in particular, as a marketing ploy to redevelop deindustrialized spaces. Within this liminality, we explore the potential for geographical perspectives to solder such contradictions into transdisciplinary heritage assessments and tourism contexts. How might the spatial tools of landscape and scalar analyses expose alternative and sustainable futures within broader patterns of industrial heritage management and consumption?
Design/methodology/approach
Using three comparative cases, interview and landscape methods and conducting discourse analysis within a spatial and scalar framework, we explore the increasing presence of industrial World Heritage.
Findings
We present both an institutional reflection upon the complexities of heritage discourse across complex spatial configurations and the intersectional historical, cultural, political, environmental and economic geographies that guide and emerge out of World Heritage Designations. Framed scalarly and spatially, we highlight common interpretation, tourism and heritage management styles and concerns found across industrial World Heritage. We point out trans-scalar considerations for future municipalities and regions looking to utilize their industrial landscapes and narratives.
Originality/value
We believe that more theoretical groundings in space and scale may lead to both the flexibility and the applicability needed to assess and, in turn, manage trans-scalar and trans-spatial complex heritage sites. These perspectives may be uniquely poised to assess the complex geographies of industrial, particularly mining, World Heritage Sites.
Tourism Geographies, 2022
South Wales was once synonymous with coal, now among the most globally controversial natural reso... more South Wales was once synonymous with coal, now among the most globally controversial natural resources due to its association with anthropogenic climate change. In the early twentieth century, Wales was the largest worldwide producer of coal, and mines employed more than ten percent of those living in the country. With rapid closure of coal mines between the 1960s and 1980s, Welsh communities lost the main source of their social and economic identity. Thirty years after the era of mass pit closures, industrial tourism attractions throughout the region relate the story of coal's heritage. With calls for renewed mining gaining traction in many countries, consideration of how coal mining is remembered in South Wales is beneficial to those advocating for a move towards the use of sustainable resources and to scholars interested in the relationship between tourism, place, and memory. An analysis is given of the interpretive discourses presented at the five most prominent coal tourism attractions in Wales, Big Pit National Coal Museum, Rhondda Heritage Park, Cefn Coed Colliery Museum, South Wales Miners' Museum, and the National Waterfront Museum, complemented with consideration of visitor perceptions at two of the sites. Among the interpretive themes highlighted are: the importance of coal, dangers of coal mining, union activity, the centrality of coal to communities, and the absence of descriptions of coal's environmental impacts. Visitor engagement with these themes is discussed along with the potential for attractions to impart insight into the broader consequences of coal mining. The positive, often nostalgic, portrayal of coal and the calls for renewed mining within South Wales' attractions are not complemented with a reckoning of the negative environmental legacy of the resource at the local or global scales.
Museums, national resources, and the broader economic impacts of National Museum Wales
Welsh Economic Review, 2025
How do public museums balance their economic costs with their economic benefits? Political debate... more How do public museums balance their economic costs with their economic benefits? Political debate often strips nuance from museum management, with the total public spending going into a museum countered by a museum’s direct revenue generation. This paper attempts to complicate those false dichotomies by demonstrating that while free-to-enter public museums generate relatively little of their own direct revenue, their broader contribution to the regional economy must be considered. Across Britain, national museums play a central role in the tourist economy, and in Wales, St. Fagans National Museum of History has long been the nation’s most visited tourist destination. With this in mind, using self-provided data on spending inside museums and within broader museum communities, we attempt to highlight the community economic impacts of all seven National Museum Wales (NMW) museums. The findings support other museum studies which identify a regional multiplying effect that free entry museums have on regional economies, and that even museums which generate little direct revenue could be considered for their 'return on investment' in broader regional economic and cultural development.
The Professional Geographer, 2021
As the newest of the seven national museums in Wales, the National Waterfront Museum tells the st... more As the newest of the seven national museums in Wales, the National Waterfront Museum tells the story of Welsh industry and innovation. This article traces the construction and engagement of the museum’s fifteen galleries as performed land- scapes in a detailed analysis of memory work. Focusing on the crafted discourse of the museum, visitor narratives as they experience the museum, and performances that regularly occupy the museum’s spaces presents a unique opportunity for landscape analysis within the context of the memory work of a museum. Swansea’s 2017 Dance Days, for example, focused around the theme of climate change and the vulnerability of the ocean while visitors were somewhat less engaged with environmental impacts as presented in the permanent collections. This article expands beyond a typical understanding of museum discourse to explore the incorporation of creative geographies of landscape, performance, and memory into more traditional museum and spatial narratives.
GeoHumanities, 2021
Each year the National Eisteddfod alternates between north and south Wales in a festival that con... more Each year the National Eisteddfod alternates between north and south Wales in a festival that consistently redefines itself and what it means to be and perform Welshness. As a publicly funded and organized national institution, the National Eisteddfod’s performances, competitions, and pavilions reflect aspects of Welsh memory and heritage through traditional poetry, dance, and music. Likewise, this space is central to the continuing evolution of Welsh memory and Welsh music. The work of memory, language, and music during the annual ten-day festival in 2018 experienced numerous structural changes from customary eisteddfodau. Through musicals, folk music, carnivals, and other performances, music and memory in Cardiff Bay intersected with transatlantic identities, protest, and the deindustrialized urban setting. Using interviews and a transoptic landscape analysis, this paper explores the musical, performative, and national land- scapes of the 2017 and 2018 National Eisteddfodau to better understand these emerging postcolo- nial, post-industrial, performative, and pluralized memories in Wales. 
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Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Articles by Mark Rhodes
Industrial heritage works within a world of contradictions, contentions and scalar liminality. Archaeologists and historians focus upon oral histories and discourses of tangible and intangible memory and heritage while planners and economists see industrial World Heritage, in particular, as a marketing ploy to redevelop deindustrialized spaces. Within this liminality, we explore the potential for geographical perspectives to solder such contradictions into transdisciplinary heritage assessments and tourism contexts. How might the spatial tools of landscape and scalar analyses expose alternative and sustainable futures within broader patterns of industrial heritage management and consumption?
Design/methodology/approach
Using three comparative cases, interview and landscape methods and conducting discourse analysis within a spatial and scalar framework, we explore the increasing presence of industrial World Heritage.
Findings
We present both an institutional reflection upon the complexities of heritage discourse across complex spatial configurations and the intersectional historical, cultural, political, environmental and economic geographies that guide and emerge out of World Heritage Designations. Framed scalarly and spatially, we highlight common interpretation, tourism and heritage management styles and concerns found across industrial World Heritage. We point out trans-scalar considerations for future municipalities and regions looking to utilize their industrial landscapes and narratives.
Originality/value
We believe that more theoretical groundings in space and scale may lead to both the flexibility and the applicability needed to assess and, in turn, manage trans-scalar and trans-spatial complex heritage sites. These perspectives may be uniquely poised to assess the complex geographies of industrial, particularly mining, World Heritage Sites.