Work hard, play hard: selling Kelowna, BC, as year‐round playground

Abstract

A keen interest in place making and place selling is widespread in contemporary society. While the bulk of academic research has focused on studying the restructuring of large urban conglomerates, places beyond the exploding metropolis, by comparison, have received little attention, especially when it concerns Canadian landscapes. In an attempt to study the particularities of place making in contemporary smaller, more isolated communities—hinterlands—this work analyses the city of Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada. We argue that historically Kelowna, a small rural community specialising in ranching, forestry and fruit production, since the early 1980s, has been re‐imagined and re‐designed, on the one hand as an all‐year playground and as an innovative frontier for high‐tech industries; on the other hand, this post‐Fordist reinvention contains a discourse of ‘whiteness’, one that entices by packaging ‘place’ in terms of ‘sameness’ and ‘familiarity’. In contrast to large cosmopolitan post‐industrial cities, hinterland‐type cities are invented, sought and lived as geographies cleared from the ‘elements’ that make cities ‘unsafe’.

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