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Developing places bears several challenging questions such as: “How can strategic initiatives be identified? How can we purposefully link businesses, attractions, and living spaces? How must we shape the environment of a place so that it allows for the emergence of a ‘good atmosphere’?” The case of Altdorf (CH) presents how a community first identified current activities by reconstructing flows of visitors. By doing so, they assessed the quality of services and the overall feeling about the town. Imminent new projects such as the enlargement of the main train station with the development of a new business centre as well as the new traffic concept in the town centre have triggered a new design of the place. This implied involving actors at different stages and combining spatial configuration and trajectories, infrastructure, services and heritage in a meaningful way. The case of Altdorf presents a practical and straightforward way of making the complexity and dynamics of a place well understandable to every person involved.

For actors in a tourism destination, the atmospheric turn initially means looking at themselves in a more holistic and differentiated way. Through the analysis of strategic visitor flows, it is possible to identify subspaces with high frequency, which thus become identification spaces of a destination. Together with other identification fields, they shape the destination brand understood as spatial and atmospheric entity. This enables a different view of a destination, its structure and generates new opportunities for destination management, which wll be discussed in the form of an outlook. A destination manager, for example, could in the future collaborate with governmental bodies responsible for spatial planning and with private builders on spatial design projects and introduce the perspective of the destination as a branded space.

This introduction to the volume Atmospheric Turn in Culture and Tourism: Place, Design and Process Impacts on Customer Behaviour, Marketing and Branding (Emerald) positions the atmospheric turn in the context of recent paradigmatic turns such as the linguistic turn, iconic turn, cultural turn, spatial turn, mobility turn and design turn. The specific contribution of the atmospheric turn is its profoundly holistic interest in overarching connections which are perceived with all senses and include both matter and idea. With its 22 chapters, this volume sets out to sharpen the atmospheric gaze and perception in research and beyond.