A Study for the Necessity of the Alternative Tourism Development Using Negative Place Assets Ju-Hyun Ryu* Abstract: Since local autonomy was first practiced in 1995, place marketing has been aggressively introduced as part of local development. However, policies set by local governments were mostly imprudent, failing to establish differentiated place marketing. Especially, as place marketing tends to focus on the positive images of the place assets, overlapping strategies have been adopted. Therefore, this study focused on dark tourism aimed at letting people get lessons through visiting the sites of catastrophic accidents as a strategy to emphasize the negative images of the sites for differentiated place marketing. For example, it is necessary to make commodification of place around Sungnyemun burned out as an educational site internally that teaches the preservation, protection, and restoration of cultural properties and at the same time as a tourist spot outwardly. This is not because of economic profits but because the place with undesirable images needs to be developed as a tourist spot from the more matured and long term perspective. This study examined the necessity of development of various niche tourism targeting segmented customers for differentiated place marketing. Especially, it focused on the conceptional definition of dark tourism using negative place assets, its types, and then sought the possibility of utilizing it in Korea. Key Words: place marketing, negative place assets, commodification of place, niche tourism, dark tourism. Assistant Professor, Department of Geography Education, Kongju National University, ryujh@kongju.ac.kr 67
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