Creating and Managing a Radically Edited Cultural Landscape: The Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States

Abstract

This article explores how a contrived heritage tourism landscape was created, how its identity was marketed, and how it has influenced the culture of the contiguous region in which it resides in. During the Great Depression, the designers from the U.S. National Park Service manipulated the authenticity of the indigenous architecture and radically edited the mountain landscape in Virginia and North Carolina to create an institutionalized super-scenic motorway—the Blue Ridge Parkway (BRP). Spanning over four hundred miles, the BRP promotes early American mountain culture. As it approaches its centennial year of being authorized by the U.S. Congress, this recreational road continues to be a popular heritage site and supports the regional economy through heritage tourism. However, does the planning of the parkway and the management of its identity convey the region’s historic mountain culture or has it always been a created landscape for tourism that is based on a formal construct of a heritage idea, created by its designers? And for the American tourist experiencing the BRP, what is more important: the authenticity of the regional heritage or the authenticity of the contrived artefact simply put, the scenic road?