The heritage and tourist city: an analysis of the image construct and appropriation of the historic center of Tiradentes-mg from the social media

Abstract

Tourism is seen as an activity capable of refunctionalizing geographic spaces and endowing them with new landscapes and symbologies. This theme can be considered very relevant in studies involving urban space and dialogues directly with geographic science and urbanism. Thus, it highlights the relevance of studies that aim to address the relationship of the tourist with space and/or the landscape, with an emphasis on this work, the studies involving heritage tourist cities. In this sense, the work in question has as main objective to analyze the perception of tourists about the urban space of the city of Tiradentes - MG, identifying the urban image formed by them, from the data contained in social media. In the case of methodological procedures, different stages were used, namely: documentary and bibliographic research, case study, photographic records, on-site observations, and analysis of data obtained from TripAdvisor. To obtaining and analyze the data, the technique known as Web Scraping (WS) was used. From the analysis, it was possible to identify the urban image formed from the perception of tourists about the city of Tiradentes. It can be noted a strong association with the Historic Center of the city, and many times seeing the totality of the city restricted only to this central space.