Batumi on the Way to Landscapoid: Representing the Transformations of Cultural Landscape in the Tourist Image of the City

The dissertation research is devoted to identifying the stages of transformation of the cultural landscape of Batumi through the prism of the formed tourist image of the city. The content of geographical representations of cultural landscapes and the mechanism of their (re)creation form a multiplicity of their spatial representations. However, the rapid growth of the tourism industry and the increase in investment activity can serve as indicators of the transformation of the cultural landscape of the city. The example of Batumi is illustrative in this regard, where development and tourism/logistics projects are currently under active construction to establish Batumi as a "global city" and a European resort. As part of the work, a complex methodology was developed to study the tourist-geographical characterization of the territory of Batumi as part of the cultural landscape of the city, which included observation (with the fixation of external features of the territory and blitz-interviews), traditional document analysis and media content analysis, as well as semi-structured interviews and mental mapping, including image-geographical mapping. The analysis has shown that in Batumi the route of a "typical tourist" is formed from the stages of the landscapoid, functionally alternating and spatially gravitating towards each other: pop-landscape, expressed by large art objects; krasivostny landscape, represented by objects of "new development"; kulturnostny landscape, expressed by points of purchase and sale with commercial advertising and replicated mass and consumer culture. The krasivostny landscape is constantly expanding and absorbing other associative images of Batumi, reflecting its historical-geographical and natural features, and important cultural layers of the city, in connection with which such aggressive transformation of the cultural landscape of Batumi leads to its gradual degradation.