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The attached paper presents a research assignment carried out between April and December 1999, by the GDR Tourisme: Lieux et Réseaux under the joint scientific supervision of Josette Mesplier‐Pinet and Sophie Elias The basic aim was the realisation of a Dictionary of Tourism Concepts, Information Sources and Methods for the Observatoire National du Tourisme to define a set of tourism concepts, point out the principal statistical tools and their accompanying methodology used to secure information on supply and demand. The principle underlying this research was to provide end users of the dictionary, namely national public authorities and private practioners as well as tourism researchers, with a guideline to better understanding as well as a more accurate means of interpretation and use of this information. The purpose of this paper is to present the research carried out and to analyse thereby the role and function of the two‐way process of information building and redistribution. Consequently, the research carried out follows up the work on monitoring change and strategic decision‐making presented at last year's TRC Conference in Vienna.

The issues at stake in this paper namely concern the changes in the cultural identity representations of territorial landscapes as a result of increasing mobility of which tourism is but one of the numerous forms. The decision to focus on festivals and events is that: 1. Traditionally speaking, festivals and events are both the result and the signifiers of the cultural identity of spaces within which they occur; 2. In more recent years, they have increasingly been instrumented as a marketing tool in the development of tourist spaces as can be attested by the large body of tourist literature; 3. Beyond the emphasis placed by researchers on the economic impacts of events organization, there has been a growing interest in investigating their social impacts. 4. Limited attention has been paid to comparing the strategies of events organization, the way they intervene on cultural identity and the ensuing impacts on territorial development in general. Accordingly, it was decided that an investigation of regularly recurring events, which have become part of the territorial landscapes within which they occur, would be led to try and answer the following questions: 1. How do festivals and events contribute to staging the particularities of cultural identity within different spaces? 2. Are these festivals and events staged simultaneously to encourage greater mobilities to and within the given spaces and to devise better responses to the mobilities that have already modified them? 3. To what extent do festivals and events contribute to re‐interpreting cultural identity?

The report hereunder has been divided into the following sections: