Get into the 'Groove': Travelling Otago's Super Region

This essay sets out the plan for Groove, a tourist experience connecting the destinations of Dunedin and Queenstown in New Zealand's South Island, Otago region. Inspiration is drawn from the inter-urban planning ideas of the English architect Will Alsop for the development of a 'super region' to maximize the public benefit from a potential, but as yet unrealized, coordinated tourism strategy. We argue the case for academics to take up an initiatory role as 'public intellectuals', in this case by promoting a tourism experience rather than merely being responsive critics to the plans proposed by government and private enterprise interest groups. Within the argument we advance a position of 'postmodern boosterism', which locates us as the 'soft drivers' of a plan involving tourism development intended for the public good. We make our proposal not so much in the expectation that it will be taken up as an actual blueprint sometime soon, but in the hope that it moves an imaginative tourism idea a little closer to the planner's table.