Visiting Warsaw for the first time: imagined and experienced urban places

There is little doubt that for the majority of tourists there is something special about visiting a place for the first time. In the case of European capital cities, a considerable amount of knowledge from different sources usually already exists before the visit. Such knowledge about a place may stimulate different attitudes, opinions, judgments and emotions, which influence the representation of that place to different extents at ‘imagined’ and ‘experienced’ levels (de Rosa, 1997; de Rosa & d’Ambrosio, 2011). Since before the visit the experience of an unknown city is not direct but mediated, the ‘anticipatory’ representation can be described as social in that it stems from the variety of inputs from society. Therefore, how people envision a place before visiting it – including their knowledge, attitudes, judgments and opinions about it – captures the essence of social representations at a given moment (Moscovici, 1984; Milgram & Jodelet, 1976; Milgram, 1984; Pailhous, 1984; de Rosa, 2013 a). They are social because they are based on common knowledge and insights from others, yet they also include individual aspects because every person pays more attention to different sources, as well as interpreting the existing knowledge in his or her own way. As a part of a wider research program on several European capitals, initiated in 1992 with first-wave research on Rome (de Rosa, 2013b) this paper examines how tourists from seven different EU and extra EU countries (FR, DE, IT, E, PL, UK, US), represented the city of Warsaw before visiting it and how their social representations transformed after the direct experience.