Staging the Magic in Harry Potter Tourism: The Interplay of Fan-Driven and Franchise-Regulated Heritage and Placemaking Practices in Denmark and the United Kingdom

Abstract

Tourism sites are increasingly recognised as places where heritage is actively produced, negotiated and felt. This chapter examines how Harry Potter tourism as ‘fan design’ transforms everyday spaces into affective heritage through interplays of fan initiative and institutional control. The term ‘fan design’ here refers to the way fans themselves design experiences through grassroots practices and performances and how experiences and locations are designed with fans in mind. Based on repeat fieldwork from 2016 to 2024, the author compares Harry Potter fan tourism sites in the United Kingdom and a fantasy festival in Odense, Denmark. ‘Platform 9¾’ shows how a once unscripted ritual was absorbed into franchised choreography. Alnwick Castle offers flexible integration of screen heritage within a Grade I listed site. The city of Oxford reveals how infrastructural redesign choreographs fan encounters alongside academic rhythms. Edinburgh’s fan sites function as participatory ruins sustained by shared imagination, while Odense reworks Potteresque cues into a civic fantasy frame without franchise-licencing. Across these cases, fan practices operate as site-specific affective labour that challenges the narrowness of Authorised Heritage Discourse (Smith, 2006). This chapter demonstrates how media tourism increasingly emerges as an ongoing negotiation between fantasy and material infrastructure, where fan belief, performance repetition and local constraints shape heritage-making in real time.