tourist in one's home town?

I'm completely baffled how I've ended up as a respondent in a panel about tourism and culture at CAA.  It's not that it's a topic that I'm uninterested in; and indeed, I've thought a good deal about it, one way and another - teaching a course on American Road Culture taught me a fair amount, a few years back; and I've done a stack of reading around tourism and landscape and the southwest.  And I guess The Transatlantic Indian wanders around the topic.  But I'd never thought of myself as any kind of expert, and I still don't (and there's not a lot of time to turn myself into one, before 9.30 tomorrow morning).  One of the questions I'll be asking, though (a small one, in the scheme of things), is whether one can be a tourist in one's own home town - and I guess that walking down W 11th St. this morning (my grad students were spot on with a cheap parking lot tip), I decided that one could.  Quite what the Desmond building is, or was, I don't know - related to the old department store building on the Miracle Mile? - but it's a fine chunk of late 20s industrial style architecture.