Tourism Geography

Critical Understandings of Place, Space and Experience

Stephen Williams

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135010164
• Edizione: 3
• Argomento: Physical Sciences
• Categoria: Geography

Tourism Geography develops a critical understanding of how different geographies of tourism are created and maintained. Drawing on both historical and contemporary perspectives, the discussion connects tourism to key geographical concepts relating to globalization, mobility, new geographies of production and consumption, and post-industrial change. The new edition has been fully updated to have an international focus, with global case studies and broader based content.

Part I Introduction: tourism and geography

DOI: 10.4324/9780203743881-1

This first part of the book provides an introduction and overview of tourism as a social phenomenon and the particular interests that geographers have in it. Ian Matley (1976: 5) observed that ‘There is scarcely an aspect of tourism which does not have some geographical implications and there are few branches of geography which do not have some contribution to make to the study of the phenomenon of tourism.’ More specifically, Mitchell and Murphy (1991) identified environmental issues, regional development, spatial studies and evolutionary/historical processes as the primary traditional ways that geographers have contributed to the study of tourism. These themes run throughout this book, although we do take a clearly critical perspective to the issues that are raised by them. To understand tourism, however, we first need to understand what we mean by tourism. It is certainly among the more important parts of the larger topic of human mobility. But for both statistical and critically qualitative understandings, clearer boundaries are required. These two topics, defining the tourism phenomenon and the geographic interest in it, are the objectives of the first chapter.

1 Tourism, geography and geographies of tourism

DOI: 10.4324/9780203743881-2

KEY CONCEPTS

• Geography
• Globalisation
• Leisure
• Mobility
• Recreation
• Relational geography
• Sustainability
• Tourism
• Tourism inversions
• Tourist motivation

More online for Chapter 1 at http://tourismgeography.com/1

The annual migrations of billions of domestic and international tourists worldwide is a fundamental geographic phenomenon that social scientists and planners cannot ignore because it has become an essential way that humans engage with other people, places, environments. Tourism is geographical because its dimensions include:

• human–environment interactions and landscape;
• conservation and management of places and environments;
• environmental perceptions and sense of place; and
• spatial behaviour and human mobility.

Part of the contemporary significance of tourism arises from the sheer scale of international travel and the rapidity with which it has developed. International tourist trips (at least one night) passed the one billion mark in 2012 in a phenomenal and seemingly unstoppable rise from less that 25 million such trips worldwide at the end of the Second World War (UNWTO, 2013a). The global gross receipts from the activities of these tourists amounted to US$1.075 trillion in 2012, and accounted for almost 3 per cent of world GDP (WTTC, 2013) trade in services, making it the world’s largest service sector industry (see Lew, 2011). In addition to these international travellers and their expenditures must be added the domestic tourists who do not cross international boundaries and day trippers who cross an international border for less than one day. For many countries, these two groups are several times more numerous than their international counterparts.

The significance of the number of tourists is in the range of economic, social and environmental impacts that the movement of people on this scale inevitably produces at local, regional, national and international levels. In addition to these impacts, as a form of popular culture, tourism offers a mirror on contemporary lifestyles, tastes and preferences. The sociologist John Urry has argued that mobility – in its various guises, of which tourism is an essential component – has become central to the structuring of social life and cultural identity in the twenty-first century (Urry, 2000).

Tourism impacts occur across the range of economic, social, cultural and environmental contexts. Globally, an estimated 100 million people derive direct employment from the tourism business: from travel and transportation, accommodation, promotion, entertainment, visitor attractions and tourist retailing (WTTC, 2013). Tourism plays a major role in social and economic globalisation (Shaw and Williams, 2004) and has been variously recognised: as a means of advancing wider international economic integration within areas such as the European Union (EU) and Southeast Asia; as a catalyst for modernisation, economic development and prosperity in emerging nations in developing economies (Britton, 1989); and as a pathway for regenerating post-industrial economies in developing economies (Robinson, 1999). It may contribute to the preservation of some aspects of local cultures in the face of the homogenising effects of globalisation. For example, it can encourage and enable the conservation and restoration of sensitive environments (Hall and Lew, 2009). In addition, it may also promote international peace and understanding (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006).

On the other hand, tourism can also result in a range of detrimental impacts on the physical environments that tourists visit, including air and water pollution, increased traffic congestion, the physical erosion of sites, the disruption of habitats and species declines, and unsightly visual blight caused by poorly planned or designed buildings. The display of local cultures and customs to tourists can be a means of sustaining traditions and rituals, but it may also be a potent agency for cultural change, the erosion of distinctive beliefs, values and practices, and the local adoption of globalised mass forms of culture. Likewise among its economic impacts, although tourism generates significant employment, it is also prone to the whims of popularity and fashion, and is susceptible to environmental disasters and global economic downturns, making it an insecure foundation on which to build national economic growth. In addition, the quality of jobs created within the tourism sector (as defined by their permanence, reward and remuneration levels) often leaves much to be desired, and more critically, it can be a vehicle for perpetuating economic inequalities, maintaining dependencies and neo-colonial relationships between developed and developing nations (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006).

Other economic activities have similar globalising opportunities and impacts, though tourism is among the more visible and accessible of these. The study of tourism impacts has become a traditional means of understanding the significance of tourism (Mathieson and Wall, 1982; Hall and Lew, 2009). Thus tourism and tourist experience are now seen as influencing social differentiation (Ateljevic and Doorne, 2003); as a means by which we develop and reinforce our identities and locate ourselves in the modern world (Franklin, 2004); as a prominent source for the acquisition of what Bourdieu (1984) defines as ‘cultural capital’; and as a key context within which people engage with the fluid and changing nature of modernity (Franklin, 2004). Franklin and Crang (2001: 19) summarise the new-found relevance of tourism studies:

The tourist and styles of tourist consumption are not only emblematic of many features of contemporary life, such as mobility, restlessness, the search for authenticity and escape, but they are increasingly central to economic restructuring, globalization, the consumption of place and the aestheticization of everyday life.

To disregard what has become a primary area of physical, social, cultural and economic development would be to deny a pervasive and powerful force for change in the world in which we live. Modern tourism creates a broad agenda for enquiry to which geographers can contribute, especially because the nature of tourism’s effects is so often contingent upon the geographical circumstances in which it is developed and practised. The spaces and places in which tourism occurs are usually fundamental to the tourist experience – and space and place are core interests for human geographers.

The contingent nature of tourism has further encouraged a shift in critical thinking around the subject, away from traditional binary views of tourism and towards more relational perspectives. Thus, for example, rather than perpetuating a view of tourism impacts as being either positive or negative, recent work in tourism geography has promoted more nuanced, equivocal understandings that have provided insight into the ways in which tourists relate to the world around them.

This book is essentially concerned with developing an understanding of how tourism geographies are formed and maintained through the diverse and increasingly flexible relationships between people and the places that are toured and how those relationships become manifest across geographical space. It takes as its point of departure a key assumption – namely that to understand tourism geography one must also understand tourism. Hence, for example, in the following sections important basic concepts and issues are introduced relating to:

• an understanding of what tourism is and some of the inherent problems associated with the study of tourism;
• some of the ways in which tourists may be differentiated (since such a vast number of people is clearly far from homogeneous);
• how tourist motivation and experience may be understood.

This material is included, not because it is inherently geographical per se, but because the differentiation of tourist types, which reflects the motivations and the experiences that they seek, results in distinct geographical patterns and behaviours. It is probably a fair criticism that geographers have not made a particularly significant contribution to the development of these core concepts (especially the differentiation of tourists or the development of tourism motivation theory and concepts of tourism experience), but the understandings that other disciplines have developed are still essential to comprehending tourism geography.

What is tourism?

What is tourism and how does it relate to associated concepts of recreation and leisure?

The word ‘tourism’, although accepted and recognised in common parlance, is nevertheless a term that is subject to a diversity of definitions and interpretations (Leiper, 1993). Definitional problems arise because the word ‘tourism’ is typically used not only as a single term to designate a variety of concepts (Gilbert, 1990), but also as an area of study in a range of disciplines that includes geography, economics, business and marketing, sociology, anthropology, history and psychology. The conceptual structures and epistemologies within these different disciplines lead inevitably to contrasts in perspective and emphasis. Furthermore, while there has been some convergence in ‘official’ definitions (i.e., those used by tourism organisations, governments and international forums such as the United Nations [UN]), public perception of what constitutes a tourist and the activity of tourism may differ quite markedly.

Traditional definitions of tourists and tourism – as found, for example, within dictionaries – commonly describe a tourist as a person undertaking a tour – a circular trip that is usually made for business, pleasure or education, at the end of which one returns to the starting point, normally the home. The word tourism is normally viewed as a composite concept involving not just the temporary movement of people to destinations that are removed from their normal place of residence but, in addition, the organisation and conduct of their travel activities and of the travel facilities and services that are necessary to meet their needs.

The core elements derived from these popular definitions that distinguish tourism activity include:

• Tourism involves travel with the temporary relocation of people.
• Motivations for tourism may come from one or more sources, including pleasure, business, education, social relations, health and religion.
• Tourism requires an accessible supporting infrastructure of transport, accommodation, marketing systems, entertainment and attractions that together form the basis for the tourism industries.

Official definitions of tourism have tended to be somewhat similarly broad in scope. For example, the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) definition published in 1994 has tourism as comprising:

the activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business or other purposes.

(UNWTO, 1994)

This definition acknowledges that tourism occurs both between and within countries (i.e., international and domestic tourism) and that it covers overnight visitors who stay as well as those who visit for part of a day (Lickorish and Jenkins, 1997). The recognition of forms of day visiting as constituting a part of tourism is im...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of plates
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of more online case studies
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction: Tourism and Geography
• Part II The Emergence of Global Tourism
• Part III Tourism’s Economic, Environmental And Social Relations
• Part IV Understanding Tourism Places and Spaces
• Part V Applied and Future Tourism Geographies
• Appendix: a guide to the use of the Internet in tourism geography
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index