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C08.15 Geography of Tourism, Leisure, and Global Change
Session: Global Change and Tourism: Socio-Cultural Issues
Chair(s): Jarkko Saarinen & Alan LewAbstract:
Global change related processes have emerged as a major discussion in the geographical study of tourism and leisure. Global change affects the basis of the socio-spatial system of tourism through numerous sets of ecological, social, cultural, economic and political transformations. In addition tourism is a major contributor to these kind of changes. This session aims to discuss global change and its impacts on tourism and the focus of the session is on the social and cultural but also economic and political changes and their interrelationships with tourist mobility in local-global nexus. The session welcomes both theoretical and/or empirical approaches.
Timeslots: 2
Session: Tourism and Global Environmental Change: Climate Change Issues
Chair(s): Michael Hall & Jarkko SaarinenAbstract:
Global environmental change related processes have emerged as a major discussion in tourism geographies and in the planning and management discussion of tourism development. Global environmental change affects the basis of the tourism system through numerous sets of ecological, social, cultural, economic and political transformations. In addition tourism is a major contributor to that change. One of the major issues is the relationship between tourism and global climate change. In general this session aims to discuss global environmental change and its impacts on tourism and the role of tourism in global environmental change. The special focus of the session is on climate change related processes and issues affecting on current and future tourism geographies.
Timeslots: 1
Session: Tourism and Regional Development
Chair(s): Dieter Muller & Dallen TimothyAbstract:
Tourism is commonly looked on as having favourable economic and social impacts, introducing new, external sources of income and opportunities for work. In the context of a core-periphery system, tourism can transfer wealth from the richer urbanised areas to the poorer peripheral regions and it can also act as a promoter of modernisation in less-developed regions. As a result, tourism is widely used in regional development processes and projects, especially in peripheral areas which have faced major challenges in the past decades. The role of traditional economies has changed and decreased in the course of globalisation and the economic transition of peripheries has turned increasingly towards tourism and leisure production. However, the desired goals of community and regional development are not always met in tourism which may also have social, economic and environmental costs. This session aims to discuss the challenges of the economic transition process of peripheries towards tourism and the complex relationships between tourism, regional development and local communities.
Timeslots: 1
Session: Sustainability and tourism development
Chair(s): Jie Zhang & Carolin FunckAbstract:
The idea of sustainability in tourism has become a paradigm guiding a wide variety of development and planning thinking and practices. Presently sustainability can be linked to almost all kinds and scales of tourism activities, impacts and environments. On the other hand there is increasing criticism of sustainable tourism which has caused a need to rethink the idea and relevance of sustainability in tourism. Some scholars have even suggested to leave sustainability model and search alternative frameworks in tourism development. This session aims to explore the relation between tourism and sustainability and also search potential new approaches in setting the limits of growth in tourism. The purpose is to discuss how the impacts of tourism and the limits of growth could be approached, evaluated and scaled in tourism development processes. The session invites papers focusing on the broad area of tourism geographies and sustainability. In addition, critical perspectives aiming to discuss the relation of development and growth in tourism are welcomed. Papers may focus on the theory and/or practice of tourism geographies and sustainability in local, regional and/or global scales.
Timeslots: 1
Session: Transforming Tourism Geographies in the Global South
Chair(s): Sanette Ferreira & Gustav VisserAbstract:
Tourism has become a global industry with increasing impacts on regional and local development. Currently many regions and countries in the Global South perceive tourism promotion as a suitable and relatively inexpensive strategy that can be used to attract foreign direct investment and create employment. As a result, many new places are tied to the global tourism industry and related cultural, social, economic and political networks. Thus, tourism has become an important policy tool for community and regional development in many developing countries. Tourism’s role is also seen positively in the global contexts such as United Nation’s Millennium Project (UN MDGs) and its goals and targets. Based on the UN MDGs related views tourism could be used as a tool for poverty reduction, ensuring environmental sustainability, developing a global partnership and the empowerment of previously neglected communities and social groups, for example. Although tourism has a tremendous capacity for generating positive development in destination regions, the growing impacts of tourism may also lead to a range of development challenges in local and wider scales. This session aims to discuss the role and impacts of tourism development in the Global South and how tourism is transforming socio-spatial structures in developing countries contexts.
Timeslots: 1
Session: Tourism Mobilities and Urban Space
Chair(s): Anne-Marie d'Hauteserre & Julie WilsonAbstract:
Since the de-industrialisation of many urban areas in Western societies, tourism has become a tool for regenerating urban environments through the creation of urban tourism production and consumption spaces. Tourism is also increasingly used in place promotion and competition in urban contexts. Recently, tourism-related urban transformations (e.g. regeneration and gentrification) have been influenced by a wider set of tourism mobilities, creating a multitude of changes in urban settings and new ways of producing and consuming urban tourism and related activities. This session aims to address how current urban transformations and an emergent 'mobilities turn' can be spatialised in urban tourism geographies. Presenters may also address a need to develop new kinds of approaches, methodologies and theories in urban tourism studies. This session is co-sponsered by ATLAS Tourism Geographies Special Interest Research Group.
Timeslots: 1
Session: 'On the move': Geographies of digital Spaces
Chair(s): Nicolai Scherle & Julia WallaAbstract:
“Doing tourism”/“doing (leisure) mobility” are unthinkable without technology. Arrangements with digital and corporeal elements, as well as their divides, raise new questions with regard to spatialisation and leisure mobility practices.
People’s mobility, accompanied by digital mobilization (for example: mobile devices with permanent internet access), as well as technologies that make mobility possible in the first place (globalization infrastructure based on data networks that set goods, people and finance in motion; complex information superhighways and server structures) present us with new patterns of socio-technical arrangements.
Mobile people are part of the geographies of digital spaces. However, mobile people also represent digital spaces when these spaces develop on the basis of technology during the moment of mobility.
The session will reflect on developments in the area of digitization and digital media using a problem-oriented perspective. The connection to mobility will be emphasized, because digital networks generate, accompany and shape mobilities in different forms.
On the one hand digital networks exist in the sense that they are there and allow different types of practice to become what they are (nonambiguous network); they digitize things which are necessary in themselves
On the other hand there are also digital networks that serve to network in the sense of interconnecting, i.e. those networks that make it possible to record an event (in a textual or (audio )visual form) in the World Wide Web. Other users can then take note of this record in real time and thereby transform the event into a communication event.
This session will concentrate on papers that address the following issues from both a theoretical-conceptual perspective and using application-oriented approaches:
Papers are invited on (but not limited to) the following themes :
- To what extent do digitization processes imply spatial processes of inclusion and exclusion?
- What implications do digitization processes have for anthropogenic mobility patterns?
- What implications does digitization have for space-time constructions and space-time deconstructions?
- Mobile technologies and mobile practices
- The social and/or cultural construction of “being connected while on the move” in leisure and tourism experiences
- Digital divides, connecting/disconnecting in tourism
- How tourism reflects and is influenced by mobile technologies
- The power relations of tourism in the Social Web
- Travel blogging, blogging mobile practices
- Technologies of touristic/mobile
- Digital tourism geographies
- Utilisation of media in mobile practices
- “Locatedness” in mobile practices
- Political, cultural and social discourses on tourism in Facebook/Social Networking/Twitter
Timeslots: 1