Easy and Hard Sustainability: Sustainable Tourism and Sustainable Cities

While almost everything I research and write about is tourism related, the classes that I actually teach at Northern Arizona University are mostly not tourism related, but are in urban and regional planning.  I have a master degree in urban planning and am a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners.  I also follow email lists for practicing planners, academic planners and tourism academics.

I try to bring my urban planning background to my tourism work, with my book Understanding and Managing Tourism Impacts: An Integrated Approach (Routledge, 2009) being the place where I have done that the most.  There is also a commentary that I wrote in 2007 on planning theory and tourism planning that you can download from the link below.  This blog post is based on that commentary, which was updated in a keynote presentation that I gave a few months ago at a conference on "Sustainable Urban Tourism" that was held in Hong Kong (2012) and which is also linked below.

My personal opinion is that urban planners have a much better understanding of the breadth of issues related to sustainable development than do tourism people.  In tourism, the main focus of sustainable development is on green certifications.  This checklist approach is what planners call a "functional" or "tame" problem. They tend to have clear goals, quantifiable results, and are not threatening in their implementation.  They are the easy challenges of sustainability, and include low carbon energy use, water conservation, waste recycling, open space protection, and low impact building practices.

There is, as you might suspect, another group of sustainable development problems that are much harder to resolve.  Planners refer to these as "substantive" or "wicked" problems, and they tend to involve vague goals, subjective attitudes, and political decisions that threaten particular interest groups.  Examples of wicked sustainability issues that relate to tourism development include changing human behavior to improve air and water quality, increasing quality of life opportunities and political empowerment for low income communities, and protecting living cultures without destroying their sense of place through commodification and museumization.

Urban planners have developed tools to use with communities to address wicked problems.  These mostly center on citizen participation techniques, and there are many substantive approaches that may be employed.  A big difference between tourism and urban planning, of course, is that tourism tends to be more private sector and business oriented, while urban planning tends to be more public welfare oriented. 

However, these orientations are not exclusive, as tourism is often seen as an economic development opportunity for both private businesses and communities in general, as well as having potential positive impacts on environmental and cultural conservation.  Just how tourism can do that in a truly sustainable manner, beyond the easy sustainability of green certifications, requires a greater awareness on the part of tourism industry leaders and managers, as well as many tourism researchers, of how this is  being done in disciplines outside of tourism itself.

References:

Lew, Alan A. (2007) Tourism Planning and Traditional Urban Planning Theory: Planners as Agents of Social Change. Leisure/Loisir: Journal of the Canadian Association of Leisure Studies 31(2):383-392. (pre-publication version)


Lew, Alan A. (2012) Planning Theory, Sustainable Cities and Sustainable Tourism. Keynote presenation at the Sustainable Tourism in Urban Environments Conference, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 20-22 April 2012. DRAFT Pre-Conference Working Copy (.pdf)

Memorable Places: Hanoi

This was recently posting on my Travelography blog, where I talk about my personal travels.  I thought it might be of interest to readers here, as well....

Hanoi: How to Make a Place Memorable

... We left Hanoi feeling really good.  We thoroughly enjoyed the city and felt like it was a place that we both wanted to visit again some day.  Part of that was the great walking and exploring opportunities of the Hanoi's Old Quarter.  Being able to "explore", "discover" and be "surprised" is a really important part of a good tourist experience.

The other key to our very positive experience of Hanoi, however, was the friendliness and hospitality of the people we encountered.  Not just one person, though Mr. Anh really stood out, but also so many of the other people we encountered.   Homer was so right when he wrote that “A guest never forgets the host who had treated him kindly.”

For more, go to: http://travelgeography.blogspot.com/2012/03/hanoi-how-to-make-place-memorable.html

Hoan Kiem Lake, Hanoi, at night

Topophilia and Emotional Geographies in Tourism Destinations

Topophilia is “the feeling of affection which individuals have for particular places” (Tuan, 1961).  The term was first coined in 1947 by the American poet, W.H. Auden, and became popularized, at least among academic geographers, by Yi-Fu Tuan’s book, Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values, which was published in 1974 (Prentice-Hall). 

Recent work in geography along the lines of how people develop affections and attachments to places has occurred under the broader title of emotional geography (Davidson, et al. 2007). Emotional geography incorporates cognitive theories on how people “know” and relate to places through their senses, bodily movements and emotions. It includes not just what people say about place experiences, but also the many different ways that they perform, function and experience place with their entire physical being.  How this leads to feelings of topophilia and place attachment is one component of emotional geography.

The connections of topophilia and emotional geographies to tourism are obvious.  Tourism destinations want visitors to like them. They want to create topophilic relationships.  They offer services and attractions that titillate the senses through site, sound, taste, touch and movement.  Though the emphasis is often on somewhat superficial sensory experiences, sometimes turning places into thematic amusement parks, the ultimate goal is almost always to touch that deeper sense of topophilia.

Aspects of cognitive emotional geographies that tourism destinations should consider in their efforts to create topophilic relationships with tourists include the following (adapted from Ogunseitan, 2005):

• Landscape Diversity – A place should contain a variety of different landscape features that are blended together to offer visual and other sensory stimulation.
• Sensory Coherence – Colors, smells, sounds, light, touch (including the sense of movement) all need to be considered and should blend in a logical and pleasing manner.
• Environmental Familiarity – Tourists visiting a new place need things that ground them and which make them feel comfortable and safe, including identifiable objects, spaces of privacy, and open spaciousness.
• Cognitive Challenges – Tourists also need to be challenged by the places that they visit, through varying degrees of complexity, mystery, surprise and exhilaration

In essence this is finding the right balance between sensory dissonance and rationality, and between cognitive safety and risk.  These are the tourism destination’s tools of topophilic place making.  How does your community compare on these measures?

References cited

Davidson, J., Smith, M., and Bond, L. (eds.) 2007. Emotional Geographies. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

Ogunseitan, O.A. 2005. Topophilia and the Quality of Life. Environmental Health Perspectives 113(2): 143–148. - Published online 2004 November 22. doi:  10.1289/ehp.7467, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1277856/

Tuan, Y-F. 1961. Topophilia. Landscape 11 (Fall): 29-32.

(This entry is also posted at: http://hospitality.blognotions.com/2011/12/20/ tourism-topophilia-and-emotional-geographies/)