The Tourism Place Blog has a new home. It is now on the website for my journal, Tourism Geographies.
Click Here to go directly to the new Tourism Place Blog's home.
You may find that the content of the Tourism Place blog has changed. It is now more of a support site for the journal.
I have a couple of other tourism-related blogs that are more research, thought and experience related, which might be more of interest. These are:
TGJournal's Tourism Place
This is an affiliated blog for the journal, Tourism Geographies at TGJournal.com, for posting editorial comments, book reviews and preliminary research notes that may also appear in the journal.
Friday, October 07, 2016
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Public and Private Sustainable Tourism: Environmental Footprints and Quality of Life
'Sustainable development' has been a popular
conceptual framework since the World Commission on Environment and Development
issued its report to the United Nations in 1987 (WCED, 1987). Also
known as the “Brundtland Report”,
after the commission’s chairperson, Gro Harlmen Bundtland of Norway, its goal
was to define a new approach to addressing pressing social and environmental
needs of the world. Among its chief
concerns were
- 1. Poverty (hunger, health, housing, wealth distribution, exposure to natural disasters
- 2. Growth (fossil fuel and other natural resource consumption and pollution), global agenda to deal with the deterioration of natural and social environments.
Today, 24 years later, sustainable development and
sustainable tourism are widely accepted as appropriate philosophies upon which
to base policy decisions and behavioral practice. Their
wide acceptance is due, in part, to the flexibility used to interpret their
meaning. “Sustainable development” is an oxymoron, in that
it implies both environmental conservation and stewardship (through
sustainability), and natural resource exploitation (or development). Proponents
for both of these perspectives commonly use “sustainable development” to argue
for their respective positions. For Destination marketing organizations
(DMOs), for example, sustainable development often means maintaining and
growing tourist expenditures and tourism investments. This may be in
complete opposition to slow growth conservationists for whom sustainable
tourism is tourism development that does not impact local natural environments
traditional cultures.
Sustainable tourism, however, mostly applies to
mostly amenity rich geographic settings and, as such, is a niche area of
application for the broader sustainable development paradigm. Urbanization,
as a primary force for global social transformation can provide a more general
and perhaps universal perspective on sustainable development. Several efforts
have been made in popular media, for example, to rate the sustainability of cities,
along with justifications for those ratings. A compilation of several of those
lists shows a dominance of European cities, followed by North America and then
a few cities in other parts of the world (table 1, sources: d'Estries, 2011; Grist, 2007; Linssen & Sindik, 2008).
What is more valuable for these sustainable cities
lists is the criteria that they are based on. A review of the sources for table
1 resulted to two general types of criteria against which these cities
stood out in various ways: their environmental footprint and their quality of
life (table 2) (see also, . The environmental footprint of cities includes technological
investments and innovations that either reduce greenhouse gas emissions or,
secondarily, enhance the recycling of natural resources. As such, they are
efforts to reduce the environmental impact of cities, with ultimate goals of
reducing or mitigating the worldwide severity of global warming and
environmental change. Quality of life criteria, on the other hand, are much less
narrowly focused on global environmental issues. Instead, they address local
lived experiences and the creation of places that are comfortably adapted to
their social and environmental geographies. Open space, park lands, air, water,
transportation systems, forests and heritage sites are shared, common resources
that require conservation for future generations as much as the fossil fuels
and other non-renewable resources.
The sustainable cities criteria in Table 2 reflect
the perspective of environmental organizations that are the strongest
supporters of sustainable development, which reflects a strong bias toward the
conservation of natural and social resources.
It also shows a bifurcation in that perspective between mitigation,
which is a mostly engineering challenge, and adaptation, which is a more
difficult social planning challenge.
The difference in these two perspectives is also
evident in the area of sustainable tourism. The most common approach to
instituting and verifying sustainable tourism is through engineering evaluations
of the environmental footprint of a hotel, resort or tourist attraction that
result in green certifications. This approach to sustainable tourism is
popular because it is easier to conceptualize and more readily measurable than
are social planning objectives. Tourism industry sectors throughout the world
have adopted green certification programs both to mitigate the environmental
impacts of tourism activities and as an effective marketing mechanism for some
travel segments.
How tourism activities impacts local quality of
life is occasionally acknowledged by the tourism industry, which mostly associates
this through contribution to employment creation and the conservation of
traditional culture through artistic displays and performances, and various
forms of museumization. Tourism’s
broader roles in community development are addressed more by non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and social scientists than by private sector tourism
industry representatives.
The distinction in tourism development between
private businesses ownership of environmental mitigation measures and public
sector and civil society responsibility for public goods is not exclusive.
Governments also build green buildings and adopt internal energy efficiency and
recycling practices to reduce their environmental footprint. In doing so, however, they are behaving more
like private sector entities, rather than setting public policies that
influence broad sectors of community behavior. The true distinction here is the
public goods nature of the resources that comprise most of the quality of life
sustainability criteria. The profit driven private sector is seldom,
if ever, given primary responsibility for ensuring a community’s water and air
quality, and shared open spaces.
After two and a half decades of sustainable
development, this is where we have arrived the sustainable development paradigm
has brought us. There is a private
sector primary focus on the technology of climate and ecosystem mitigations,
and there is a public sector dominance of the realm of quality of life. These
are both positive experiences that have benefitted the communities by reducing
environmental impacts (footprints) and creating more livable places where they
have been adopted.
The problem is that although sustainability
paradigm practices have been adopted throughout the world to a degree beyond
the expectations of many, they have not resulted in effective responses
to global climate change and widespread poverty and hunger. Some have even argued that the success of
sustainability has resulted in a depoliticized and coopted climate change
concerns, resulting in post-modern indifference to the future (Swyngedouw, 2013; Beck,
2010).
The solution? See my previous post on Creative Resilience for the direction that I am currently leaning towards...
References Cited
Beck, UY. (2010) Climate for Change, or How to
Create a Green Modernity. Theory, Culture & Society 27: 254-266.
d'Estries, M. (2011) Top Five Most Sustainable
Cities in the World. Ecomagination.com (29 Nov), online at http://www.ecomagination.com/top-five-most-sustainable-cities-in-the-world,
accessed 20 January 2013.
Grist (2007) 15 Green Cities. Grist (20 July), online at: http://grist.org/article/cities3/, accessed 20 Jan 2013.
Linssen, S. and Christopher Sindik, C. (2008) 2020
Global Sustainability Centers, Ethisphere (7 Sept), online at http://ethisphere.com/2020-global-sustainability-centers/,
accessed 20 January 2013.
Swyngedouw, E. (2013) The Non-political Politics of
Climate Change. ACME: An International
E-Journal for Critical Geographies 12(1): 1-8, online at http://www.acme-journal.org/vol12/Swingedouw2013.pdf, accessed 13 January 2013.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Creative Resilience: The Next Sustainability for Tourism?
by Alan A. Lew – this is a brief summary of a paper that I am
working on
'Sustainable development' has really only been around as a
popular conceptual framework since the World Commission on Environment and Development
(WCED) issued its report to the United Nations in 1987 (Hall & Lew, 2009). Also known as the Brundtland Report, its goal
was to define a global agenda to deal with the deterioration of natural and
social environments.
Today, 24 years later, sustainable development and
sustainable tourism are widely accepted as appropriate philosophies upon which
to base policy decisions and behavioral practice. Their wide acceptance is due,
in part, to the flexibility used to interpret their meaning. Unfortunately, that flexibility may have made
both sustainable development and sustainable tourism meaningless.
Evidence for the failure of sustainable development is seen
in many of the major news headlines of the past couple of years, including:
- Increasingly extreme climate events related to increasing atmospheric green house gasses (GHG).
- Increasing global population (reaching seven billion in 2011) putting more pressure on natural resources.
- Increasing extreme geologic events (earthquakes and tsunamis), in part due to growing populations in dangerous locations.
- Economic recession and financial crises, especially in the US, the Eurozone and Japan.
All of these changes, among others, are taking place despite
widespread commitments to sustainable development across the globe. It appears that sustainable development in
general, and sustainable tourism as one of its forms, has failed to meet the
demands of contemporary society, and are even being overwhelmed by them.
Resilience theory offers an alternative to the sustainable
development paradigm. Community
resilience is the ability of a place to maintain a normal level of service in
the face of periodic or unpredictable external shocks or system failures. One way to think of the difference is that
sustainable development tries to prevent the shock event from occurring (by
behaving more responsible toward the environment and society), whereas resilience
planning focuses more on the response and recovering after the shock event.
From a human settlement of community perspective, three
general approaches to resilience planning have been suggested (Davoudi 2012):
Engineering, Ecological and Transformational.
Engineering resilience is the ability to return to a normal equilibrium
after a disturbance and emphasizes the efficiency and predictability of
bouncing back.
Ecological resilience is the ability to learn from an
adverse event so as to be better prepared for future shocks, which may involve
an alternative form of normalcy. Such learning includes institutional capacity
building and understanding individual social capital opportunities and
needs. For example, the SARS epidemic
decimated tourist arrivals in many Asian countries in 2003 because they were
caught unprepared to address this type of catastrophe. Similar disease issues
have arisen since that time, but policies and practices adopted since 2003 have
successfully kept them mostly under control, protecting the tourism
industry. These practices include
isolating travelers who are severely ill and regularly disinfecting elevators
and other strategic locations in public places.
Engineering and ecological resilience represent the
traditional goals of community resilience planning and both assume that there
is a normal level of social equilibrium that can be achieved. Most the new interest in climate change
resilience has tends to focus on these traditional approaches. However, as
community resilience planning has become more widely examined by social
scientists and community planners, a third form of resilience has emerged. It is define as the capacity of a community
to invoke whole systems changes, reflecting different timelines and
geographical scales, that evolve and create new adaptive models of response to
changes in their natural and social environment (Planning Theory &
Practice). I call this Creative resilience because resilient societies are
those that are able to continuously re-create themselves to successfully adapt
to an ever changing world.
Three basic tenets of Creative resilience are:
- Disturbances range from large, sudden shocks to gradual and consistent shifts, from the unpredictable to the expected, and from the undesired to those that are welcome.
- Communities and people build resilience by continuously responding to disturbances in creative and adaptive ways.
- Creative capacity building is occurs through effective leadership, individual social capital, and institutional social learning.
To me, a resilience approach makes a lot more sense in
today's world, with today's challenges, than does a sustainability
approach. While much of sustainability
also supports resiliency, resilience planning is more directly related to the
immediate challenges of a community in a real and practical manner. Creative resilience also offers a wider range
of possible responses and visionary futures than does sustainability, which is
more narrowly focused on conservation approaches.
For tourism, does this mean that we will replace green certifications
(such as Green Globe) with resilient certifications, or at least incorporate
resilience into the certification criteria?
I think that we may actually see this some day, though not in the near
term as resilience is still an emerging approach.
For tourism destinations, however, the question arises as to
what is the more important and effective policy for local and regional funding
and political support: sustainability or resilience? Instead of sustainable
tourism, should we be promoting resilient tourism? And what would resilient tourism look
like?
My own fieldwork in Asia indicates that the answer to this
last question is very much dependent on the context and needs of the tourism
entities involved. Figure 1 shows how
four generalized types of tourism settings based on the degree of disturbance
(from gradual shift to sudden shock) and the scale of tourism (from private
entrepreneurs to shared public interests) that are involved.
Figure 1
The Change Rate axis recognizes that people perceive and
manage slow, but still significant, changes in the environment, culture and
society than they do with sudden shocks to these systems. In addition, the model recognizes that rates
of change can be highly variable over time and at different social and
geographic scales, which can require different modes of response.
Given the complexity of contemporary social challenges, a
fully comprehensive approach to resilience planning is best approached from a
creative resilience because it is the only approach that acknowledges and
accepts the range of changes that a community faces. From the perspective of the tourism industry,
this means:
- 1- All tourism destinations face a range of change pressures, including environmental (changing natural resources), social (changing cultural resources) and economic (changing economic conditions).
- 2- Some pressures for change are apparent and predictable, while others are opaque and unpredictable.
- 3- Pressures for change occur at a variety of time lines (speeds) -- some are slow and gradual, while others require urgent responses.
- 4- Traditional sustainable tourism planning mostly addresses slow change issues. Engineering resilience planning mostly addresses major disruptions.
- 5- Pressures for change occur at a variety of geographic scales -- some only impact an individual entrepreneur, while others impact an entire community or cultural group.
- 6- Lower geographic scale issues need to be incorporated into resilience planning that occurs at higher geographic scales.
- 7- Common change issues in tourism destinations include the modification, deterioration or complete loss of: (1) tourism facilities and services; (2) environmental and cultural tourism resources; (3) tourist markets; and (4) skilled employees
- 8- A slow change pressures may be transformed into a sudden shock event if it passes a tolerance threshold (or breaking point).
- 9- Comprehensive resilience planning should incorporate the full range of change pressures that a community faces, and encourage creative and flexible response.
- 10- The tourism industry needs to be included in community resilience planning.
Reference Cited
Davoudi, S. (2012) Resilience: A Bridging Concept of a Dead
End? Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 13, No. 2, 299–333, June 2012 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2012.677124
Hall, C.M. and Lew, A.A. (2009). Understanding and Managing Tourism Impacts: An Integrated Approach.
London: Routledge.
Sunday, August 12, 2012
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)
Sunday, April 29, 2012
The Challenge of Benchmarking Tourism's Global Economic Value
Anyway ... yes, I fully agree that tourism is a huge global economic activity that just continues to grow despite economic upheavals across the globe. However, I caution everyone to be careful in accepting the illusion of hard number results from any study that tries to compare tourism economic activities with other industries at a global or even regional scale.
(Cross-posted at BlogNotions.com)
Labels:
comparisons,
statistics,
tourism industry,
tourism research,
wttc
Saturday, April 07, 2012
The Top 10 Dive Destinations in the World -- Really!
I just finished writing a book chapter on the World Geography of Scuba Diving for a book that a friend is putting together on recreation dive tourism. One of the things that I did for that chapter was to look at 15 online lists of "the top ten dive sites in the world".
Taken at Pulau Sapi (Sapi Island) very close to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia. |
Here is my list of the World's Top 10 Dive Destinations that comes from my combining 15 lists created by other people. (A longer version of this list will appear in the book when it comes out.)
COUNTRY (REGION) -LISTINGS- DIVE DESTINATIONS
1) Australia (S Pacific) -10- Great Barrier Reef, Heron Island
1) Indonesia (SE Asia) -10- Sulawesi, Raja Ampat
1) Mexico (M America) -10- Baja California, Riviera Maya and Cozumel
1) Thailand (SE Asia) -10- Koh Tao Island, Phuket Island
5) Malaysia (SE Asia) -9- Sipadan Island, Mabul Island
5) Egypt (Africa/M East) -9- Ras Mohammed Nat. Park, Red Sea (south)
7) Belize (M America) -8- Barrier Reef Reserve, Great Blue Hole
8) Fiji (S Pacific) -7-
9) Ecuador (S America) -6- Galapagos Islands
10) USA - Hawaii (C Pacific) -5- Kona Coast
10) Maldives (Indian Ocean) -5-
10) Micronesia, F.S (S Pacific) -5- Chuuk (Truk) Lagoon
OK. So my list is more than 10, due to so many ties. But let me explain it.
The top four countries that tied for first place were each listed on 10 of the 15 lists that I looked at. No country appeared on more than 10 of the lists, indicating how variable these lists are. Malaysia, which is where I am currently living, appeared on 9 of the lists, as did Egypt.
To the right of the listings number are any specific sites that might have been mentioned more than once. Lists tend to combine countries (like the Maldives and Fiji) and destinations (such as the Kona Coast or Sipidan). My list is based on countries. Dive destinations are shown only if they appeared on two different lists or more. So Maui, which appeared on only one of the 15 lists, did not make it onto the list above.
I took this photo of a pregnant pygmy seahorse at Lembeh Strait, near Manado on Sulawesi Island, Indonesia. |
Personally, even though I included top dive destinations from both the US and UK, I think the results are a bit biased. Based on other data I used for the book chapter, I believe that Australia, Indonesia, Mexico and Belize may be ranked a little too high and Pacific Island countries area little too low.
Australia, Indonesia and Mexico are all far larger in land area and coastlines than any of the other countries on this top ten list. (The mainland US and Canada were in the top 25, but not the top 10.) This gives them an advantage in that they have many more dive sites, as well as dive sites from widely different parts of their country. Mexico and Belize are boosted by their close proximity to the very large US diver market, which puts them on more top dive lists than they otherwise might be. On the other hand, the Pacific island countries may be a bit lower because they are so remote from both North America and Europe (the second largest dive market). Many, but not all, of the top 10 dive spot lists are written for specific diver markets, such as the US, the UK or Australia.
In addition, I doubt that very many Americans get to Egypt's Red Sea to dive, as I almost never see it in articles or advertisements in the dive magazines in the US. However, it still ranked quite high on this list. I believe that this is because it is such an important dive destinations for the UK and Europe in general. The Red Sea is the closest tropical-like coral reef destination for Europe.
All of these destinations are in warm water regions of the world. Europe does not appear at all, not even on the full list of 25 countries that I ended up with. Colder water dive sites, in general, only occasionally appear on top 10 diving lists that I reviewed. I wonder why? ;-)
I have personally dived at five of the places on this list, and snorkeled at one more of them. One of the problems is that any one dive spot, no matter how fantastic it is, may not be that great on the day that you are there due to water and weather conditions. Thus, my one day diving experience at the Great Barrier Reef was not very memorable, in part because a large cyclone a couple of months earlier had covered a lot of the coral with muck.
Still, I love scuba diving, and I love the Asia-Pacific region -- and I now have a (growing) list of places that I need to visit!!!
You can read how I got lost on my last dive just last week at : http://travelgeography.blogspot.com/2012/04/dive-54-where-are-you.html |
Labels:
dive destinations,
diving,
lists,
Pacific,
scuba,
scuba diving,
Southeast Asia,
top 10
Monday, March 26, 2012
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....
... 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
Hanoi: How to Make a Place Memorable
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 |
Labels:
Hanoi,
memorable,
sense of place,
Vietnam
Saturday, March 03, 2012
Travel Hungry? Look at this....
I have long felt that a lot of the research coming out of the neurosciences these days can inform our understanding of tourism and tourist behavior. I also know that a lot of that research is controversial with results that are probably overstated. With that caveat, though, I saw a recent article in 'Science Daily' that discussed research on how "what's going on inside our head affects our senses. For example, poorer children think coins are larger than they are, and hungry people think pictures of food are brighter." (Science Daily, 3 March 2012)
The research found that when words were flashed very fast on a screen (too fast to read, but slow enough to imprint on the brain), "Hungry people saw the food-related words as brighter and were better at identifying [the] food-related words" when shown on a list after they were flashed.
So what this research shows is that our perceptions increase toward items that our body wants or needs. How does this relate to tourism?
Tourism scholars have long pondered what motivates people to want to travel, and especially what motivates them to travel to certain types of destinations. Coastal and island destinations, for example, hold particular attraction as travel destinations for a broad spectrum of people. Culinary diversity, family kinships, ethnic and national identities, and architectural wonders are among the many other attraction types that we want to see and experience.
So if food hunger enhances our senses toward food, what does our selection of attractions tell us about what we are lacking, or hungry for, in our day to day lives? Because that is what is guiding our attention to travel magazine, tv shows and advertisements.
And while we are on a trip, what do the things we do, the photos we take (I will take several hundred photos of an interesting place), and the many other choices that we make say about our motivations and needs?
And finally, why are these so different from one person to the next?
These are the kinds of questions that get tourism researchers excited. ... Wow, look at that!
------
(This blog post is cross-listed at: http://hospitality.blognotions.com/2012/03/03/travel-hungry-look-at-this/)
Here's looking at you -- at a morning wet market in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia. (photo by Alan A. Lew) |
So what this research shows is that our perceptions increase toward items that our body wants or needs. How does this relate to tourism?
Tourism scholars have long pondered what motivates people to want to travel, and especially what motivates them to travel to certain types of destinations. Coastal and island destinations, for example, hold particular attraction as travel destinations for a broad spectrum of people. Culinary diversity, family kinships, ethnic and national identities, and architectural wonders are among the many other attraction types that we want to see and experience.
So if food hunger enhances our senses toward food, what does our selection of attractions tell us about what we are lacking, or hungry for, in our day to day lives? Because that is what is guiding our attention to travel magazine, tv shows and advertisements.
And while we are on a trip, what do the things we do, the photos we take (I will take several hundred photos of an interesting place), and the many other choices that we make say about our motivations and needs?
And finally, why are these so different from one person to the next?
These are the kinds of questions that get tourism researchers excited. ... Wow, look at that!
------
(This blog post is cross-listed at: http://hospitality.blognotions.com/2012/03/03/travel-hungry-look-at-this/)
Labels:
desire,
food,
hunger,
psychology,
travel motivation
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Have Blog, Will Travel
I have been “on the road” for just over a month now. I received a
Fulbright research grant to spend six months in Malaysia studying
coastal tourism development. The first month was a whirlwind tour that
included about a week each in Kuala Lumpur, Kota Kinabalu (mostly house
hunting), Singapore (for Chinese New Year), and a road trip from Johor
Bahru to Kuala Terengganu (one of my research sites). We have had some
amazing experiences and living a life that makes many of my friends
quite envious (though not in a bad way).
A few friends have asked me if I was going to post photos or blog. As usual, I have been taking a lot of photos. I average about 200 photos a day that I keep (out of the many more that I take) when I am visiting new places. Normally, I do try to post some photos and blog some about my experiences. However, that does take time, and for me, that time usually comes at the expense of sleep. This time, my wife has a request from her friends to post photos of our trip on Facebook, so I have been letting her do that. Occasionally I will share those so that my friends can see them, as well.
Now that I am settled into my semi-permanent home in Kota Kinabalu, I guess I do not have any more excuses for not blogging about our trip – and trying to get a few photos posted. Which raises a question in my mind about why — why do I feel the compulsion to blog, or two write in general. During this past month I gave two presentations on researching, writing and publishing tourism research (at two universities). And, as usual, I mention my passion for writing, and how much I enjoy writing. Not everyone has that passion, though most people in academia these days are under pressure to write and publish.
I think the desire to write, whether it be an book, journal article or blog post, meets to important human needs. The first is the desire to connect with other people – the people who read our writings. Even if we do not know them, we still get satisfaction from reaching out, with a degree of trust and optimism that someone will listen and be appreciative. The second is the desire for introspection. Writing requires thinking through thoughts and exploring ideas that would otherwise lie dormant in one’s mind. Putting them on paper makes them more concrete, forges new thought connections, and gives a sense of self discovery and existential creativity.
Travel also gives the potential for discovery and existential creative experiences. Writing about our travels, therefore, brings us full circle in a journey of understanding that includes both the outside world and our inside world. Writing about our travels also brings us full circle in connecting our known home (and friends) to our new places (and new friends).
Not everyone has the need to do this, but a lot of people do, resulting in the popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and specialty travel blogging and comment websites. It may also have to something to do with the proliferation of academic journals on tourism – over 160 of which currently exist!
You can follow my escapades in Malaysia by going to : http://aalew.blogspot.com
This blog is cross-posted at: http://hospitality.blognotions.com/2012/02/07/have-blog-will-travel/
A few friends have asked me if I was going to post photos or blog. As usual, I have been taking a lot of photos. I average about 200 photos a day that I keep (out of the many more that I take) when I am visiting new places. Normally, I do try to post some photos and blog some about my experiences. However, that does take time, and for me, that time usually comes at the expense of sleep. This time, my wife has a request from her friends to post photos of our trip on Facebook, so I have been letting her do that. Occasionally I will share those so that my friends can see them, as well.
Now that I am settled into my semi-permanent home in Kota Kinabalu, I guess I do not have any more excuses for not blogging about our trip – and trying to get a few photos posted. Which raises a question in my mind about why — why do I feel the compulsion to blog, or two write in general. During this past month I gave two presentations on researching, writing and publishing tourism research (at two universities). And, as usual, I mention my passion for writing, and how much I enjoy writing. Not everyone has that passion, though most people in academia these days are under pressure to write and publish.
I think the desire to write, whether it be an book, journal article or blog post, meets to important human needs. The first is the desire to connect with other people – the people who read our writings. Even if we do not know them, we still get satisfaction from reaching out, with a degree of trust and optimism that someone will listen and be appreciative. The second is the desire for introspection. Writing requires thinking through thoughts and exploring ideas that would otherwise lie dormant in one’s mind. Putting them on paper makes them more concrete, forges new thought connections, and gives a sense of self discovery and existential creativity.
Travel also gives the potential for discovery and existential creative experiences. Writing about our travels, therefore, brings us full circle in a journey of understanding that includes both the outside world and our inside world. Writing about our travels also brings us full circle in connecting our known home (and friends) to our new places (and new friends).
Not everyone has the need to do this, but a lot of people do, resulting in the popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and specialty travel blogging and comment websites. It may also have to something to do with the proliferation of academic journals on tourism – over 160 of which currently exist!
You can follow my escapades in Malaysia by going to : http://aalew.blogspot.com
This blog is cross-posted at: http://hospitality.blognotions.com/2012/02/07/have-blog-will-travel/
Labels:
blogging,
Malaysia,
psychology,
travel
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
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/)
Monday, October 24, 2011
Crossing Chasms: The Role of Distance in Tourism
Over the years, tourism scholars have come up with a large
number of different ways to segment tourist markets so that different products
can be more precisely targeted to potential travelers. Probably the most famous
of these is Stanley Plogs division of the both travelers and destinations into “psychocentrics”
(associated with security, familiarity and mass products) “allocentrics” (associated
with risk taking, extocism and niche products).
Although a lot of different terms have been applied to this safety-risk dualism,
with the goal of showing nuances, the fundamentals of the dichotomy have
remained consistent.
Like others, I am not going to venture far from the basic model,
but I do hope to provide some insights by introducing a perspective that has
not, to my knowledge, been suggested before.
That perspective is the concept of “distance”. There are essentially
three forms of distance: Geographical, Social and Psychological. Each of these
can tell us something about the different ways people travel.
Geographical distance
is based on absolute measurements on the planet earth, measured in miles or
kilometers. For tourists, it becomes quickly complicated by complicated roads
and pathways between where we are and where we want to go. GPS receivers and online maps help us to
navigate in a mostly more efficient and timely way, assuming they are based on current and
correct geographic information.
However, for tourists, a more desirable route may be one
that encompasses certain kinds of scenery or attractions, which can be highly
subjective to the individual tourist. What is happening here is the
transformation of geographical distance into social and psychological distance.
Social distance
is how the majority of people in a society define the distance between one
place and another. This can be totally
different from geographic distance. Political borders, for example, are a more
formal social structure that has a huge impact on travel distance – both actual
and perceived. One reason, among many, is that political borders increase the time it takes to get to a place, which is often be a more important distance factor than actual geographic measurements.
Another example is the distance between different
socio-economic groups in a society. We talk, for example, about the huge
distance between the privileged lives of those in houses on the hill (the upper
class) and homeless street life on skid row. We talk about not wanting to go to
certain neighborhoods for safety and cultural.
These perceptions, while grounded in society, also have major
psychological components.
Psychological
distance is how our brains perceive distance. We can only see clearly over
a fairly short distance (even with glasses on). In addition, our brains can
only comprehend and process a somewhat limited amount of information. Where we
focus our eyes is what we cognize and remember the best. While we see the background and larger
context of objects, elements in that broader scan are not stored in detail in
our memory.
For tourists, this means that we can only comprehend a
selected part of the destinations we visit. To fully appreciate requires time,
repeated visits, curiosity, an openness to the unexpected, and patience. Most
mass tourists are not able to devote themselves to a place in these ways, and
so the tourism industry does its best to help direct a short term focus on immediate
objects in front of the tourist – not in the distance.
Together, geographical distance, social distance and
psychological distance contribute to making a lot of travel a short-sighted
experience, even when we travel far (for the psychocentrics among us). On the other hand, some travel can traverse
great chasms and lead to unknown worlds, even if the actually journal is very
close (form allocentrics). It all
depends on distance to which the tourist is willing to go….
(also posted at Hospitality.Blognotions.com)
(also posted at Hospitality.Blognotions.com)
Labels:
distance,
geography,
issues,
mobility,
perception,
psychology,
social science,
time
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Emerging Research Themes for Tourism: Insights from Geography
The annual meeting of the Association of American
Geographers (AAG) is held every Spring. In 2011 in was held in Seattle, April
12-16. In the previous fall there are a plethora of CFPs (Call for Papers) from
people who are organizing paper sessions. I am personally on several geography email
lists, including UrbGeog (urban geography), EconomicGeography, CulturalGeog,
and LeftGeog, in addition to the email list of the Recreation, Tourism and
Sport (RTS) Specialty Group in the AAG.
As an avid academic geographer, I find many of these CFPs (certainly not
all of them) to be very thoughtfully written and informative in themselves. And, more importantly, they are often (certainly
not always) at the cutting edge of research thought in my home discipline of
geography.
In fact, I often find the geography CFPs more compelling
that those that are written for tourism sessions at the AAG. Because of that, I collected some 100 CFPs
for last year’s meeting and culled through them to find the most interesting
topics that academic tourism geographers should be studying (IMHO of course). I grouped the 100 CFPs into the three topic
areas below. Here is a selection of some of the more compelling research topics
that I came up with:
TOPIC AREA 1 – Economic
and Urban Geography
2. City Hubs and Networks – This is also a concept that has been around for awhile in travel and tourism studies, though not a major part of the field. Emerging geography research is still looking at the idea of transportation hubs (air and sea), but also extending that into “brainports” (aka “centers of competence”), the influence of municipalities on regional policies related to theorizing policy networks, sustainability and environmental governance, transnational networking and sociotechnical regimes related to global civil society and NGOs, and the new geographies of global production networks focusing on the relationships between small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and international corporations.
3. Mobile Technologies and Place – This is, of course, a major new area of emerging activity and research. As such we are still evolving ways to study it. Geographers are interested in: how mobile devices change the spatial and temporal flexibility of individuals and organizations; how they change the ways in which material places are used and perceived; how technology transforms social and spatial relations, affects social identification, and transforms state-society and nature-society relations; and how information, communication and telecommunication technologies are becoming (or not) integrated into the everyday practices of businesses and households -- and with what socioeconomic consequences.
TOPIC AREA 2 – Cultural
and Political Geography
5. Multicultural Peoples – This is a popular topic in the broader social sciences that tourism researchers have touched upon to some degree. Topics include multicultural people's sense of place and the various belongings they have to where they grew up, where they live, where they travel, and where their ancestors were from. Also of interest are the intersections of race with gender, class, religion, and space; spatialities of post-racial thinking; and the growing diversity in both metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas the developed world.
6.
People
Mobilities - The multicultural peoples topic is related to the growing
mobility of people worldwide. This topic presents many geographic research
themes, including: the search for alternative mobility futures; slow movements;
borders and their surveillance and securitization; embodied performances and
affective mobility; friction, turbulence and rhythms of movement; mobile and
locative social media and electronic gaming; and imaginary and virtual travel. Also
of related interest are how class, gender, sexuality, are ethnicity are
enacted, (re)produced and potentially transformed in mobile practices by
individuals and their social relations, experiences, mobile strategies, and identities.
At another level are issues of freedom of movement, challenges and changes in the
global system of migration controls, and “no borders” politics in an era of rising
anti-immigrant sentiment.
TOPIC AREA 3 – Planning
and Sustainable Places
7. Green
Economies – Sustainable tourism is a very popular topic for tourism
research, but the broader geography research on the green economy still brings
some new ideas, including: new forms of green commodification and the rapidly
expanding markets on which these are traded; developing spaces of the green
economy; the work of creating ‘sustainable’ cities, transportation networks,
waste management systems, and alternative/renewable energy; how ‘green jobs’
differ from traditional jobs; green urbanism; Foucault's apparatus (dispositive;
institutions that support power structures); and the political economy and
material processes of the green economy.
8. Ethical Practice
– This is a topic that is very new among tourism researchers, and has probably
been better addressed by geographers. Major themes include: issues of civil,
political and social rights, what might be called "place rights" or a
"right to place" as an entitlement of citizenship, and what constitutes
these place-based rights, theoretically and in practice; policy implications
that arise from normative scholarship and practice; caring approaches to social
theory; human rights and geographic place; defining hegemonies and counter-hegemonies;
accommodation and subversion within social movements; meaning and materiality
in societal mobilization; similarities between red and green social movements –
and, of course, their relationship to tourism development.
As you might guess, there were many other topics among the
AAG Call for Papers. Each of the topics above is based on three to four
different CFPs. I am sure other academic disciplines have a lot that they can
inform our tourism research. For me, I am glad to be a geographer as I find the
entire discipline to be immensely stimulating and informative for my personal tourism
research.
Labels:
academia,
cultural geography,
ethics,
geography,
green economies,
interdisciplinary,
mobility,
multicultural,
research,
tourism planning,
tourism research,
urban planning
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