Tourism Planning and Development

Contemporary Cases and Emerging Issues

Jarkko Saarinen, Christian M. Rogerson, C. Michael Hall, Jarkko Saarinen, Christian M. Rogerson, C. Michael Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367891367
• eBook ISBN: 9781351536011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Academically complex and challenging to apply, development and planning are increasingly relevant to the growing tourism industry.

This collection contains critical studies on tourism development and planning, and calls for proactive, holistic and responsible thinking. It addresses conceptual and contemporary issues in development and planning research including political trust, innovation networks, sustainability, moral encounters, enclavisation and evolutionary economics. It argues that recognition of the contextual and historical dimensions around tourism development and planning is essential to help both researchers and practitioners better understand destination and place-based decision-making. In addition, it will lead to improvements in stakeholder relations, and explains how tourism best works with localities and localities with tourism.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Tourism Geographies.

Geographies of tourism development and planning

Jarkko Saarinen, Christian M. Rogerson and C. Michael Hall

ABSTRACT
Development and planning have long been a focus of tourism geographers. Although the ideas of development and planning are complex and challenging to define and study, there is a strong agreement on the academic and societal relevance of their research in tourism geographies: tourism is a growth industry which requires holistic and future-oriented planning measures that minimize the negative externalities of tourism and guide the industry’s growth towards a development path. A brief overview of early phases and current directions of development and planning approaches in geographical tourism research shows how traditional approaches are still relevant. There is, however, a need to recognize distinct contextual and historical dimensions around the geographies of tourism development and planning in versatile research contexts. These historic and contextual elements influence the present and future characteristics and power relations of tourism in place and can help us to understand how tourism works with localities and localities with tourism.

Introduction

‘Painters search out untouched unusual places to paint. Step by step the place develops as a so-called artist colony. Soon a cluster of poets follows, kindred to the painters; then cinema people, gourmets, and the jeunesse dorée. The place becomes fashionable and the entrepreneur takes note. The fisherman’s cottage, the shelter-huts become converted into boarding houses, and hotels come on the scene. Meanwhile, the painters have fled and sought out another periphery – periphery as related to space, and metaphorically, as ‘forgotten’ places and landscapes. Only the painters with commercial inclination who like to do well in business remain; they capitalize on the good name of this former painter’s corner and on the gullibility of tourists. More and more townsmen choose this place, now en vogue and advertised in the newspapers. Subsequently, the gourmets, and all those who seek real recreation, stay away. At last, the tourist agencies come with their package rate travelling parties; now, the indulged public avoids such places. At the same time, in other places the cycle occurs again; more and more places come into fashion, change their type, turn into everybody’s tourist haunt’ (Christaller, 1964, p. 103).

Geographers have a long-standing interest in tourism planning and development (Hall & Page, 2014). The geographer Walter Christaller, better known for his contributions to Central Place Theory, made early efforts to study the formal spatial organization and development of tourism (Christaller, 1955, 1964). For him, as a reinvented tourism geographer after the Second World War (Barnes & Minca, 2013), the typical course of new tourism development in peripheral areas followed the above-described process. At a general level, this trajectory resembles the same pattern conceptualized by Stansfield (1978) and, more famously, by Butler (1980) as the Tourist Area Cycle of Evolution model and has clear connections to resource management and planning issues. Indeed, both development and planning have a long research tradition in tourism geographies with implications for identifying and understanding tourism impacts, management, and public policies; and more recently for sustainability and resilience in tourism (Butler, 1999; Hall, Malinen, Vosslamber, & Wordsworth, 2016; Lew, Ng, Ni, & Wu, 2016; Saarinen, 2006). Yet, ideas of tourism development and planning are subject to multiple conceptual frames, are interpreted differently from place to place, and evolve over time (see Pike, Rodríguez-Pose, & Tomaney, 2007).

Although there is no consensus about what development or planning precisely means in tourism (Hall, 2000), there is no disagreement about their academic importance and societal relevance in research. Tourism is widely regarded as a social and economic phenomenon that calls for proactive measures to help ensure positive development trajectories. The difference between growth and development is well acknowledged in tourism studies (Hall, 2009; Holden, 2013; Saarinen & Rogerson, 2014; Scheyvens, 2011; Telfer & Sharpley, 2008; Wahab & Pigram, 1997) and can be simplified by utilizing the United States Local Government Commission’s distinction stating that ‘growth means to get bigger, development means to get better – an increase in quality and diversity’ (cited by Pike et al., 2007, p. 1253). Thus, while growth is generally seen as a quantitative indicator, the idea of development is more focused on qualitative dimensions in social and economic processes, such as the quality of life and well-being. In addition, development has two connected threads of meaning: development as a concrete material process and as a discourse (Lawson, 2007) which both influence the course, impacts, and planning issues of tourism in destination contexts (Saarinen, 2004).

‘Planning is an extremely ambiguous and difficult word to define’ (Hall, 2000, p. 6). Overall, planning is a future-oriented and strategic decision-making process that aims to direct human actions to a desired and mutually agreed direction(s). Murphy (1985, p. 156), for example, defined tourism planning as ‘anticipating and regulating change in a system to promote orderly development so as to increase social, economic and environmental benefits of the development process’. Therefore, public tourism planning can be understood as a potential tool for guiding tourism to a development path that creates benefits and well-being beyond the industry and its core operations. That said, the emphasis on wider socio-economic development in tourism is not an automatic premise or outcome as public planning actions can produce unexpected consequences and are often highly industry-oriented. Getz (1987) identified four tourism planning approaches including industry-oriented ‘boosterism’ which unquestioningly promotes tourism growth per se. In addition, Hall (2000) noted an alternative sustainable tourism planning tradition that specifically aims to foster a holistic and progressive approach and integration of economic, sociocultural, and environmental values in tourism development. More recently, the emergence of new public management and the neo-liberal project highlights the growth of public–private partnerships in tourism planning and development and the development of more corporatized public planning approaches which are barely distinguishable from those of the private sector (Figure 1). Yet despite the now more than 30 years of research attention to sustainable, environmentally, and related tourism(s), and a plethora of strategies and interventions to balance the tensions between tourism growth and development (Hall, 2015a), tourism remains further away from being sustainable than ever (Hall, Gössling, & Scott, 2015).

Early approaches in tourism development and planning

Academic geographical research into tourism development and planning issues may be traced back to Europe and North America in the 1920s (Carlson, 1980; Gilbert, 1939; Lundgren, 1984; Mitchell, 1979; Wolfe, 1964). Early research topics and approaches included land use, locational issues, and the economic geography of tourism (Christaller, 1955; Duffield, 1984; Jones, 1933; McMurray, 1930; Wolfe, 1951). These topics involved a focus, explicitly or implicitly, on development and planning aspects in tourism. Gilbert (1939, p. 16), for example, regarded tourism-related evolution and planning issues as part of urban studies by stating that seaside health resorts formed ‘a very important feature of English urban geography’ (also Gilbert, 1949). Gilbert was specifically interested in the reasons and contexts lying behind the development of resorts, including their transportation connections and world politics. In this respect, he acknowledged wider structures and processes beyond local issues, impacts, and carrying capacity, for example, that impacted the evolution and success of tourism destinations and which laid the foundation for the later work of Stansfield (1978) and Butler (1980).

Figure 1: Relationships between planning traditions, key themes in tourism development, global development milestones, and humanity’s global footprint (Hall, 2015a).

After the Second World War and the rise of systematic studies in geography, the research emphasis turned to topics such as the modelling of tourism development, related questions of tourist supply and demand, and enquiries concerning locations and flows of tourists (Christaller, 1955; Miossec, 1967). A common research setting was a rural, remote, and/or natural amenity-rich area: with tourism characteristically seen as a typical phenomenon for peripheries (Christaller, 1964; see also Brown & Hall, 2000; Butler, 1980; Hovinen, 1982; Keller, 1987). Only since the 1980s has there developed a strong urban-focused scholarship around tourism development and planning issues (Jansen-Verbeke, 1986; Judd, 1995; Rogerson & Rogerson, in press), while the growing literature on second homes and multiple place attachment also highlights the importance of relational perspectives on tourism mobility for policy and planning (Hall, 2015b; Muller & Hoogendoorn, 2013; Strandell & Hall, 2015).

From peripheries to centre, from presentism to historical and contextual understanding

In tourism development and planning practices, the periphery embodies symptoms of a distance-based (geographical and economic) isolation and lack of access, but it typically also relies on the perceived location and related societal interpretations of marginality (Shields, 1991). The tourism industry operates as a link and medium between local and larger spatial scales and socio-economic and environmental systems. Arguably, these core--periphery/global–local relations, often characterized by inequalities and uneven power structures (Britton, 1991; Scheyvens & Momsen, 2008), call for critical tourism and planning geographies. Harrison (2008) suggests tourism development scholars should analyse the complexity and various benefit distribution patterns found in globalized tourism landscapes, especially in the Global South (see Christian, 2016). Such measures could bridge the theory–practice divide often present in development and planning studies. In this respect, the relatively recent emphasis on value-chain analysis (Judd, 2006) and evolutionary economic geography (EEG) (Brouder, 2014) offers fruitful avenues for greater understanding in specific tourism development and planning contexts.

While tourism is highly visible in many peripheries and can potentially contribute to local and regional development in areas suffering a lack of alternative socio-economic development prospects, there are urgent research problems in various other kinds of spatial settings. Recent rapid expansion of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ in tourism, for example, creates new kinds of planning issues in urban and suburban areas (Gurran & Phibbs, 2017) with a realization that there are urban ‘communities’ and interests that may have diverse opinions about the effects of products, such as Airbnb and Uber, in their neighbourhoods (Colomb & Novy, 2017; Hall, Le-Klähn, & Ram, 2017; Visser, Erasmus, & Miller, in press).

Recent literature stresses that it is crucial to understand the historical nature and context of tourism development and planning in present situations (Buzinde & Manuel-Navarrete, 2013), including pre-tourism issues and relatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Geographies of tourism development and planning
• 2. Political trust and residents’ support for alternative and mass tourism: an improved structural model
• 3. Networking and learning for tourism innovation: evidence from the Western Cape
• 4. Moral assemblages of volunteer tourism development in Cusco, Peru
• 5. The value of community-based tourism in Banteay Chhmar, Cambodia
• 6. Modelling tourism and hospitality employment clusters: a spatial econometric approach
• 7. Enclavic tourism spaces: territorialization and bordering in tourism destination development and planning
• 8. Evolutionary economic geography: reflections from a sustainable tourism perspective
• 9. Tourism planning and place making: place-making or placemaking?
• 10. ‘Putting Place on a Plate’ along the West Cork Food Trail
• 11. Community, state and power-relations in community-based tourism on Lekhubu Island, Botswana
• 12. Modeling the state of agritourism in the Malopolska region of Poland
• 13. Reconsidering ‘development’ in tourism geography research
• Index