Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
In many cases, the state's involvement is to ensure a policy of intervention so that
political objectives associated with employment generation and planning are achieved,
although this varies from one country to another and from city to city according to the
political persuasion of the organisation involved. D.G.Pearce (1989) rightly
acknowledges, however, that
the public sector then is by no means a single entity with clear cut
responsibilities and well-defined policies for tourist development. Rather,
the public sector becomes involved in tourism for a wide range of reasons
in a variety of ways at different levels and through many agencies and
institutions…[and] there is often a lack of coordination, unnecessary
competition, duplication of effort in some areas and neglect in others.
(D.G.Pearce 1989:44)
SPATIAL ANALYTICAL APPROACHES TO THE SUPPLY OF
TOURISM FACILITIES
Much of the research on tourism supply in relation to facilities and services is descriptive
in content, based on inventories and lists of the facilities and where they are located. In
view of the wide range of literature that discusses the distribution of specific facilities or
services, it is more useful to consider only two specific examples of how such approaches
and concepts may be used to derive generalisations of patterns of tourism activity.
The tourism business district
Within the literature on the supply of urban tourism, Ashworth (1989) reviews the
'facility approach' which offers researchers the opportunity to map the location of
specific facilities, undertaking inventories of facilities on a city-wide basis. The difficulty
with such an approach is that the users of urban services and facilities are not just
tourists, since workers and residents as well as recreationists may use the same facilities.
Therefore, any inventory will be only a partial view of the full range of facilities and
potential services tourists could use. One useful approach is to identify the areas in which
the majority of tourist activities occur and to use it as the focus for the analysis of the
supply of tourism services in such a multifunctional city which meets a wide range of
uses for a wide range of users (see Chapter 5). This avoids the individual assessments of
the location and use of specific aspects of tourism services such as accommodation (Page
and Sinclair 1989), entertainment facilities such as restaurants (S.L.J.Smith 1983b, 1989)
and night-life entertainment facilities (Ashworth et al. 1988) plus other attractions. This
approach embraces the ecological approaches developed in human geography to pinpoint
regions within cities as a basis to identify the processes shaping the patterns.
The ecological approach towards the analysis of urban tourism dates back to
E.W.Gilbert's (1949) assessment of the development of resorts, which was further refined
by Barrett (1958). The outcome is a resort model where accommodation, entertainment
and commercial zones exist and the central location of tourism facilities were dominant
elements. The significance of such research is that it identifies some of the features and
