Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
behaviour, the tourism system and its constituent components need to be evaluated in the
context of future growth in urban tourism to understand the visitor as a central component
in the visitor experience. Managing the different elements of this experience in a realistic
manner requires more attention among those towns and cities competing aggressively for
visitors, using the quality experience approach as a new-found marketing tool. Future
research needs to focus on the behaviour, attitudes and needs of existing and prospective
urban tourists to reduce the gap between their expectations and the service delivered. But
ensuring that the tourism system within cities can deliver the service and experience
marketed through promotional literature in a sensitive and meaningful way is now one of
the major challenges for urban tourism managers. The approach adopted by the tourism
industry needs to be more proactive in its pursuit of high-quality visitor experiences
rather than reactive towards individual problems that arise as a result of tourist
dissatisfaction after a visit. Research has a vital role to play in understanding the
increasingly complex reasons why tourists continue to visit urban environments and the
factors which influence their behaviour and spatial activity patterns. While urban tourism
continues to be a recognised and established form of tourism activity, research by the
academic community and private sector has really paid only lip-service to what is a
central feature of the tourism system in most developed and developing countries.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has reviewed the role of recreation and tourism within the context of an
urban environment, where recreationalists and tourists inevitably use some of the same
resources, a feature recognised in Toronto's launch of a Green Tourism Map which also
includes many recreational sites. This feature of multiple use is best summarised by
Burtenshaw et al.'s (1991) conceptualisation of different users and functional areas of the
city, where no one group has a monopoly over its use, a feature now being recognised in
more integrated recreational planning that begins to recognise that residents and visitors
use similar resources. The urban environment is still a neglected field of research in
relation to the geographer's analysis of tourism and recreation as Ashworth (2003)
reiterated in revisiting his seminal study published in 1989. It is ironic, therefore, that
many of the methodologies, techniques and skills which the geographer can harness and
utilise with new technology, such as the use of GIS, can help both the public and private
sector to understand how a range of research issues affect the functioning of the
recreational and tourism system. For the more applied geographical researcher, this is a
straightforward process in many instances of utilising a synthesising role to adopt the
holistic view to the city, to provide what Lynch (1960) described as
legibility
. It is this
absence of legibility that seems to affect the management of urban tourism and recreation
even in the new millennium. For example, in recreational planning, issues of access,
equality, need and social justice can easily be integrated into spatial analysis using
secondary data but the spatially informed planning framework is often only portrayed as
a static one point in time analysis produced for structure plans and development plans as
this chapter has shown. Few attempts have been made to build and maintain urban
models of recreation and tourism that accommodate the dynamic and changing needs of
the users of such services. Where data do not exist, spatially orientated social surveys
