Reflections and Futures - Tourism and Trails: Cultural, Ecological and Management Issues - page 249

themes such as 'tourism and climate change', which registered 1142 search
results, suggesting that sufficient interest and research has been developed
enough to justify a themed book on this interesting topic.
Early thinking by Wall (1997) suggested that a useful way to categorize
tourism (and we include recreation) spaces was to look at them as points
(e.g. visitor centers, casinos, campgrounds and museums), areas (e.g. resorts,
theme parks, protected areas and villages), and lines (e.g. routes, trails, rail-
roads and coastlines). Undoubtedly there has been much more interest by tour-
ism scholars in researching points and areas, but the numbers illustrated in
Table 8.1 would suggest that research in linear tourism spaces is developing.
One sign of a mature field of academic inquiry is when researchers shift
from generic textbooks to tomes that often have a very narrow and special-
ized theme (Hall, 2005). The collation of research on trails and routes in
this topic is very indicative of the latter. We argue that sufficient research
has been undertaken over the years to justify this topic where topics such
as trail and route types, supply and demand, impacts and management are
examined, bringing together what is a rather disparate body of research into
a condensed and accessible volume. Around these five aspects we provide
some reflection in this concluding chapter. A short and speculative com-
mentary is offered at the end on potential future directions for research on
trails and routes.
It should be noted at the outset, that the research analyzed in this topic
strongly reflects an English-language and developed country bias. This is
not intentional but rather reflects the fact that recreation and tourism
research on routes and trails is dominated by English-speaking experts in
predominantly English-language journals and books, although publications
in other languages were also utilized for their conceptual contributions
throughout the topic. While most of the examples and case studies were
assembled from the world's developed countries, this does not reflect
that routes and trails as tourism resources in developing countries are any
less important. It does, however, indicate the origins of most trail research-
ers and the unbalanced abundance of empirical material from the most
developed, Western countries.
Toward a typology of trails and routes
Categorizations or typologies are common in tourism studies, from
those that focus on types of tourists (Prentice, 1994) to types of tourism
(Novelli, 2005), so it should therefore not be surprising that we have pro-
posed a simple typology of human-originated linear spaces that is inclusive
of all linear tourism and recreation resources, including paths, bridleways,
blueways, greenways, railway lines, scenic roads, wilderness tracks and tour
circuits. Understanding this classification is, however, complicated further
when scale and setting are considered.