Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
2 2
TOURISM
N o a m S h o v a l
Sightseeing, walking, shopping, and sitting in restaurants and cafés are widely recognised as
the major activities undertaken by tourists. Although these activities appear to be clearly set
in time and space, so far relatively little attention has been paid to visitor mobility within the
fi elds of human geography and tourism research (Shaw
et al.
, 2000).
The dearth of research that exists on this subject can be attributed primarily to the meth-
odological complexity involved in studies of this kind. Firstly, it is diffi cult to locate the
tourist when he or she enters and leaves a city or region, due to the absence of defi ned entry
and exit points. Secondly, the term 'tourist' includes a wide variety of different types of tour-
ists that are distinguishable from one another by their interests, the purposes of their visits,
and their time budgets, among other factors, so that in order to illustrate
the tourist's
spatial
behaviour, different types of tourists in the region must fi rst be identifi ed. Thirdly, the
funding requirements for such surveys have restricted the wide implementation of empirical
research on tourists' time-space activities (Forer, 2002: 24).
In this chapter, I argue that a better understanding of the logic of visitor activities in time
and space could not only serve a number of practical purposes in tourism industries, planning
and management, but also develop the existing concept of time geography and considerably
enlarge the theoretical foundations of tourism research.
Time geography
Time geography, which focuses on the constraints and trade-offs that occur when people fi nd
themselves having to divide a limited amount of time between various activities in space, is
one of the earliest analytical perspectives used to analyse patterns of human activity (Miller,
2005c: 17). Time geography was the brainchild of the Swedish geographer Torsten
Hägerstrand, who in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, together with his associates at the
University of Lund (known collectively as the Lund School), developed time geography's
basic tenets (Gregory, 2000: 830).
Beyond Sweden's borders, researchers such as Allan Pred, Nigel Thrift and Anthony
Giddens helped with the international diffusion of time-geographic thought. In particular,
Giddens, with his structuration theory and thoughts on space-time, made time geography
known to a wider circle of researchers (Lenntorp, 1999: 57). As a result, analysis of human
