Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
2 6
LANDSCAPE PERSPECTIVES ON
TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES
Michelle M. Metro-Roland
Introduction: landscape, tourism and geography
The relationship between tourism and geography is a strong one. Tourism entails the move-
ment of people to a locale that is different from their normal environs. However, because it
encompasses such a wide range of activities, from sunning and shopping to museum and nature
exploring, the common denominator of temporary relocation in space is critical to separating
out tourist activity from simple day-tripping. Movement is a fundamentally geographic
concept. While geographers were instrumental in early tourism theories concerning the
patterns of tourist movements worldwide, today geographers are approaching other frontiers
in tourism studies, particularly in terms of tourist experiences.
The concept of landscape was fi rst introduced as a way to explore the impact of cultural
groups on the physical and built environment, as it offers a way to organise human and
physical processes in order to understand the ways in which places change under human adap-
tation (Lewis, 1979; Meinig, 1979; Sauer, 1925). One of the key aspects of landscape is the
distinction that is drawn between space as a geometric concept and meaningfully created
places. While early landscape geographers focused on the physical aspects of the land and the
history and culture of the people inhabiting a place, later geographers began to investigate the
meaning of places. Landscapes were examined as manifestations of cultural processes, partic-
ularly in rural landscapes which were seen as having been shaped by the communities which
inhabited them. While geography underwent a shift towards quantitative methodologies,
humanistic geographers working along vaguely phenomenological lines began investigating
a closely related concept, that of sense of place. The cultural turn in the 1980s and 1990s
ushered in works of a more critical nature, which treated the representational qualities of
landscape, the contestation within landscape, and landscape as a text to be read. The great
complexity tied up in the term 'landscape' underpins the applicability of landscape studies to
other fi elds, in particular tourism.
The very idea of touring, of 'getting away', is predicated on the geographical imagination
of places that are elsewhere; places which are seen as destinations. Both the discourse
surrounding touring, from guidebooks to postcards, and the actual act of being on tour are
closely associated with landscapes, urban to rural, alpine to tropical. While the landscape
concept has a long history within geography, it has only recently become a heuristic tool for
