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250 geography
tourism, much of this work was seen primarily as a
contribution to the understanding of outdoor
recreation and there has often been an unfortunate
and unnecessary schism, particularly in the
United States, between those working on recreation
and those involved in tourism.
Geographers have displayed a strong interest in
the role of tourism in economic development
and have played a prominent role in investigations
of tourism in developing countries and in the
debates concerning tourism and sustainable
development. They have also been among
those adopting an evolutionary approach to the
study of tourism. Thus, they have been prominent
in research on the history of tourism, conducting
work on phenomena such as spas and the
Grand Tour. They have also been major
contributors to the introduction, debate and
testing of tourism cycles and, on a different time
scale, seasonality.
As already noted, the spatial approach to
geography has been associated particularly with
the description, explanation and prediction of
patterns of tourist movements at a wide variety of
scales from global to local. At times this has
required the compilation and mapping of large
quantities of information on tourism networks and
flows. It has also involved the examination of such
patterns using the gravity model and its derivatives,
which are used to describe and project
patterns of movement between origins and destinations
based upon population size and intervening
distances. Such work has involved the development
of methods to measure the attraction of destination
areas and, more generally, the quality of
landscape and scenery. Concepts such as distance
decay and core±periphery relationships, in which
the core is viewed as an area of demand and the
periphery as an area of supply, have been applied
to tourism in a search for widely applicable
generalisations. Use of computer technology for
storing, analysing and retrieving large data sets and
associated techniques such as computer cartography,
remote sensing and geographical information
systems are finding increasing application in
geographical tourism research and planning.
Many national and international organisations
include sections or working groups which specialise
in tourism. An example of the former is the
International Geographical Union Study
Group on the Geography of Sustainable Tourism:
Development and Protection of Cultural and
Natural Heritage, and examples of the latter are
the Recreation, Tourism and Sport Specialty
Group of the Association of American Geographers,
and the Parks, Recreation and Tourism
Study Group of the Canadian Association of
Geographers. All of these groups produce newsletters.
Many university geography departments
offer courses on tourism and encourage students to
specialise in it in their graduate degrees, so that
many dissertations have been written by geographers
on tourism.
Today, geography is a highly pluralistic discipline
with no dominant perspective or philosophical
approach, and its practitioners adopt a wide
variety of research methods. Geographers have
tended to be eclectic in their research and teaching
leading to charges that the discipline as a whole,
and its tourism scholars especially lack cohesion
and focus. They have dealt with many aspects of
tourism and, although often fragmented, the
literature has an underlying sense of unity when
viewed from a spatial perspective and provides a
substantial base for the construction of a geography
of tourism. Geographers have become skilled at
synthesising numerous causal factors as an aid to
understanding the complexity of tourism phenomena,
particularly its consequences for special
environments in general and destination areas.
This has permitted many geographers to become
involved in impact assessment and to participate as
consultants and practitioners in the evaluation of
many tourism issues. Therefore, their help is often
sought in planning exercises involving tourism. The
proclivity to synthesise large quantities of diverse
information derived from many disciplinary perspectives
has also permitted them to be among the
more prolific producers of general tourism texts.
See also: borders; migration; scale of
development
Further reading
Mitchell, L.S. �1979) `The geography of tourism',
Annals of Tourism Research 6�3): 235±44. �Provides
a concise introduction to the study of tourism