TOURISM GEOGRAPHY

The course attempts to show how tourism has also come to be a major force for change as an integral and indispensable part of the places in which we live, their economies and their societies.

Tourism is also an intensely geographic phenomenon. Tourism creates distinctive relationships between people (as tourists) and the host spaces, places and people they visit, which has significant implications for destination development and resource use and exploitation, which are exhibited through a range of economic, social, cultural and environmental impacts that have important implications for local geographies.

Tourism is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. The Geography of Tourism course examines tourism from an economic and geographic perspective. Topics are: Sustainable cities; Globalization; Population; Tourism Landscapes; Geo-Economic spaces; Local Development; study cases on tourism (e.g. cinetourism; cruise tourism, sustainable tourism, etc.).

The course presents an essential understanding of critical perspectives on how tourism places and spaces are created and maintained. Drawing on the holistic nature of geography, a range of social science disciplinary views are presented, including contemporary perspectives. Fundamentally, however, the course strives to connect tourism to key geographical concepts of globalisation, mobility, cities, landscapes, and post-industrial change of firms explores a range of major themes in the geographies of tourism, including place creation and promotion, the transformation of urban tourism, heritage and place identity, and creating personal identity through consumption, encounters with nature and other embodied forms of tourism experience.

TEXTBOOK INFORMATION

For Erasmus students and foreigners it is' possible to agree an alternative program in English and afford the examination with a written test in English.

English text: Stephen Williams, Alan A. Lew, Tourism Geography: Critical Understandings of Place, Space and Experience (3rd Edition), Routledge, New York, 2014, ISBN-13: 978-0415854443