Tourism Spaces: Environments, Locations, and Movements

Geographic space is a fundamental and essential construct of the physical reality within which we live, move, and construct our world. Through space we create ‘others’ (anything that is any distance from ‘us’) and we experience time (by moving from one place point to another). Because it is so fundamental to our experience, we often take geographic space for granted.

Tourism Spaces: Environments, Locations, and Movements shows some of the ways that geographers and other social scientists bring spatial considerations to the forefront of our research and understanding of tourism. This is seen through the spatial arrangements and distributions of tourism phenomena, such as attractions, destinations, and in the spatial behaviour of tourists themselves. Today, these spatial arrangements and patterns are increasingly being captured, analysed, and understood through various forms of formal and informal digital data.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Tourism Geographies.

Alan A. Lew is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Planning at Northern Arizona University. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Tourism Geographies (Routledge/Taylor & Francis), and has primarily researched and written about tourism development and landscapes of East and Southeast Asia.