Geographies of tourism: European research perspectives

摘要

Europe was the birthplace of modern tourism and remains the leading world region in terms of international tourist arrivals although its share has decreased in recent decades. European geographers were among the first scholars to study tourism and continue to be active in this field. However, this situation is not reflected in the literature on the geography of tourism or rather, as the editors and contributors to this volume argue, in the Anglo-American literature on the geography(ies) of tourism which largely ignores and fails to incorporate much work done in Europe. This volume seeks to redress this situation through a series of regional/linguistic reviews which trace the evolution of geographical research on tourism, outlines the approaches taken and the themes researched, and discusses the relationship between studies of tourism and broader disciplinary traditions. After an introduction by the editors and a more general overview of developments in the geographies of tourism by Michael Hall, chapters are presented on the Nordic countries, France, German-speaking countries, Greece, Italy, the Low Countries and Spain before conclusions are drawn in the final chapter. While varying in format, each of these chapters provides an interesting and generally well-structured account of the research that has been done and how this reflects the forms of tourism in each region-the nature-based tourism of the peripheral Nordic countries and a concern with regional development contrasts with managing mass coastal tourism in Spain-and different schools of geography, such as the different theoretical traditions in Germany and the ideographic Italian studies.