Mobilities and sustainable tourism: an introduction

摘要

The study of Mobilities, the movement of people, objects, capital and information, has recently become a subject of intense research for scholars in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, geography, migration studies, science and technology studies and tourism and transport (Sheller & Urry, 2004,2006). Mobilities and tourism do seem to be naturally connected. Some researchers have encouraged others to consider tourism under the theoretical focus of mobilities (e.g., Cole, Duval, & Hall, 2005), thereby looking at tourism as a form of temporary mobility. This approach is not without critics: Aramberri, for example, stated that "the new mobilities school also winds up in a blind alley" (2005, p. 19). Mobilities may not be the panacea that researchers are looking for to theorize and better understand the tourism phenomenon, but this approach certainly has some merits: many efforts have been made in the past few years to help us understand tourism and its challenges using the study of mobilities. The late Karl-Georg Hoyer was among the first to urge the need to include mobilities in discussions of sustainability and tourism. He argued that the "focus on stationary activities and local, intensive environmental issues is too limited both in relation to the concept of tourism and the concept of sustainable development" (2000, p. 147). Indeed a discussion of sustainable tourism does not make sense without addressing the challenges of sustainable mobility.