Tourism & Hospitality
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Ashworth, J Tourism Hospit 2012, 1:4
http://dx.doi.org/10.4172/2167-0269.1000e117
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Do we Understand Urban Tourism?
GJ Ashworth*
Department of Planning, University of Groningen, Netherlands
There is no denying the existence of a mountain of books, articles,
academic papers and official reports produced in the past few decades
on many aspects of tourism in cities. There have been numerous case
studies of tourism in specific cities, written either in hope of anticipated
future benefits or as warning of future feared costs. Many stress the roles
of tourism as an instrument of urban economic development [1-3] or
tourism as a component or catalyst for local urban revitalization and
regeneration. Terms such as ‘recreational business district’ [4], ‘touristhistoric city’ [5] or ‘urban tourism precincts’ [6], reflect longstanding
attempts at relating tourism to cities.
However have these efforts created an agreed and coherent
structure for furthering the academic study of urban tourism? There
remain fundamental stubborn contradictions, which may amount
to paradoxes, uncomfortable in positivist science, which need to be
confronted.
Cities world-wide provide an important, arguably the most
important, arena within which the activity tourism occurs. Yet the
attentions of scholars of either tourism or of the city, have largely failed
to link theoretical ideas about either topic. As a consequence urban
tourism, despite its significance, remains imprecisely defined and
vaguely demarcated with little development of a systematic structure
of understanding of either the role of tourism in cities or of cities in
tourism.
Tourists visit cities for many purposes either as primary attractions
or as providers of supportive facilities, especially transport and
accommodation. The cities that accommodate most tourists are large
multifunctional entities offering a diversity of functions and spaces
into which tourists can be effortlessly absorbed so that they become
economically, socially and physically invisible to an extent that is not
so in many other tourism spaces, such as beaches, spas or winter sports
resorts.
Tourists use almost all urban facilities and services to some extent,
some intensively others more rarely, but almost none of these have
been created or are managed specifically or exclusively for tourists.
There are not two cities, that of the tourist and that of the resident, in
any sense useful to the management of either user group.
Thus it is clear that ultimately, and from a number of approaches,
there is a critical asymmetry in the relationship between tourism and
the city. The tourism industry needs the varied, flexible and accessible
tourism resources that cities provide but it is by no means so clear
that cities need tourism. The very diversity of cities, so important to
tourism, also means that very few cities are dependent on it. Tourism
can contribute substantial economic benefits to cities but it is the cities
with a large and varied economic, social and cultural base that benefit
the most from tourism but are also the least dependent upon it. The
cities that are the most economically reliant upon tourism are likely
to benefit the least from it, as this very reliance betrays the narrowness
of their functional base. It is this asymmetry that is central to the
interwoven political, social and economic issues surrounding the topic,
and which is fundamental to urban policy-making and management.
Prefixing the adjective urban to the noun tourism gives the activity
a spatial context but does not in itself define or explain that activity.
J Tourism Hospit
ISSN: 2167-0269, an open access journal
As Edwards et al. [7] state, tourism is ‘one among many social and
economic forces in the urban environment…. Even so, whilst tourism
occurs in cities, as in other environments, this in itself does little to
elucidate the possible relationships and interactions between tourism
and that multifaceted entity, the city’.
Trying to link changes in tourism activity with changes in the city
raise the fundamental issue (as discussed by Wall and Mathieson) of how
much urban change can be attributed specifically to tourism rather than
non-tourism activity [8]. Cities are in constant change, with or without
changes in their tourism. Thus studies of the impacts of tourism on the
city do not help to focus the discussion on the urban nature of urban
tourism and how it is inherently different from other geographically
demarcated tourisms. The question that needs to be posed is whether
there is a quality of urbanicity that can be contrasted with its antonyms,
such as rurality, which gives definition and connotation to a category of
tourism and tourist? If this is the case, then what are the distinguishing
urban characteristics that shape a distinctive urban tourism [9]?
Unlike many other adjectival tourisms, urban tourism accumulates
additional descriptive adjectives, including ‘cultural’, (encompassing
‘festival’ or ‘art’) ‘heritage’ and even ‘congress’, ‘sport’, ‘gastronomic’,
‘night-life’, ‘shopping’, ‘health’ and many more, as different clusters of
urban features and services are utilized to satisfy an array of tourism
markets. Although it is precisely this diversity that lies at the core of the
relationship between the city and the tourist, this accounts for only one
facet of the interaction. If tourists make use of almost all urban features,
they make an exclusive use of almost none. Therefore understanding
urban tourism is dependent upon an awareness and appreciation of the
urban context in which tourism is inextricably embedded.
There are four basic questions that have been posed in various
forms since the topic first attracted academic attention. These are
why tourists are attracted to cities, who are the urban tourist, how do
tourists use cities and what are the impacts of tourists upon cities? The
answers cannot be found by isolating and analyzing the phenomenon,
tourism, divorced from its spatial context but by returning to the
fundamental core distinctive features of ‘urbanism as a way of life’
namely size, heterogeneity and density [10]. Understanding what is
happening to urban tourism depends upon a prior understanding of
what is happening to cities. The emergence of the phenomenon, ‘world
city’ [11], the re-globalisation of urban networks and resulting complex
interaction between the local and the global [12], the rise of the city as
centre of cultural production and consumption, the commodification
of cities as competitive marketable brands [13], and many more
*Corresponding author: GJ Ashworth, Department of Planning, University of
Groningen, Netherlands, E-mail: [email protected]
Received August 17, 2012; Accepted August 17, 2012; Published August 25,
2012
Citation: Ashworth GJ (2012) Do we Understand Urban Tourism? J Tourism Hospit
1:e117. doi:10.4172/2167-0269.1000e117
Copyright: © 2012 Ashworth GJ. This is an open-access article distributed under
the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted
use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and
source are credited.
Volume 1 • Issue 4 • 1000e117
Citation: Ashworth GJ (2012) Do we Understand Urban Tourism? J Tourism Hospit 1:e117. doi:10.4172/2167-0269.1000e117
Page 2 of 2
identifiable trends, are the basis of the explanation of the current state
of urban tourism and determinant of the trajectories along which it will
develop [14].
Simply it is all but impossible to analyse the urban tourism industry
or the urban tourist other than in the wider context of the functioning
and management of cities as a whole. They both therefore become
inevitably studies of urban change and its reactive planning and
management in general and thus become focused upon the application
of policy in the urban setting as much as upon the tourism activity
[15,16]. Only then can we begin to redress the imbalance in attention
[17,18], reconcile the seeming paradoxes and unravel the complex
inter-relationships between the city and its tourists.
References
1. Law CM (1993) Urban tourism: attracting visitors to large cities. (edn), London:
Mansell.
2. Law CM (1996) Tourism in major cities. (edn), London: Thomson International
Business Press.
3. Law CM (2002) Urban Tourism: the visitor economy and the growth of large
cities. London: Continuum.
7. Edwards D, Griffin T, Hayllar B (2008) Urban tourism research: Developing an
agenda. Annals of Tourism Research 35: 1032-1052.
8. Wall G, Mathieson A (2006) Tourism: Change, Impacts and Opportunities.
Pearson: Harlow.
9. Ashworth G (2009) Enhancing the City -Questioning the urban in urban tourism.
Urban and Landscape Perspectives 6: 207-220.
10.Wirth L (1938) Urbanism: As A Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology
44: 1-24.
11.Page SJ, Connell J (2009) Tourism: A Modern Synthesis. (3rdedn). London:
Cengage Learning.
12.Rennie Short J, Breitbach C, Buckman S, Essex J (2000) From World Cities to
gateway cities: Extending the boundaries of globalization theory. City: analysis
of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action 4: 317-340.
13.Govers R, Go F (2009) Place branding: glocal, virtual, and physical identities
constructed, imagined, experienced. Palgrave Macmillan Basingstoke.
14.Ashworth G, Page SJ (2011) Urban tourism research: recent progress and
current paradoxes. Tourism Management 32: 1-15.
15.Tyler D, Guerrier Y, Robertson M (1998) Managing tourism in cities: policy,
process and practice. Chichester: Wiley.
16.Page SJ, Hall CM (2003) Managing Urban Tourism. Harlow: Prentice Hall.
4. Stansfield CA, Rickert EJ (1970) The recreational business district. Journal of
Leisure Research 2: 213-225.
17.Ashworth GJ (1989) Urban tourism: an imbalance in attention. Progress in
Tourism, Recreation and Hospitality Management 1: 33-54.
5. Ashworth GJ, Tunbridge JE (2000) The tourist-historic city. Belhaven: London.
18.Ashworth GJ (2003) Urban Tourism: still an imbalance in attention? In C.
Cooper (edn) Classic Reviews in Tourism Clevedon: Channel View. 143-163.
6. Hallyar B, Griffin T, Edwards D (2008) City spaces tourist places: urban tourism
precincts. (edn). Oxford: Elsevier.
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J Touris Hospital
ISSN: JTH, an open access journal
Volume 1 • Issue 4 • 1000e117