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According to UN Tourism, Urban Tourism is "a type of tourism activity which takes place in an urban space with its inherent attributes characterized by non-agricultural based economy such as administration, manufacturing, trade and services and by being nodal points of transport. Urban/city destinations offer a broad and heterogeneous range of cultural, architectural, technological, social and natural experiences and products for leisure and business".

According to the United Nations, in 2015, 54% of the world’s population lived in urban areas and, by 2030, this share is expected to reach 60%. Along with other key pillars, tourism constitutes a central component in the economy, social life and the geography of many cities in the world and is thus a key element in urban development policies.

Urban tourism can represent a driving force in the development of many cities and countries contributing to the progress of the New Urban Agenda and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, in particular, Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable . Tourism is intrinsically linked to how a city develops itself and provides more and better living conditions to its residents and visitors.

Fulfilling tourism’s potential as a tool of sustainable and inclusive growth for cities requires a multi-stakeholder and multilevel approach based on close cooperation among tourism and non-tourism administrations at different levels, private sector, local communities and tourists themselves. Likewise, the sustainable development and management of tourism in cities needs to be integrated into the wider urban agenda.

  8th UN Tourism Global Summit on Urban Tourism "Smart Cities, Smart Destinations"   7th UN Tourism Global Summit on Urban Tourism   6th Global Summit on Urban Tourism   5th Global Summit on City Tourism   4th Global Summit on City Tourism   3rd Global Summit on City Tourism   2nd UN TourismGlobal Summit on City Tourism   Global Summit on City Tourism

  UN Tourism Conference on City Breaks: Creating Innovative Tourism Experiences

Mayors Forum for Sustainable Urban Tourism

  3rd edition Mayors Forum for Sustainable Urban Tourism (Madrid)

  2nd edition Mayors Forum for Sustainable Urban Tourism (Porto)   1st edition Mayors Forum for Sustainable Urban Tourism (Lisbon)

Quantifying tourism in city destinations

This joint report of UN Tourism and WTCF assesses the current situation and challenges of tourism data collection and reporting at the city level through the review and analysis of 22 case studies of city destinations covering Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East. The analysis will help advance the harmonization of existing data practices in city destinations with the ambition of creating a global database of urban tourism, enabling better understanding and benchmarking of its size, value and impacts, both globally and by region.

UN Tourism Recommendations on Urban Tourism

These recommendations stem from the series of UN Tourism Urban Tourism Summits held since 2012, and the Lisbon Declaration on Sustainable Urban tourism, adopted at the First UN Tourism Mayors Forum for Sustainable Urban Tourism, held in Portugal on 5 April 2019. They also drawn on the research conducted by the UN Tourism Secretariat in the field of urban tourism.

UN Tourism-WTCF City Tourism Performance Research

The UN Tourism/WTCF City Tourism Performance Research brings forward an analysis and evaluation of success stories in urban destinations. The results were collected by experts who applied the methodology created for the initiative through the realization of field visits and interviews of local tourism authorities and the main stakeholders. The publication based on case studies from 15 cities, provides in-depth understanding of each individual city and has the objective to enable other cities to learn from the progress they have achieved in order to enhance their performance, competitiveness and sustainability.

‘Overtourism’? – Understanding and Managing Urban Tourism Growth beyond Perceptions

The management of tourism flows in cities to the benefit of visitors and residents alike is a fundamental issue for the tourism sector. It is critical to understand residents’ attitude towards tourism to ensure the development of successful sustainable tourism strategies. This report analyzes the perception of residents towards tourism in eight European cities – Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Munich, Salzburg and Tallinn – and proposes 11 strategies and 68 measures to help understand and manage visitor’s growth in urban destinations. The implementation of the policy recommendations proposed in this report can advance inclusive and sustainable urban tourism that can contribute to the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.

‘Overtourism’? – Understanding and Managing Urban Tourism Growth beyond Perceptions. Volume 2: Case Studies

This second volume includes 18 case studies across the Americas, Asia and the Pacific and Europe – Amsterdam, Antwerp, Barcelona, Berlin, Besalú, Cambridge, Dubrovnik, Edinburgh, Ghent, Hangzhou, London, Lucerne, Macao (China), New York, Lisbon, Seoul, Porto, Prague and Venice – on how cities are implementing the following eleven strategies: 1. Promote the dispersal of visitors within the city and beyond; 2. Promote time-based dispersal of visitors; 3. Stimulate new visitor itineraries and attractions; 4. Review and adapt regulation; 5. Enhance visitors’ segmentation; 6. Ensure local communities benefit from tourism; 7. Create city experiences that benefit both residents and visitors; 8. Improve city infrastructure and facilities; 9. Communicate with and engage local stakeholders; 10. Communicate with and engage visitors; and 11. Set monitoring and response measures.

Global survey on the perception of residents towards city tourism: impact and measures

This research is a result of a partnership between the World Tourism Organization (UN Tourism) and IPSOS. To better manage the issues arising from the growing tourism demand in urban destinations it is essential to understand resident's experiences and perceptions on city tourism. The research aims at understanding the perception of residents towards city tourism, its impacts, as well as the most adequate strategies to manage the growing tourism flows in cities.

New Business Models in the Accommodation Industry – Benchmarking of Rules and Regulations in the Short-term Rental Market

Several factors explain the growth of the so-called “sharing economy” in the tourism sector over recent years, including the 2010 global economic crisis, digitalization and new trends in travellers’ behaviour and preferences. This growth has been particularly notable in the accommodation industry. With the emergence of online platforms for short-term rentals, the market has been expanding at an unprecedented rate.

Building upon UN Tourism’s 2017 publication New Platform Tourism Services (or the so-called Sharing Economy) – Understand, Rethink and Adapt, this report provides an analysis and benchmarking of 21 case studies in terms of the rules and regulations applied to the short-term rental market, focusing on three key areas: 1) fair competition; 2) consumer protection; and 3) planning and sustainability.

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Moscow, like other international urban areas , is decentralizing, despite considerable barriers. The expansion will lead to even more decentralization, which is likely to lead to less time "stuck in traffic" and more comfortable lifestyles. Let's hope that Russia's urban development policies, along with its plans to restore population growth, will lead to higher household incomes and much improved economic performance.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “ War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life ”

Note 1: The 23 ward (ku) area of Tokyo is the geography of the former city of Tokyo, which was abolished in the 1940s. There is considerable confusion about the geography of Tokyo. For example, the 23 ward area is a part of the prefecture of Tokyo, which is also called the Tokyo Metropolis, which has led some analysts to think of it as the Tokyo metropolitan area (labor market area). In fact, the Tokyo metropolitan area, variously defined, includes, at a minimum the prefectures of Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama with some municipalities in Gunma, Ibaraki and Tochigi. The metropolitan area contains nearly three times the population of the "Tokyo Metropolis."

Note 2: The expansion area (556 square miles or 1,440 square kilometers) has a current population of 250,000.

Note 3: Includes all residents in suburban districts with at least part of their population in the urban area.

Note 4: Urban area data not yet available.

Photo: St. Basil's Cathedral (all photos by author)

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Road in city area.

The roads and ways of the city areas are very clumsy and many accidents are happening due to the short road. But you need to maintain the driving properly otherwise you may face accident. So now the government decided to expand the road which may put the positive effect on automobile sector. I think it is a helpful service for the society people. If you have a BMW car and you have faced any problem then better to repair it at BMW Repair Spring, TX for the best service.

Transit & transportation

Transit and transportation services are quite impressive in most of the urban cities; therefore people were getting better benefits from suitable transportation service. Urban cities like Moscow, Washington, New York and Tokyo; we have found high margin of transportation system that helps to build a better communication network in these cities. I hope through the help of modern transportation system we are able to bring revolutionary change in automobile industries; in this above article we have also found the same concepts to develop transportation system. Mercedes repair in Torrance

Moscow is bursting Noblesse

Moscow is bursting Noblesse at the seams. The core city covers more than 420 square miles (1,090 kilometers), and has a population of approximately 11.5 million people. With 27,300 residents per square mile (10,500 per square kilometer), Moscow is one percent more dense than the bleach anime watch city of New York, though Moscow covers 30 percent more land. The 23 ward area of Tokyo (see Note) is at least a third more dense, though Moscow's land area is at least half again as large as Tokyo. All three core areas rely

Belgravia Villas is a new

Belgravia Villas is a new and upcoming cluster housing located in the Ang Mo Kio area, nested right in the Ang Mo Kio landed area. It is within a short drive to Little India, Orchard and city area. With expected completion in mid 2016, it comprises of 118 units in total with 100 units of terrace and 18 units of Semi-D. belgravia villas

Russians seeing the light while Western elites are bickering?

What an extremely interesting analysis - well done, Wendell.

It is also extremely interesting that the Russian leadership is reasonably pragmatic about urban form, in contrast to the "planners" of the post-rational West.

An acquaintance recently sent me an article from "The New Yorker", re Moscow's traffic problems.

The article "abstract" is HERE (but access to the full article requires subscription)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gessen

One classic quote worth taking from it, is: "People will endure all manner of humiliation to keep driving".

I do find it odd that the "New Yorker" article author says nothing at all about the rail transit system Moscow had, on which everyone was obliged to travel, under Communism. It can't surely have vaporised into thin air?

Moscow is a classic illustration of just how outmoded rails are, and how important "automobility" is, when the auto supplants rails so rapidly than even when everybody did travel on rails up to a certain date, and the road network dates to that era, when nobody was allowed to own a car; an article written just 2 decades later does not even mention the rail transit system, other than to criticise the mayor for "failing to invest in a transit system".......!!!!!!!!

This is also a give-away of "The New Yorker's" inability to shake off the modern PC ideology on rails vs cars.

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Mapping urban tourism issues: analysis of research perspectives through the lens of network visualization

International Journal of Tourism Cities

ISSN : 2056-5607

Article publication date: 9 June 2021

Issue publication date: 15 October 2021

The purpose of this study is to identify research perspectives/clusters in the field of urban tourism (city tourism) in narrow sense and tourism cities (cities and tourism) in the broader sense to examine the complex relationship through the optics of science mapping. This paper believes that the existing qualitative assessments of this field can be experimentally verified and visualized.

Design/methodology/approach

First, the key conceptual dilemmas of research perspectives in urban tourism are highlighted. Based on the Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection and the VOSviewer (computer program for visualizing bibliometric networks), the data will be analyzed. Clustering is used to evaluate information retrieval (inclusivity or selectivity of the search query), publication patterns (journal articles), author keywords, terminology and to identify the respective cities and author collaborations between countries.

Terminological specificities and their contextuality (authors’ preferences) are elaborated, as the topic is studied by authors from different disciplinary fields. Compared to other specific tourisms, urban tourism includes geographic terms (variations of city names) and terms with different connotations (travelers, visitors). Recent Spanish (also Portuguese) linguistic/geographic contexts are noticeable and a strong presence of WOS Emerging Sources Citation Index papers. Research perspectives are represented in the network of clusters of connected terms. If the search is based on a narrower sense of strict urban tourism, then tourism-business topics predominate. If tourism and cities are less closely linked, socio-cultural and environmental-spatial perspectives emerge, as does tourism/cities vulnerability (climate change and health issues).

Research limitations/implications

The construction of a search syntax for the purpose of retrieval is always marked by compromises, given different terminological usages. A narrow search query will miss many relevant documents. On the other hand, if the query is too general, it returns less relevant documents. To this end, this paper tested queries on three different levels of inclusivity or selectivity. More consistent use of terms would benefit authors in the field of urban tourism when searching for references (information retrieval) and, as a consequence, would allow better integration of the field.

Practical implications

This study provides a practical method for evaluating cities and tourism in combining the expertise of an information scientist and a sociologist. It points out numerous caveats in information retrieval. It offers an overview of publishing just prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, thus providing an opportunity for further comparative studies.

Originality/value

This study is the first to examine urban tourism using such a method and can serve as a complement to the existing systematization of qualitative approaches. The findings are consistent with numerous qualitative assessments of weak the research interconnection between the specifics of cities and tourism in terms of broader socio-spatial processes. However, the study suggests that such research linkage is increasing, which is noticeable in relation to issues of social sustainability (e.g. overtourism, Airbnb and touristification).

• Bibliometrics
• Social change
• Urban tourism
• Science mapping
• Social sustainability

Hocevar, M. and Bartol, T. (2021), "Mapping urban tourism issues: analysis of research perspectives through the lens of network visualization", International Journal of Tourism Cities , Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 818-844. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJTC-05-2020-0110

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2021, Marjan Hocevar and Tomaz Bartol.

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial & non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

1. Introduction

The issues of the specificity of urban within the tourism and the specificity of tourism within the urban domain have been widely discussed in tourism studies, urban studies and other fields of the social sciences. The purpose of this study, however, is not to continue the thematization and discussion on these specificities but to examine matters concerning information retrieval in the research field of urban tourism (city tourism) and tourism and cities . We start from the assumption that the existing qualitative analyzes assessments of this field of research can also be verified experimentally thereby complementing conceptual discussions and findings. It might be meaningful to observe how divergent approaches and different uses of terminology behave at the level of aggregate data analysis through visual presentation.

According to numerous analytical observations, the evolution of research dedicated to urban tourism is accompanied by a questioning of its development toward greater coherence and maturity. Here, we focus on those who thematize urban tourism as inherently multidimensional; as an industry (business), a socio-cultural phenomenon (practice) and a specific geographic setting (in spatial and environmental terms). This is not only a question of epistemological but also of etymological coherence. In fact, it is understandable that evaluations and self-criticisms are reflected, to a large extent, by those who study tourism and cities in general. Hand in hand with this goes the broader trend toward diversity in tourism practices themselves, reflecting the de-differentiation between tourism activities and other social domains ( Cohen and Cohen, 2019 ).

1.1 Theoretical background

In tourism studies and in the social sciences in general, diverse approaches can steer in both directions: rarely toward interdisciplinary networking and more often in the direction of problematic fragmentation that hinders the progress of distinct but coherent disciplinary epistemologies. Although their emphasis may be different, this is overall a consistent supposition of authors ( Selby, 2003 ; Taillon and Jamal, 2009 ; Tribe and Xiao, 2011 ; Darbellay and Stock, 2012 ; Balietti et al. , 2015 ). Indeed, researchers deploy various approaches, epistemologies and methodologies and also use diverse terminologies ( Fainstein and Judd, 1999 ; Hoffman et al. , 2001 ; Gospodini, 2001 ; Bellini et al. , 2017 ; Romero-García et al. , 2019 ). The differences can already be detected in the uses of terms with which the authors operate, but which often explain related or similar concepts: urban tourism domain, approaches, perspectives, types, topics and sub-themes. The published works are scattered across different academic networks and disciplines.

Within a simple semantic framework, “urban tourism is best defined as an overlap area between a number of adjectival tourisms” ( Ashworth, 2009 , p. 208), but is clearly not like other “adjectival” tourisms ( Ashworth and Page, 2011 ). As Ashworth points out, this definition does not cover the much broader relationship between cities and tourism, but only a narrow one. From a certain research perspective, it depends whether the focus is either on the issue of urban (city, town) or on tourism [ 1 ]. Definitions are inevitably delineated by an author’s primary disciplinary affiliation, e.g. geography, sociology, economics, etc. ( Edwards et al. , 2008 ).

In exploring the tourism-business topic, the “urban setting” is more likely to play an “adjective” role to achieve the desired business effect but less likely so when, for example, research focuses on urban sustainability due to the impact of tourism activities.

As a specific feature of urban tourism studies, one would expect a strong integration of tourism studies with urban studies. In accordance with the above we assume, that the most permeating research framework should be the relationship between cities and tourism, which is complex and would ideally require a good knowledge of the urban field by tourism researchers and vice versa. However, what does the actual research coexistence between the two look like? Various assessments focus in particular on the critique of the fragmentation or insufficient integration of the broader knowledge of the relationship between cities and tourism in the wider context of social and cultural dynamics, which involves long-term processes of globalization ( Pearce, 2001 ; Ashworth and Page, 2011 ; Pasquinelli, 2017 ). An example of this is a three-decade-old and repeated observation by Ashworth (1989 , 2003 , 2012). According to him, both tourism studies and urban studies much too often pay no necessary attention to each other. This annoyance explains the lack of understanding of the special role of cities within the tourism or the place of tourism within the form and function of cities. He interprets the narrowness of approaches or the lack of tourism/urban causality as a “paradox,” “imbalance,” “indiscipline” or “double neglect.” Often the reference to this particular argument by other authors allows a conclusion that a considerable agreement on such assessments remains relevant to date, at least as a tool of exploration. In recent years his arguments and those of others have even gained in weight with “paradoxes” or apparent contradictions on a larger scale in two opposite directions as indicated above: growth and differentiation of tourism practices in cities and de-differentiation between tourism and other social domains. The conflict or at least issues, in the relationship between the day-to-day operation of cities and tourism-related activities, is intensifying ( Colomb and Novy, 2016 ). However, these are clearly only a part of the emerging phenomena, and long-term social changes in general, in particular, in mobility patterns and Spatio-temporal arrangements affecting cities, such as travel, leisure or home-and-away residency ( Sheller and Urry, 2006 ; Füller and Michel, 2014 ). In conjunction with these socio-spatial dynamics, there is a significant increase of research, especially critically oriented, linking various aspects of tourism with urban sustainability in different contexts, from the environmental, housing, spatial planning to mobility/travel patterns ( Bianchi, 2009 ; Cohen et al. , 2015 ; Hall, 2015 ; Bauder and Freytag, 2015 ; Hall, 2016 ). We depart from our particular investigation with the assumption that research on urban tourism should go beyond the “adjective” by strengthening the pervasive link between the urban (city) and tourism, and the linking of both with wider social and environmental processes.

In light of the above, the question arises as to what the terms urban and tourism actually mean when the adjective urban and the noun tourism are put together, especially when it comes to finding reliable sources in databases used by researchers. How, then, are the dilemmas raised in the study of urbanity and tourism reflected in terminology? Although heterogeneous and occasionally volatile and ephemeral terminology is only part of the problem of fragmentation in researching the phenomenon, it can help shed light on its nature. For example, insights into bibliographic databases reveal a recent “buzz” of new keywording such as overtourism, antitourism, post-tourism and new tourism in relation to various problems between tourists and urban residents or between the tourism industry and urban management ( Jansson, 2018 ; Jovicic, 2019 ; Perkumienė and Pranskūnienė, 2019 ; Šegota et al. , 2019 ). Can this development, both semantic and topical, be quantitatively assessed? Before formulating our research questions, we present selected works that have dealt with tourism using tools of quantitative methodology. Indeed, our study has used the expertise of both an information specialist and a sociologist.

1.2 Empirical background

Although urban tourism has not been specifically examined, other aspects of tourism have received attention also in quantitative studies, often referred to in the informetric literature as bibliometrics, scientometrics, science mapping, research evaluation and the like. Most such studies have investigated bibliographic data, for example, researchers, countries or journals. Different textual issues have also been addressed, for example, disciplinary structure and categorization of tourism ( Benckendorff and Zehrer, 2013 ; Park et al. , 2016 ). Köseoglu et al. (2016) and Okumus et al. (2018) who investigated many different tourism-related sub-fields thus emphasized that quantitative bibliometric methods should complement the qualitative and theoretical reviews.

Tourism-related bibliometric research frequently used science mapping and visualizations which facilitate the evaluation of “big data” or large corpora of documents which would be difficult to evaluate only in a qualitative way. We identified only a few tourism-related bibliometric studies where urban tourism and cities and tourism, was detected. However, it was never addressed on its own, except for the study by Musavengane et al. (2019) where urban tourism was tackled in a specific setting of sub-Saharan African cities. Estevão et al. (2017) noticed urban tourism, in terms of co-citations, in the cluster of marketing and tourism management. Galvagno and Giaccone (2019) placed it close to creative tourism. It was identified among the keywords in tourism journals ( Wu et al. , 2012 ). Visualizing tourism by countries, Shen et al. (2018) also noticed urban tourism although only in the context of competitiveness with rural tourism.

With regard to the data sets, citation databases Scopus and Web of Science (WOS) are usually used. WOS, for example, in the bibliometric analysis of urban sustainability ( Fu and Zhang, 2017 ) or Scopus in a review of overtourism or destination branding ( Nilsson, 2020 ; Dioko, 2016 ). Sometimes, both citation databases are used, for example, in the aforementioned study by Musavengane et al. (2019) and in mapping tourist mobility ( Chantre-Astaiza et al. , 2019 ). Such bibliometric studies present some limitations for the social sciences, where research is disseminated through different publishing avenues (especially books) ( Hall, 2005 ). Google Scholar could also be used, but still lacks better quality control. Visualizations and mapping of database records can be conducted with several tools. VOSviewer has been identified as having, in general, the highest diffusion ( Pan et al. , 2018 ) although other programs have also been used, for example, CiteSpace in a study on tourist mobility ( Chantre-Astaiza et al. , 2019 ) and Pajek in a three-level co-citation analysis of innovation in tourism ( Gomezelj-Omerzel, 2016 ). Additional examples from the literature will be presented in methodological and experimental sections.

1.3 Research questions

Taking into account the issues motivating the research field of tourism on the one hand and urban processes on the other, we want to test these relationships quantitively. The aim is to identify the main research agendas (research perspectives) and interpret the relationships based on journal publication patterns and authors’ choice of terminology.

We would like to determine a search query (search statement) that optimizes the terminological landscape (research field contextuality) as this influences bibliographic exploration. The constraints of a more limited (or broader) search query need to be explored as an important factor in the retrieval of information. By testing queries at different levels of inclusivity, we aim to answer the questions that motivated our study: How are analytical dilemmas in the relationship between tourism studies, urban studies and other academic disciplines reflected in the authors’ choice of publication venues (journals)? Can some evolution in time be detected, as well as some particular characteristics of publications identified on the basis of links and shared references? A further and main goal is the identification of research perspectives based on textual data (authors’ choice of terminology in titles and abstracts). As such terminology can be highly scattered, specific developments can perhaps be revealed by examining author keywords and terms that have emerged only in the most recent period. Finally, we wish to explore some features of a geographic nature. Which are the most important cities in tourism research and how are the countries linked by author collaboration (co-authorship) on a time scale? The limitations of such empirical studies will also be addressed.

This research thus aims to complement the existing theoretical assessments of urban tourism (cities and tourism) with an empirical analysis based on a complex computer visualization program designed for the purposes of science mapping. As far as we know, such an approach to the assessment of urban tourism has never been attempted before.

2. Materials and methodology

2.1 choice of research material (database).

Citation databases Scopus (Elsevier) or Web of Science (WOS, Clarivate Analytics) are commonly used in visualization studies. Our pilot based on article titles (“urban tourism” or “city tourism”) found high similarity between Scopus and WOS Core Collection in recent years. WOS was used more frequently because it has been around for much longer. WOS was chosen for this study because of its categorization (WOS Categories) and inclusion of a much longer time period, as well as the recent introduction of a new index. We used to research and review articles mapped to three established citation indexes (indices): Social Sciences Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE a.k.a. SCI-Expanded) and Arts and Humanities Citation Index. An aim was also to investigate the impact of the recent expansion of WOS by the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). This ESCI Index was introduced in 2015, and has already been used in the studies of tourism ( Köseoglu et al. , 2019 ).

2.2 Construction of search syntax

A key procedure was to create a query (Boolean search syntax or Search statement) of concepts and terms related to urban tourism in a narrow sense and cities and tourism (tourist cities) in a broader sense. Town(s) [ 2 ] were also included. Many terms have too many connotations and meanings are not used consistently by the authors. This makes it difficult to find them on uniform principles. For example, travel and cities usually refer to the commuting of the “local populace” [ 3 ] although travel can also be considered a social practice in its own right (e.g. “new-nomadism”) ( Cohen et al. , 2015 ).

Living (in) cities of the past: time travel in second life.

Cordon toll […] network of two cities […] traveler route and demand responses.

Factors affecting adolescents’ use […] leisure time […] city of Vienna.

Informant-provided leisure constraints in six Taiwanese cities.

Visitor inflows and police use of force in a Canadian city .

Home visiting among inner- city families.

To compensate for search noise, only such tourism -based concepts ( tourism, touristic, tourists …) that are sufficiently focused and unambiguous could be used. As the specific term urban tourism returns only a few hundred records, we tested several queries: a narrower query (NQ) with urban/city tourism in a narrower (more strict and focused) sense and then two increasingly extended queries representing the concepts denoting tourism and cities in less closely connected contexts (up to and including 2018). The contexts are referred to as NQ, broader (BQ) and general (GQ) queries ( Table 1 ). In the database, search terms in the singular (e.g. city ) also return the plural (cities) and vice versa. The BQ may seem somewhat lengthy, but a shortened “tourist cit*” would have yielded other meanings (for example, tourist citation ), so the terms with more restricted meanings were included in the query.

For each of the data sets (NQ, BQ and GQ) we provide an example of contexts:

2.2.1 Narrower query.

Title: Making sense of the square: Facing the touristification of public space through playful protest in Barcelona.

Abstract: Drawing from assemblage thinking, this article explores the complexity of urban tourism conflicts. The case study of […].

Author Keywords: assemblage thinking; […] urban tourism conflicts .

2.2.2 Broader query.

Title: The What, Where and Why of Airbnb Price Determinants.

Abstract: Breakthrough changes in the rental market […] cities selected as case study […] tourist area […] with previous studies.

Author keywords: Airbnb; price determinants; touristic cities […].

2.2.3 General query.

Title: Residents’ perceptions and attitudes towards future tourism development A challenge for tourism planners.

Abstract: This paper aims to present the results of a quantitative […] residents consider that tourism […] development of the city […].

Author keywords: Perceptions; Tourism ; Impacts; Residents; Porto; Overtourism.

2.3 Analysis of article-growth and article distribution by Web of Science indexes and journals

The data were verified at the end of 2019. Growth was assessed for the past 20 years (there were very few earlier articles). Visualizations were conducted on the entire corpus (up to and including, 2018). The distribution by journals usually conforms with power laws according to which a large proportion of articles are published in a few so-called core journals (mapped to core WOS categories) while many other articles are scattered over many occasional journals (decreasing exponential ratio). Such patterns are evaluated by the eponymous Bradford’s law ( Bradford, 1934 ) which has been tested by many authors, and is theoretically represented as 1:n:n 2 . In visualizations, we assessed possible connections among journals through the number of shared references and average publishing year.

2.4 Visualization program

Using VOSviewer, we created the following maps/figures: Maps based on text data ( Figures 5 to 7 . Type of analysis: co-occurrence. Units: title and abstract fields).

Journals ( Figures 3 and 4 . Type of analysis: bibliographic coupling/unit: sources = journals).

Author keywords ( Figures 8 and 9 . Type of analysis: co-occurrence/unit: author keywords).

Co-authorship based on country of affiliation ( Figures 11 and 12 . Type of analysis: countries).

In the network visualization, items (units of analysis) are represented by a label (terms) and a circle, where the size reflects the weight of an item. An “item” is a general term for each unit under consideration, which is included in different thematic visualization maps. In our case, the items are terms in article titles and abstracts, journals, author keywords and countries of co-authorship.

When the items are related to each other, they are arranged in clusters by color. The strongest relationships (co-occurrence or the number of documents in which they occur together) are represented by lines. The procedure is explained in the manual ( van Eck and Waltman, 2019 ). In the overlay visualization (bibliographic coupling of journals, co-occurrence of author keywords, co-authorship), the maps reflect the average year, starting from early average years (blue color palette) to recent years (red color).

2.5 Clusters of article terms and topics by author keywords

Terms in titles and abstracts (maps based on text data) were visualized by way of co-occurrence. Terms were arranged in clusters according to the relatedness of terms. Generic terms from structured abstracts (such as aim , material and results) were excluded as were the generic terms article, paper, research, study .

Author keywords (maps based on bibliographic data) were presented using overlay visualization in which the keywords are highlighted according to the average year of occurrence of a keyword.

2.6 Identification of the cities

The identification of principle cities was carried out in the WOS database itself. First, all terms were downloaded from the text data maps into an experimental auxiliary database. Then, the city names were identified. These cities were then ranked according to their frequency in WOS. Some disambiguation was necessary (for example, Cordoba in Spain vs Cordoba in Argentina). Different linguistic forms were also checked (for example, Beijing vs Peking).

2.7 Co-authorship of papers (by country of an author’s affiliation address)

The last two maps were visualized by co-occurrence using clusters. Relatedness was determined by the number of co-authored documents (co-authorship links). The resulting country network shows the strength of co-authorship links between authors from different countries. The elements are displayed and connected by an overlay visualization, with the maps reflecting the average year of contributions from a country.

3. Findings and discussion

3.1 progression of articles on urban tourism as reflected by publications and web of science indexes.

Figure 1 shows articles retrieved with NQ and BQ query ( Table 1 ). The growth of records is similar in both queries and has intensified after 2015 with the introduction of ESCI (Emerging Sources Citation Index, WOS). This share is 50% for and up to 53% in the BQ. At the same time, only 9% of the total WOS records were attributed to ESCI in 2018.

The aim was to test the assumption of “paradox” and “imbalance” in the interconnectedness of narrower urban tourism studies and urban studies in general (see Introduction). The findings that follow can only be tentative, as they depend on the categorization used by the individual journals, the author’s choice of publishing and the editorial policies of the journals.

Journals are mapped to different WOS categories. With the exception of the journal Sustainability , four other main journals are all mapped to the category of Hospitality Leisure Sport Tourism (HLST) ( Figure 2 , right inset). Although the articles are scattered across journals in many different WOS categories HLST is the principal category in this field. In retrieval with the NQ, half of all articles were mapped to HLST . This share was someway lower when articles were retrieved with BQ but the principal journals were nevertheless the same ( Figure 2 , left inset). The category HLST is followed by the categories which indicate spatial topics, Urban Studies being the most important, followed by Regional Urban Planning . However, none of the five most important journals were mapped to such categories. We also conducted an exploratory overview of authorship. Among the many authors, only a couple of them published at least two articles in HLST journals and Urban -related journals. Thus, the connections between the principal authors in the two journal groups are weak. We may also mention Environmental Sciences which covers aspects of the environment as related to natural sciences while the category of Environmental Studies is designated as pertaining to social sciences. From the categorization of the journal Sustainability , we infer that these classifications are not strictly defined. The environment -related categories are thus important, however, most such articles are mapped to the journals Tourism Management and Sustainability which is also evident in Figure 2 (right inset).

In the interpretations of categories, a limitation applies. Namely, WOS categorization and disciplinary orientation of journals do not always correspond very exactly ( Boyack et al. , 2005 ; Leydesdorff and Bornmann, 2016 ; Bartol et al. , 2016 ). This wide assignment of categories can also be seen in the right inset of Figure 2 where principal journals are mapped to a variety of categories, although the HLST category prevails. It seems a kind of a universal canopy for tourism studies of different kinds. For example, very similar principal journals were also identified for the topic of rural tourism ( Lane and Kastenholz, 2015 ; Hocevar and Bartol, 2016 ).

An important volume of urban tourism (cities and tourism) studies, therefore, gets published in the “generic” HLST journals. This “touristic emphasis” then prevails although many dimensions of urban tourism are inherent particularly to cities (and society issues). Many authors dealing with tourism in the cities may thus fail to notice that such tourism involves, in particular, urban space and its very specific (societal) characteristic. The importance of “the urban” thus remains unnoticed or indeed dismissed or perhaps remains perceived as yet another “adjectival” variant. We may speculate: although there do exist many Urban- category-related journals, the authors seem to favor touristic categories (journals). The issues of the author or editorial motivations, however, would require an analysis on its own.

The distribution of journals follows the patterns of an exponentially descending curve ( Figure 2 , main part): a few principal journals (among several hundred) published an important segment of all articles, but soon a long tail of journals with very few articles follows. The five principal journals are, however, identical in both queries (left inset in Figure 2 ). Such Bradford-like patterns have already been observed ( Barrios et al. , 2008 ).

Figures 3 (NQ) and 4 [ 4 ] (BQ) show the average year of articles (by journals) and links based on the number of references that these journals share (bibliographic coupling) which suggests that these journals are (cognitively) related in terms of content ( Yuan et al. , 2015 ). The two principal journals Annals of Tourism Research and Tourism Management were important in this field already a decade ago (purple colors). The strong early average links between these two journals (cf. Annals of Tourism Research and Tourism Management ) can be attributed to the fact that the topic of our study was not as intensively researched at that time and was primarily approached by researchers contributing to these two journals. Almost 40% of all such articles were published in these two journals before 2010. These were, in fact, already established tourism journals. Some of the newer journals discovered in our study are still quite “young.” Moreover, cities and tourism have recently become quite strongly associated with sustainability issues. Therefore, many more journals are now attracting the attention of authors as a publication opportunity, including journals published in other languages.

While the entire WOS database contains only 0.7% Spanish-language articles, the ESCI contains 7.2% of these. Such language-related patterns were also detected by other authors ( Huang et al. , 2017 ), for the ESCI index in general. The topic of our study of urban tourism and tourist cities, therefore, plays an important role in relation to this geographic (and to some extent linguistic) milieu. Researchers have raised the question of whether all topics have equal importance in various parts of the world and whether articles have been around long enough to be discovered ( Jamal et al. , 2008 ). ESCI journals, already recommended for future tourism research ( Mulet-Forteza et al. , 2019 ), have substantially advanced representation of urban tourism and tourist cities , therefore, offering new possibilities for such “discoveries.” The most important ESCI journal now seems to be the International Journal of Tourism Cities which has recently become one of the principal journals in this field ( Figure 2 ). This journal has been attributed a central position by computer visualizations ( Figures 3 and 4 ) which indicates strong interdisciplinary links and relationships with other journals. Here we need to point out that the number of articles is not an indication of quality. Given the only recent introduction of ESCI, the impact will only be quantifiable after some time-lapse.

At the end of the journal appraisal, it is worth mentioning that the very recent accents of the non-ESCI journal Sustainability and Journal of Sustainable Tourism (orange-to-red colors in Figures 3 and 4 ) corroborate our preliminary reflection on a significant increase in research interest in various aspects of sustainability which evidently applies to tourism and cities as well.

3.2 Identification of research perspectives through clusters of terms

As highlighted above, the common point in the analytical debates is the assumption that urban tourism is a subject area with a growing body of work but with divergent, disconnected and narrowly confined research backgrounds which includes a non-uniform and heterogeneous terminological use. This fragmentation could limit coherence and integration. As highlighted, Ashworth (2003) and Ashworth and Page (2011) address the “paradoxes” in the progress of urban tourism research which results from the researcher’s lack of engagement with debates in urban studies along with the wider societal dynamics of globalization and vice versa. Based on links between journals established on bibliographic coupling ( Figures 3 and 4 ), we found that the assumption is not fully justified, especially relating to BQ which is more inclusive. In this section, we therefore further evaluate, through visual analysis of article terms, whether a perceived “paradox” contained in unresolved shortcomings (“imbalances” and “double neglect”), especially in terms of descriptive (“adjectival”) rather than inclusive treatment of the urban condition in the conducting of research on urban tourism, could be somehow detected. Many analytical typologies of perspectives, discourses, disciplinary perspectives and bibliographic measurements of urban tourism alone or within tourism studies, in general, have been presented, ranging from generalized binaries to more detailed ( Fainstein and Judd, 1999 ; Yuan et al. , 2015 ) [ 5 ]. As we highlighted in the introduction, we focus on those perspectives which thematize urban tourism as inherently multidimensional; as an industry, a socio-cultural phenomenon and a geographic setting.

In the above consideration, it is important to determine how strongly certain research agendas, here analytically represented by article terms, determine a perspective as visualized in clusters. Terms organized in clusters could be considered, on an experimental basis, as perspectives in the above sense. The weaker co-occurrence between the clusters, the more the research is self-sufficient and thus less connected with other perspectives.

For this purpose, we tested three different queries ( Table 1 ). We wanted to find out what the difference between the perspectives is when they are based on a very strict term of urban tourism as opposed to more inclusive queries enriched with other applicable terms, for example, tourism cities and cities together with tourism. All visualizations in the following three figures present 60% of the most relevant terms (designated by the program) which occur at least 10 times (last column in Table 2 ).

3.3 Research perspectives through the clusters in the narrower query

This query (383 articles) focused specifically on urban tourism (NQ). The program arranged related terms into clusters/perspectives ( Figure 5 ).

The presentation of at least 10 occurrences per term excluded terms with lower counts. The presented terms are thus more operational in nature. Overall, this narrower corpus is dominated by the empirical “business of tourism” with the city (“urban”) existing more in a geographic or setting context. Contextual terms are scattered across several clusters. Due to the predominantly author’s empirical treatment of the topic, the operational terms, especially those concerning the methods of studying urban tourism ( interview, year, model, effect, survey, demand, range ) are quite distinctive. Such terms occur in all clusters, although in lower counts, due to a low number of articles. Connections between urban tourism and marketing and tourism management were also detected by Estevão et al. (2017) . Even if the terms may occur in connection with socio-cultural and spatial issues, the occurrences are too small to be identified in the clusters. It seems that authors use a very heterogeneous or non-unified terminology so the clusters are difficult to delineate very exactly. The figures become much more meaningful when larger data sets are available. This will be revealed in the two next queries (BQ and GQ) which are more inclusive and where main research perspectives become evident.

3.4 Research perspectives through the clusters of article terms in broader query

Tourism-business cluster/perspective (red) – A.

Environmental-spatial cluster/perspective (blue) – B.

Socio-cultural cluster/perspective (green/yellowish) – C.

These three clusters of article terms are somewhere in between the “binary” approaches by Fainstein and Gladstone (1997) who specify the political and the cultural and the much more detailed 12 sub-themes-typology ( Ashworth and Page, 2011 ). There are other, detailed studies of approaches in terms of theoretical orientations ( Fainstein and Judd, 1999 ; Hoffman et al. , 2001 ) and more recent, updated discussions ( Bellini et al. , 2017 ; Romero-García et al. , 2019 ) about them. Our systematization of approaches or perspectives/clusters is, in terms of content and definition, quite close to a summarized division into three perspectives by Edwards et al. (2008) : urban planning/governance, industrial and cultural.

3.4.1 Tourism-business cluster/perspective (red cluster).

In this cluster, strong network links of article terms can be identified, covering both applied and business-related topics and related to empirical studies, for example, tourist-consumer issues (e.g. marketing, motivation, perception and various connotations of destination ) and research methods (e.g. questionnaire, respondent, sample). It exhibits weak network terminological links with other clusters and is very homogeneous; one would describe it as “self-sufficient” and “adjectival.” Here we can relate to the findings in Section 3.1 on the progression of articles on urban tourism as reflected by publications, where the journal Tourism Management plays a prominent role. Links with other clusters do exist, but a closer look reveals a different research contextuality. For example, the term accommodation is located toward the middle of the map and is also linked to other clusters. On the other hand, the term satisfaction is located on the perimeter of the map as is mainly focused on business. Accommodation issues, therefore, go beyond the business-related aspects and are thus more strongly related to clusters/perspectives B and C than term satisfaction , which is mostly related to tourist experience, and perhaps less to the impact of tourism on residents. Focusing only on visitors or only on residents is defined by some authors as “the reductive dualism” [e.g. empowered tourist – disempowered host ( Bianchi, 2009 )]. The context seems to be linked to the empirical studies in the previous map, which is based on the NQ ( Figure 5 ).

3.4.2 Environmental-spatial cluster/perspective (blue cluster).

This perspective shows topics and concepts of the natural environment and physical (built-up) space with links to urban systems in connection with tourism. Structural and functional activities reflect issues such as spatial patterns, morphology, population and natural resources. This is in line with the approaches specified by Gospodini (2001) . The cluster seems to be more concerned with the sustainable living conditions of residents under the impact of tourists who are only temporary visitors. The terms somehow suggest a more critical stance regarding tourism activities as opposed to mainly affirmative (or at least neutral) attitudes in the preceding cluster. It also involves time-scaling terms (days/months, seasons). Period is thus prominent. As analyzed in the journal section, the queries also retrieved articles in the category Environmental Sciences which are evident ( coast, land, pollution, water , etc.) and which have weak connections with urban studies in a more confined context of social sciences. Urban areas and tourism are here essentially geographic units (such as districts or precincts). The dispersion of terms suggests that such empirical studies use specific terminologies. One might expect to find various environmental sustainability issues, but the distinct notions of sustainability are more specifically reflected in the next cluster of socio-cultural perspectives. According to clustering algorithms, an item may belong to only one cluster – the one to which it is more related – although this does not preclude connections with other clusters.

3.4.3 Socio-cultural cluster/perspective (green/yellowish).

The green and yellowish terms are not only close to each other but also intermingle, so that we perceive them as one shared cluster with blurred boundaries between the more empirically oriented and the more qualitative or narrative oriented, for that matter. The empirical research (yellowish) addresses aspects of social issues ( participation, society ). These are dispersed and drawn to other clusters. It also includes the term sustainable development , which is not visible because of the overlap with the term society . Several authors ( Perkumienė and Pranskūnienė, 2019 ; Capocchi et al. , 2019 ) point out these more recent topics which will also be shown in Figures 8 and 9 . It seems quite clear that in this cluster/perspective the concept of sustainability , both in the use of terms and in the connections between them, is treated with a different emphasis than in cluster/perspective B. It is not focused on the natural but on the social and cultural “environment” or to put it better, milieu. Qualitative research and theoretical or narrative reflections (green) are more homogeneous and put more emphasis on the cultural-interpretative background ( identity, history, culture ) but may apply to “social issues” and “cultural issues.” To illustrate with an example: the noun in singular form heritage is yellowish, whereas composite heritage tourism is green. We deduce that strong network links here represent analytically related research agendas of tourism in cities and society (or culture) in general. Our deduction, which relates to terminological connections within and between clusters, is consistent with the review of literature on the topic, especially over the past 10 years. It seems that the authors are somehow pursuing a common socio-cultural perspective which includes cautionary, critical and non-positivistic perspectives toward tourism research ( Bianchi, 2009 ; Platenkamp and Botterill, 2013 ; Colomb and Novy Eds ., 2016 ; Novy, 2019 ).

This BQ cluster seems to be a good model for assessing publication patterns and relations among research perspectives in this field the way we perceive and interpret it through the lenses of terminology. The clusters in the selective NQ ( Figure 5 ) were less informative due to the low numbers of terms and narrow search syntax based on the rather restrictive concepts of urban tourism and city tourism . Now we want to compare these findings with an even “bigger picture”: a general query (GQ) based on more openly connected concepts of urban, city and tourism , where the three distinct perspectives become even clearer.

3.5 Research perspectives through the clusters in the general query

The third and the most inclusive query was based on the occurrence of urban or city on the one hand and tourism ( tourists ) on the other. It presents 1,992 relevant terms ( Figure 7 ). Most of the terms are displayed only by circles while the names cannot be displayed due to overlapping. These even broader pictures now identifies the socio-cultural perspective as one cluster (bottom left). The cluster at the top-left indicates the tourism-business perspective. This clustering shows a fairly similar picture as the clustering in the previous BQ where the socio-cultural terms were weakly indicated as two possibly distinct clusters but did, in fact, intermingle. This picture now shows that these concepts are indeed quite related which corroborates our inference of one cluster of shared perspectives.

Nevertheless, the original assumption of weak links between the perspectives is not fully confirmed, as the precise term urban tourism is clearly too narrow and does not cover the many relevant connections between cities and tourism. As we found (Section 3.1), articles are not only dispersed across different journals which are mapped to diverse categories; the authors also use heterogeneous terminology, when they wish to thematize cities in relation to tourism or vice versa. Thus, on analyzing clusters, we can substantiate our original assumption that a non-unified terminology at least partially hampers the integration and interconnectedness between perspectives in urban tourism (city tourism or tourism in cities).

Although the environmental-spatial cluster/perspective was already well-defined in the BQ ( Figure 6 ) it is now much more prominent (right side of the map in Figure 7 ). This cluster is in a clearly separated position with increasingly weak links to the other two clusters. We assume that many articles are no longer very strongly connected with the city- and tourism- associated topics. Contexts can be multidirectional: the impact of tourism or the impact of other forces on tourism and cities. The term climate change alone occurs 119 times (not visible because of the overlap). There are another 200 occurrences of terms based on climate .

Interestingly, with this GQ another “approach” (fourth cluster) now appears, which was not present in the previous maps: tourism and health , in the small centrally located cluster ( disease, epidemiology, hospital , etc.). The central location indicates some links with other clusters although the links with the environmental issues are stronger. It denotes links between cities, tourism and health, and suggests susceptibility of cities and tourism to climate change and outbreaks of diseases. An important WOS category of such documents is indeed Public Environmental Occupational Health although such research is also being published in Tourism journals.

Cities and tourism may have a weaker role in such articles although they do occur at least in abstracts or keywords. WOS category of HLST is still the main category and 9 of the top 10 journals are similarly tourism-related as in the first two more restricted queries.

3.6 Recent specific topics in urban tourism by the evolution of author keywords

The visualization of author keywords complements the existing research perspectives/clusters. Author keywords are the terms which the authors have assigned to their papers and which are then also recorded in databases. Although subjective, keywords reflect an author’s attunement to terminology in a given period. Some very recent terms (“hot topics,” as indicated by the red color) reflect emerging socio-spatial issues ( Airbnb, sharing economy, touristification ) and are shown in both maps ( Figures 8 and 9 ). The circles are still small, as these novel concepts are not yet very numerous. The very novel antitourism or overtourism (also as anti-tourism or over-tourism ) are not shown because the counts are still too low. In 2019, however, there was an upturn. It will, however, take some time for these issues to become established. This is discussed in the last chapter. Some authors may use two separate keywords to describe the context: tourism + city/cities . The subjective use of geographic terms likely reflects an author’s decision to highlight a particular city.

We may tentatively interpret the maps by way of the contextualization of terms. Time analysis and the emergence of author keywords provide only an approximate estimate of the research directions. Sustainability (also as an adjective sustainable ) has been addressed in general tourism and sustainability studies ( Garrigos-Simon et al. , 2018 ). In our case, we assess it specifically in relation to urban tourism. The emerging issues of sustainability were also reflected in journal maps ( Figures 3 and 4 ). Sustainability is gaining importance through contextually-related processes of gentrification , planning and mobility , which is also reflected in emerging topics, such as sharing economy, Airbnb and overtourism ( Bauder and Freytag, 2015 ; Colomb and Novy, 2016 ; Perkumienė and Pranskūnienė, 2019 ; Kadi et al. , 2019 ; Capocchi et al. , 2019 ). Studies of tourism and cities are thus increasingly focusing on various aspects of sustainability, embracing broader social phenomena in the context of urban dynamics: from the environment, housing and planning to mobility patterns ( Urry, 2016 ; Tokarchuk et al. , 2017 ). Looking at the above time-analysis of keywords, one could at least suggest that the problem of “imbalance in focus” or “paradox” (which Ashworth has repeatedly stressed) in the treatment of cities in tourism studies is indeed diminishing. This applies both to the aspect of tourism management and to the critical optics of the impact of tourism on cities and society. Point in the case could be the most frequent reference to Barcelona and even more recently Berlin (“blurred” red above gentrification in Figure 8 and to the right of touristification in Figure 9 ), which illustrates well the many discussions on these sustainability contexts ( Füller and Michel, 2014 ; Hall, 2016 ).

3.7 Cities as topics of research

Limitations linked with city names need to be highlighted first. Sometimes, the concept of a city is used as an epithet, for example, the city of Valencia, but this is not always the case. The particular urban- or city terms may not even be used in the abstract when an article deals with a particular city. Such a study can thus only serve as a model as many possibly relevant records cannot be retrieved. We were nevertheless interested which are the principal cities which come about in connection with tourism. A combined procedure was needed to this end. First, all terms from the NQ and BQs were downloaded into a temporary data set. This then required “manual” identification of all cities in the data set. Some disambiguation was essential. Also, different linguistic forms were merged. Then, the analysis of the occurrences was conducted in the WOS itself. The cities were then ranked according to their frequency ( Figure 10 ).

The cities thus identified confirm our findings on the particular role of urban tourism in the Spanish (and to some extent in Portuguese) geographic (including linguistic) context and the role of ESCI journals. While the publishing contribution of some countries in the field of tourism has been previously noted ( Yuan et al. , 2015 ), some countries and cities have recently gained a higher presence in this field of research. Thus, geographic and regional effects play an important role in publication behavior. For example, Barcelona appears about six times in the journal Documents d'Analisi Geografica (ESCI) which also publishes articles in Catalan. Figure 10 also roughly shows that Europe is the most studied region, followed by Asia and the Americas. Similar geographic patterns (research regions) have also been found in VOSviewer-based visualizations of mobile technologies and smart tourism ( Dorcic et al. , 2018 ).

The particulars and implications of geographic terms are not so evident in other “adjectival” tourisms, for example, in adventure tourism or rural tourism. However, in investigating the cities the very names of certain cities have a retrieval impact on Mexico City (sometimes only as Ciudad de Mexico ), NY City and Cape Town. The City of London denotes a particular area in London. Some “city names” may refer to an entire territory or a country ( Hong Kong, Singapore ). The name of Beijing (official Chinese Pinyin Romanization) is used almost without exception, although the now old-fashioned English exonym Peking still crops up (frequently in clear-cut phrasal contexts, for example, Peking opera, Peking duck). However, sometimes only the “international” English names are used (Vienna for Wien, Venice for Venezia, etc.).

This emphasis is important because it highlights the need for a unified terminology in the development of a disciplinary field. Awareness of this kind of limitation is also important for researchers and authors, especially when it comes to retrieval in databases.

3.8 Co-authorship of papers by country of an author

The counts of cities as topics of research ( Figure 10 ) are to some extent associated with contributions by authors from the respective countries ( Figures 11 and 12 ). Documents in both queries exhibit similar patterns of co-authorship links. Spain shows links with the countries from Spanish (Portuguese) linguistic/geographic neighborhoods. The average publication year of this authorship is much more recent. USA and England [ 7 ] show a longer presence in such studies (violet-to-blue colors). The US circle is located in the vicinity of East Asian countries. The authors affiliated to US institutions co-authored the highest number of articles with the authors in the Peoples Republic of China. This is shown by the close proximity of the two countries and the thickness of the connecting line. Such intense co-authorship between these two countries in tourism research was also observed by Shen et al. (2018) and Köseoglu et al. (2019) . The recent importance of Spain in tourism research was noted by Butowski et al. (2019) . The recent Spanish context substantiates our previous inferences on the role of ESCI journals in this field. While the contribution by countries was investigated earlier ( Yuan et al. , 2015 ) some countries have now gained higher prominence (orange-to-red color palette) which points to the changing landscape in (urban) tourism studies.

3.9 Recent upsurge of novel terms

A consistent analysis for the 2019 data cannot be made as many articles have not yet been indexed by WOS. Against this background, we conducted an exploratory assessment of the 2019 data in the early spring of 2020 (based on NQ). We needed to exclude documents with early access in WOS because they distort the visualizations as the publication year is not yet assigned. The data show a very strong increase in some novel terms, some of which we highlighted in the keyword section and which have obviously experienced an outbreak over the past year – or even months. In 2010, there were no such terms ( Figure 13 ). Degrowth first appeared in 2019. However, this is only a preliminary assessment. The 2019 documents are still arriving. We highlight an interesting terminological development: the novel t ou ristification also appears as t u ristification (Spanish: turistificacion), in up to 10% of the articles. As expected, these documents represent several ESCI journals and/or the Spanish research background, although the (incorrect) turistification was derived from English language titles, abstracts or keywords. Also, the compound word overtourism sometimes comes about as over tourism . Authors should therefore take care not to increase terminological entropy in addition to other challenges of information retrieval in this field.

At this point, we need to, however, mention that this evolution may take yet unexpected directions. Namely, in the time of the finalization of this study, a disturbing turn of events has begun with the outbreak of Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus). The troubling developments are likely to have a major impact on tourism and cities although this will not be immediately reflected in the publishing patterns in this field because the first articles to this end are just being published. This remains a subject to be followed in our future research based on science mapping and visualizations.

4. Conclusions

The study evaluates the conceptual framework in the field of urban tourism in a narrow sense and tourism and cities in a broader sense using quantitative visualizations. It thus contributes to existing theoretical frameworks in which the authors either systematize perspectives (or research approaches) or discuss them analytically. The findings on the importance of information retrieval represent an academic and practical contribution. The academic one refers to the extraction of information relevant to researchers in the field. Consequently, the better quality of information can contribute to the development, and more importantly, the integration of this disciplinary field. Of practical importance to urban and tourism professionals is guidance on how to search for research findings in the literature. The connections between research directions were tested at three levels of terminological inclusivity, with implications for information retrieval addressed at each level. This is a novel way for evaluating links in the field of urban tourism. The dual expertise of an information specialist and a sociologist was used for this purpose.

In creating the methodological search syntax, which was an introductory step, it became clear that a focused search query would miss a significant portion of the relevant documents. On the other hand, a broad query would also return documents that are no longer related to the topic. On the analytical level, this is a dilemma of the degree of inclusiveness of topics, approaches, perspectives in a given field, which also impacts connectivity to other fields. Obviously, this dilemma is also reflected in information retrieval. The practical implications are clear: researchers who want to get a more complete picture must be aware that some information will remain “undiscovered.”

The impression of particularly strong growth in this area after 2015 is due, at least in part, to the addition of journals to the WOS, although these journals are not really new. They may have been overlooked, however, if authors have previously searched only at WOS. In any case, the more recent publication patterns show a very strong occurrence, if not prevalence, of Spanish (Portuguese) linguistic-geographic contexts. This is reflected not only in the cities studied but also in the author’s collaborations. Other clusters are also apparent, albeit of early date (US – East Asia). The boundaries and implications are left to interpretation. Perhaps, this is an opportunity for future collaboration, for example, in sharing new insights in the face of the Covid-19 crisis that will inevitably hit tourism and cities hard.

Quantification, in this case, the dispersion of articles across journals, points to connectivity between the fields, allowing the theoretical assumption of imbalance in the perspective to urban tourism to be tested. This type of tourism has been fully embraced by HLST (WOS). Recently, the issues of (social) sustainability have also come to the fore. On the other hand, this research area seems to have been very weakly covered by urban studies, according to the respective WOS category, notwithstanding the limitations of this scheme. Nevertheless, we advise authors and editors outside the immediate field of tourism journals to open up to this type of research to better reflect the many aspects of urban tourism, especially social sustainability.

The central aim of the study was to identify research perspectives through clustering techniques and science maps. The correspondence between the clusters identified in this study and the perspectives analytically systematized in the literature is remarkable. Restricting the search to the narrow concept of urban tourism reveals dominance of the tourism business. It is only through broader searches that all perspectives become visible: tourism-business perspective, socio-cultural perspective and environmental-spatial perspective. Limitations exist nevertheless. The less restrictive the search query, the higher the proportion of articles with weaker direct references to issues of cities and tourism.

This inevitable trade-off has practical implications for researchers. If they want to find very focused documents, it is sufficient to limit the query to the conventional notion of “urban tourism.” However, such documents are not numerous. If they want to find documents that reflect the links between tourism and cities in a broader sense, they will need to test queries at multiple levels, which will inevitably produce unrelated documents. The least precise documents will be found in the interlinking area of tourism, cities and the environment, where impacts can go in all directions (impacts of cities and tourism on the environment and vice versa).

Recently, there has been a flood of terms such as Airbnb, overtourism and touristification, in response to changes in cities and society in general. From an informetric perspective, this is still too new to be perceptible in visualizations. These novel issues, all related to the social sustainability of cities, could possibly develop into a separate research front that we would like to pursue in the future. Such issues can also be discovered through the analysis of author keywords, as authors are inevitably influenced by urban dynamics and wider social processes. In fact, such subjective “buzzwords” may even skew the numbers. Or the keywords may simply reflect the politics of a journal. This has practical implications for search, so keywords should be interpreted with caveats.

The role of each city also needs to be considered in context, as the terms city or urban are not necessarily used in the context of a particular city. However, this is true for most cities, so the occurrence of a city name still reflects its relative importance. On the other hand, terms such as travel can be used for other types of mobility. Indeed, the enfolding broader socio-cultural processes promote Spatio-temporal accessibility and thus permeate different “mobilities” that affect urban morphology and consequently influence the changing nature of urban tourism. This will then have an impact on information retrieval. In any case, it will never be able to identify “all” relevant elements (apart from subjective notions of relevance).

Finally, one of the clusters points to links between tourism and health, recalling the vulnerability of cities and tourism to climate change and disease. This has already begun to manifest itself in publications related to the Covid-19 outbreak. The implications for cities and tourism are likely to be severe, potentially reversing or significantly reconceptualizing previous sustainability issues (due to overtourism). This could put earlier studies in a new perspective. Here, our study could serve as a temporal reference point, as it mapped this field shortly before the pandemic. This is an important implication for upcoming research. So this is also a front on which we intend to continue our science mapping in the future.

To conclude, we would like to reflect on a challenge in such studies: the multiple limitations and trade-offs in information retrieval perceived by the information specialist are interpreted by sociologists as a specific aspect of social complexity that must be reduced in order for the “big picture” to emerge. Authors can nevertheless contribute to better discoverability of their work by using more streamlined terminology, e.g. by at least using terms with clear and unambiguous meanings. In any case, despite all the challenges, we would like to encourage more interdisciplinary collaboration as a contribution to better integration in this field.

Articles between 2000-2018 in the four WOS indexes retrieved with Broader query (main figure) and Narrower query (inset)

Main part: exponential decrease of articles per journal

Links between journals established on shared references (bibliographic coupling) and average time of published articles (Narrower query)

Links between journals established on shared references (bibliographic coupling) and average time of published articles (Broader query)

Clusters/approaches of the 60 % of the most relevant terms identified in the titles and abstracts, occurring at least 10 times (Narrower query: based on 383 WOS records and 8,700 total terms)

Clusters/approaches of the 60 % of the most relevant terms identified in the titles and abstracts, occurring at least 10 times (Broader query: based on 1,386 WOS records and 25,000 total terms)

Clusters/approaches of the 60 % of the most relevant terms identified in the titles and abstracts, occurring at least 10 times (General query: based on 7,362 WOS records and 128,000 total terms)

Visualization of co-occurrence and average time of author keywords (Narrower query)

Visualization of co-occurrence and average time of author keywords (Broader query)

Twenty cities which come about most frequently in WOS in relation to urban tourism (cities and tourism)

Country collaboration links by co-authorship from the respective countries (Narrower query)

Country collaboration links by co-authorship from the respective countries (Broader query)

Development of specific terms in documents retrieved with the Narrower query (2010-2019)

Number of records retrieved by the three search queries (TS = occurrence of terms in either title, abstract or keywords; TI = occurrences in article titles)

WOS records by queries

Narrower query – NQ; broader query – BQ; general query – GQ

Later, we will highlight additional problems of terminological nature, for example, multifaceted terms, such as travel(lers) and visit(ors) which are used in tourism terminology but may also have “non-tourist” meanings and uses.

The share of town -associated documents relative to tourism is very low.

As highlighted in the introduction, tourism and day-to-day practices are increasingly interconnected and thus indistinguishable (de-differentiation of socio-spatial practices).

The length of journal names on the map is optimized by the program. If the number of journals increases then the names are shortened to lessen both the overlapping and blurring.

See a comprehensive and detailed summary of approaches in Edwards et al. (2008) .

With an increasing number of included terms in visualization maps, many terms are blurred or not visible because of overlap with other terms what is especially well demonstrated in Figure 7 which displays only the principal terms.

WOS counts UK’s countries/regions (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales) separately which hampers the comparison of the UK with other countries. This also applies to Chinese territories where Hong Kong and Macao are also counted separately in WOS.

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Further reading

Ashworth , G.J. ( 1992 ), “ Is there an urban tourism? ”, Tourism Recreation Research , Vol. 17 No. 2 , pp. 3 - 8 .

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency ARRS (H5-8286, P4-0085).

Corresponding author

About the authors.

Marjan Hocevar is based at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Centre for Spatial Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia where he teaches subjects related to socio-spatial issues (Spatial sociology, Sociology of spatial planning, urban sociology). He has lectured at the University of Trieste, Italy (PhD Program Territoriality and Networks). His research interests include cities, urban networks, urban transformation, gentrification, socio-spatial globalization and the social impact of tourism. He is the Editor of the Journal Druzboslovne razprave (Scopus), published by the Slovenian Sociological Association. He cooperates with city administrations in Slovenia in development programs.

Tomaz Bartol is based at Biotechnical Faculty, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is a Professor of “Information science and communication” at the Biotechnical Faculty and “Management of information resources” at the Department of Library and Information Science and Book Studies of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. He has lectured in several countries in the framework of the United Nations FAO Capacity Building programs. His research interests include science mapping, research evaluation, information science, library science, information literacy, bibliometrics and scientometrics. He sits on editorial boards of academic journals and program committees of several annual conferences in the information sciences. He has been a licensed tour guide for more than three decades.

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Robyn Bridges and AO Tourism bring people to the Plains

Auburn, Alabama, commonly referred to as “The Loveliest Village on the Plains,” is a community beloved by many. From Auburn University students to families, Auburn is made up of all kinds of people.

In a growing community like Auburn, marketing the city as a tourist destination is essential. That is the purpose served by Auburn-Opelika Tourism and its president Robyn Bridges.

Bridges moved to Auburn in 1994 and despite attending The University of Alabama, developed a love for the community. She has seen a lot of growth during her time on the Plains.

“Shortly after I moved here, the front page of the OA News was ‘Ruby Tuesday Opens in Auburn,’" Bridges said. “That’s about how much we had going on in 1994.”

Bridges discussed the purpose of Auburn-Opelika Tourism and how it impacts the community.

“Auburn-Opelika Tourism is here to make the community better – that is our vision statement, and that is what we work toward every day,” Bridges said. “Our business revolves around our core values and how those contribute to making this community better. The way we do that is by impacting the visitor economy. We are here to bring in people and events that are positive for our community, both for the economy and long-term benefit of our residents and neighbors.”

Bridges elaborated on where her passion for marketing Auburn as a tourist destination comes from and how rewarding it is to do so.

“It just comes from my love for this community and a heart for service that I developed and honed when I worked at the Hotel at Auburn University,” Bridges said. “I never knew that was what I wanted to do with my life, I never studied hospitality. That was not my major. I took a job in marketing at the AU Hotel for about seven years before I moved over to tourism. I don’t think there is any other place in the world that I’d rather live and work.”

Bridges spoke on the effect that the city of Auburn as well as the campus has on the people who visit and where that welcoming nature comes from.

“It’s not so much about what the campus looks like,” Bridges said. “It’s the people, and we hear it every day in our work and when we’re out and about hearing from people who visit. There is something special about it, and no one is immune to it – if you come here, you feel it.”

Bridges talked about her favorite places to dine throughout Auburn and the surrounding areas.

“I love to go a lot of places,” Bridges said. “Café 123 [in Opelika] is one of my favorite restaurants in the community. I think it’s very underrated. It’s been there a long, long time. It’s a workhorse, but the chef there is very creative and does a really great job.”

Bridges listed some places to eat and visit as well as other things to do that she would recommend to someone visiting the area for the first time.

“If you live here, it seems cliché, but everyone needs to go the Toomer’s [Corner] and have lemonade when they come,” Bridges said. “I think everyone should see Chewacla State Park and the trails that have been built out there. Everybody needs to go to downtown Opelika and eat and shop in those little stores. There are just some no-brainer things everyone should make sure to do the first time that they’re here.”

Bridges mentioned how Auburn has become more marketable as a place to open a business as a result of it becoming a more popular place to live and visit.

“It’s a place where people want to come to open their business because it’s such a great community and such a thriving community that continues to grow,” Bridges said. “A place where people want to live is a place where people want to open their businesses. We continue to add sports facilities and parks and recreation facilities. Those types of facilities are great for our businesses.”

Bridges talked about what she would like to see come to Auburn either soon or further down the road.

“Everybody wants a major attraction,” Bridges said. “Years ago, there was talk of an aquarium or something that is visitor-centric. We’re here to make this community better and to develop those projects that are beneficial not just to our visitors but are going to be a long-term benefit to our residents.”

Bridges has dedicated her career to the betterment of the Auburn community, a place that she loves dearly.

“It’s something people say all the time," Bridges began, "but if you love Auburn, it will love you back.”

Do you like this story? The Plainsman doesn't accept money from tuition or student fees, and we don't charge a subscription fee. But you can donate to support The Plainsman.

Daniel Locke, junior in journalism, is the community editor for The Auburn Plainsman.

Twitter: @danieljlocke

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Number of domestic overnight visitors the Gold Coast, Australia 2023, by purpose

Over 2.2 million domestic overnight visitors traveled to the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia for holiday purposes in the year ended December 2023. The second most prevalent reason for making trips to the Gold Coast among domestic overnight visitors was to visit friends and family.

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Australian Army Tests New Urban Warfare Live-Fire Range in Brisbane

Australia is validating a new purpose-made urban operations live-fire range for the army in Brisbane.

The Deployable Austere Shoot House (DASH) serves as the army’s first firing facility since the 90s and early 2000s following the establishment of special operations counter-terrorism centers in Perth and Sydney.

The new, single-story hub incorporates equipment to accommodate rifle and pistol systems.

It has 10 rooms and three hallways designed for corresponding urban combat conditions. The walls are based on Hesco baskets, layered with rubber sheets, and filled with 10-millimeter basalt aggregate to resist close-range fire down to one meter.

Canberra wrote that the Australian Army conducted training at the DASH center to support the ongoing operational testing and assessment of the site.

It involved about 30 personnel from the Royal Australian Regiment’s 8th/9th Battalion, a motorized infantry unit based in Queensland.

Sessions required the use of lethal and non-lethal ammunition in different scenarios.

The unit’s Course Instructor Warrant Officer Class II Phil Brown said soldiers also underwent explosive breaching and grenade simulations during the event.

“The end state of the course is to prepare for war, not a live-fire range,” Brown stated .

Maintaining Lethality, Survivability

Another instructor, Sgt. Casey Morrison , explained that live-firing experience from the DASH complex helped the participants cope with stress and anxiety for future deployments.

Morrison and Brown, along with other trainers, curated tactical doctrines and procedures up to platoon level over three years according to their urban live-fire experience under the Australian military’s Special Operations Command.

“If our participants are using these principles in a combat context, not only do they make us more lethal and survivable but they also aid range safety, controlling a live-fire manoeuvre practice,” Morrison said.

“It’s a skill that degrades quickly and takes a lot of practice to maintain – reading building anatomy and other combatants’ body language and manoeuvring as a team in a complex environment effectively.”

DASH will activate for three years and accommodate combat brigades after its testing concludes.

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The low-carbon city initiative and urban inbound tourism economy: a spatial difference-in-differences analysis

• Published: 05 April 2024

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• Jiafeng Gu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5904-0897 1  

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Although tourism is often treated as one of the crucial industries for the construction of low-carbon cities (LCCs), there is no systematic evidence on whether there is a causal relationship. This research aims to explore and empirically test the causal link between LCC initiatives and inbound tourism of cities using a spatial difference-in-differences approach with balanced panel data of 59 Chinese major tourism cities from 2000 to 2017. The results show that urban tourism by foreign tourists exhibits significant spatial spillover effects. Compared to non-LCCs, the number of foreign tourists on LCCs increased by 4.7 percentage points and the average length of stay of foreign tourists increased by 3.6 percentage points. The direct impact of the LCC initiative on foreign tourists was significant, while the indirect impact was insignificant. The findings of the study not only deepen the research on sustainable tourism behavior of inbound tourists, but also provide valuable references for cities to participate in the competition in the international tourism market through low-carbon development.

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The authors gratefully acknowledge the Social Science Foundation of China (17BSH122) for the support of this research.

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Gu, J. The low-carbon city initiative and urban inbound tourism economy: a spatial difference-in-differences analysis. Environ Dev Sustain (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-024-04815-y

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For the first time, infantry soldiers will have access to a purpose-made urban operations live-fire range, after operational testing and evaluation of a prototype facility finished in Brisbane last month. 

About 30 soldiers from 8th/9th Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment (8/9 RAR) were the first to live-fire in the newly constructed deployable austere shoot house (DASH) on March 22, designed for training with rifle and pistol. 

DASH is a first for conventional Army and the latest urban live-fire range since the 90s and early 2000s, when special operations counter-terrorism facilities were built in Perth and Sydney. 

The single-storey complex has 10 rooms and three hallways, configured to test most urban tactics, techniques and procedures.  

Walls are constructed from Hesco baskets (defensive barriers), wrapped in rubber sheets and filled with 10mm basalt aggregate, so soldiers can fire as close as one metre away. 

Two revamped urban operations courses were recently run by 8/9RAR to prepare soldiers and range staff to conduct live-fire training. 

'The end state of the course is to prepare for war, not a live-fire range.'

Serials included the use of non-lethal and lethal ammunition in opposed and unopposed scenarios. 

Course instructor Warrant Officer Class Two Phil Brown, from the 8/9RAR Combat Cell, said opposed scenarios, incorporating non-lethal training ammunition, explosive breaching and sim grenades was considered the “high watermark” for training. 

“The end state of the course is to prepare for war, not a live-fire range,” Warrant Officer Brown said. 

He said live-fire was just one of the mediums used to validate individual and collective tactics, techniques and procedures.

Soldiers preferred non-lethal opposed scenarios as it replicated elements of combat conditions. 

Sergeant Casey Morrison, another combat cell instructor, said although live-fire was crucial for training progression, soldiers said it was “benign” compared to opposed scenarios, where they learned to control stress and anxiety. 

Doctrine and procedures were developed over the past three years by Warrant Officer Brown, Sergeant Morrison and Corporals Nigel Tegg and Cameron Cherrett based on their experiences conducting urban live-fire, up to platoon level, with Special Operations Command. 

Sergeant Morrison said one of the key concepts to emerge was abandoning the perfect solution for a principles-based approach that could be adapted to solve different problems. 

“If our participants are using these principles in a combat context, not only do they make us more lethal and survivable but they also aid range safety, controlling a live-fire manoeuvre practice.” 

It represents a new approach to urban training, according to course instructors, who said a lot of work was needed to reshape soldiers’ perceptions from “kicking in doors and rushing in” to being deliberate and methodical. 

“There’s so much in this space to learn,” Sergeant Morrison said. 

“Every soldier needs to start this journey from when they reach Singleton or Kapooka.

“It’s a skill that degrades quickly and takes a lot of practice to maintain - reading building anatomy and other combatants’ body language and manoeuvring as a team in a complex environment effectively.” 

When testing wraps up, DASH is expected to roll out to combat brigades within the next three years. 

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