urban tourism planners

UN Tourism | Bringing the world closer

Product Development

• Rural tourism
• Gastronomy and Wine Tourism
• Mountain Tourism

Urban Tourism

• Sports Tourism
• Shopping Tourism

share this content

• Share this article on facebook
• Share this article on twitter
• Share this article on linkedin

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.

• Tianjin Workshop, 2 September 2017
• Buenos Aires Workshop, 26 September 2017

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

TED Radio Hour

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

How can more U.S. cities become more walkable? Here's one urban planner's approach

Manoush Zomorodi

Katie Monteleone

Sanaz Meshkinpour

Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode A More Walkable World .

Imagine everything you need—shops, parks, schools, and more—is within walking or biking distance of your home. Urban planner Jeff Speck is bringing a walkable lifestyle to cities across the U.S.

About Jeff Speck

Jeff Speck is a city planner and architectural designer who advocates internationally for more walkable cities. Speck is the principal at the urban design and consultancy firm, Speck Dempsey .

As Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 through 2007, he oversaw the Mayors' Institute on City Design and created the Governors' Institute on Community Design, a federal program that helps state governors fight suburban sprawl. Speck's books include Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time , and Walkable City Rules .

This segment of TED Radio Hour was produced by Katie Monteleone and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour. You can follow us on Facebook @TEDRadioHour and email us at [email protected].

Related Links

Web resources.

Urban Tourism in the Global South pp 1–37 Cite as

The Other Half of Urban Tourism: Research Directions in the Global South

• Christian M. Rogerson 4 &
• Jayne M. Rogerson 4  
• First Online: 14 July 2021

576 Accesses

7 Citations

Part of the book series: GeoJournal Library ((URPGS))

In mainstream urban tourism scholarship debates there is only limited attention given to the urban global South. The ‘other half’ of urban tourism is the axis in this review and analysis. Arguably, in light of the changing global patterns of urbanization and of the shifting geography of leading destinations for urban tourism greater attention is justified towards urban settlements in the global South. The analysis discloses the appearance of an increasingly vibrant scholarship about urban tourism in the setting of the global South. In respect of sizes of urban settlement it is unsurprising that the greatest amount of attention has been paid to mega-cities and large urban centres with far less attention so far given to tourism occurring either in intermediate centres or small towns. In a comparative assessment between scholarship on urban tourism in the global North versus South there are identifiable common themes and trends in writings about urban tourism, most especially in relation to the phenomenon of inter-urban competition, questions of sustainability and planning. Nevertheless, certain important differences can be isolated. In the urban global South the environment of low incomes and informality coalesce to provide for the greater significance of certain different forms of tourism to those which are high on the urban global North agenda. Three key issues are highlighted by this ‘state of the art’ overview, namely the significance of an informal sector of tourism, the distinctive characteristics of the discretionary mobilities of the poor, and the controversies surrounding slum tourism.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution .

Buying options

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

In 2020 the World Bank introduced a new classification of countries: low-income, low-middle income, upper-middle income and high income. Macao SAR, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar are classed as high income. As the focus of this book is South Africa, which the World Bank classifies as falling in the category of upper-middle income bracket, the high income urban destinations are viewed as Norths within the South and thus not included in our research overview of the global South.

This section builds upon and extends certain of the discussion presented in Rogerson and Saarinen ( 2018 ).

Aall, C., & Koens, K. (2019). The discourse on sustainable urban tourism: The need for discussing more than overtourism. Sustainability, 11 (15), 4228.

Article   Google Scholar  

Adam, I. (2013). Urban hotel development patterns in the Kumasi Metropolis, Ghana. Tourism Planning and Development, 10 , 85–98.

Adam, I., & Amuquandoh, F. E. (2013a). Hotel characteristics and location decisions in Kumasi Metropolis, Ghana. Tourism Geographies, 16 (4), 653–668.

Adam, I., & Amuquandoh, F. E. (2013b). Dimensions of hotel location decisions in the Kumasi Metropolis, Ghana. Tourism Management Perspectives, 8 , 1–8.

Adie, B. A., & Cepeda, R. G. (2018). Film tourism and cultural performance: Mexico City’s day of the dead parade. In E. Kromidha & S. Deesilatham (Eds.), Inclusive innovation for enhanced local experience in tourism: Workshop proceedings, Phuket, Thailand , pp. 33–36.

Google Scholar  

Alliance, C. (2014). Africa regional strategy: Final document . Brussels: Cities Alliance.

Amanpour, M., & Nikfetrat, M. (2020). The effect of urban tourism on economic sustainable development of Sari City. Iranian Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research, 8 (1), 87–97.

Amore, A., & Hall, C. M. (2017). National and urban public policy in tourism: Towards the emergence of a hyperneoliberal script? International Journal of Tourism Policy, 7 (1), 4–22.

Amore, A., & Roy, H. (2020). Blending foodscapes and urban touristscapes: International tourism and city marketing in Indian cities. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 6 (3), 639–655.

Angelini, A. (2020). A favela that yields fruit: Community-based tour guides as brokers in the political economy of cultural difference. Space and Culture, 23 (1), 15–33.

Ashworth, G. J. (1989). Urban tourism: An imbalance in attention. Progress in Tourism, Recreation and Hospitality Management, 1 , 33–54.

Ashworth, G. J. (2012). Do we understand urban tourism? Journal of Tourism & Hospitality, 1 (4), 1–2.

Ashworth, G. J., & Page, S. (2011). Urban tourism research: Recent progress and current paradoxes. Tourism Management, 32 (1), 1–15.

Aukland, K. (2018). At the confluence of leisure and devotion: Hindu pilgrimage and domestic tourism in India. Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 6 (1), 18–33.

Avieli, N. (2013). What is ‘local food’?: Dynamic culinary heritage in the world heritage site of Hoi An, Vietnam. Journal of Heritage Tourism, 8 (2–3), 120–132.

Bao, J., Li, M., & Liang, Z. (2020). Urban tourism in China. In S. Huang & G. Chen (Eds.), Handbook on tourism and China (pp. 116–130). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Baumgart, S., & Kreibich, V. (2011). Informal urbanization – Historical and geographical perspectives. disP – The Planning Review, 47 (187), 12–23.

Bellini, N., Go, F.M., & Pasquinelli, C. (2017). Urban tourism and city development: Notes for an integrated policy agenda. In N. Bellini & C. Pasquinelli (Eds.), Tourism In The City: Towards an Integrative Agenda on Urban Tourism (pp. 333–339). Cham: SpringerTourism

Bhati, A., & Pearce, P. (2017). Tourist attractions in Bangkok and Singapore; linking vandalism and setting characteristics. Tourism Management, 63 , 15–30.

Bhoola, S. (2020). Halal food tourism: Perceptions of relevance and viability for South African destinations. African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure, 9 (3), 288–301.

Bogale, D., & Wondirad, A. (2019). Determinant factors of tourist satisfaction in Arbaminch City and its vicinity, southern Ethiopia. International Journal of Tourism Policy, 9 (4), 320–348.

Booyens, I. (2010). Rethinking township tourism: Towards responsible tourism development in South African townships. Development Southern Africa, 27 (2), 273–287.

Booyens, I. (2021). The evolution of township tourism in South Africa. In J. Saarinen & J. M. Rogerson (Eds.), Tourism, change and the global South . Abingdon: Routledge.

Booyens, I., & Rogerson, C. M. (2019a). Creative tourism: South African township explorations. Tourism Review, 74 (2), 256–267.

Booyens, I., & Rogerson, C. M. (2019b). Recreating slum tourism: Perspectives from South Africa. Urbani izziv, 30 (Supplement), 52–63.

Bowman, K. (2015). Policy choice, social structure, and international tourism in Buenos Aires, Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Latin American Research Review, 50 (3), 135–156.

Brouder, P. (2020). Reset redux: Possible evolutionary pathways towards the transformation of tourism in a COVID-19 world. Tourism Geographies, 22 (3), 484–490.

Brouder, P., & Ioannides, D. (2014). Urban tourism and evolutionary economic geography: Complexity and co-evolution in contested spaces. Urban Forum, 25 (4), 419–430.

Buning, M., & Grunau, T. (2014) Touring Katutura!: Developments, structures and representations in township tourism in Windhoek (Namibia) . Paper presented at the Destination Slum! 2 Conference, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany, 14–16 May.

Burgold, J., & Rolfes, M. (2013). Of voyeuristic safari tours and responsible tourism with educational value: Observing moral communication in slum and township tourism in Cape Town and Mumbai. Die Erde, 144 (2), 161–174.

Burrai, E., Mostafanezhad, M., & Hannam, K. (2017). Moral assemblages of volunteer tourism development in Cusco, Peru. Tourism Geographies, 19 (3), 362–377.

Burton, C., Rogerson, C. M., & Rogerson, J. M. (2020). The making of a ‘big 5’ game reserve as an urban tourism destination: Dinokeng, South Africa. African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure, 9 (6), 892–911.

Cantu, L. (2002). De ambiente: Queer tourism and the shifting boundaries of Mexican male sexualities. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 8 (1–2), 139–166.

Carlisle, S., Johansen, A., & Kunc, M. (2016). Strategic foresight for (coastal) urban tourism market complexity: The case of Bournemouth. Tourism Management, 54 , 81–95.

Cejas, M. I. (2006). Tourism in shantytowns and slums: A new “contact zone” in the era of globalization. Intercultural Communication Studies, 15 (2), 224–230.

Chand, M., Dahiya, A., & Patil, L. S. (2007). Gastronomy tourism – A tool for promoting Jharkhand as a tourist destination. Atna Journal of Tourism Studies, 2 , 88–100.

Cheer, J. (2020). Human flourishing, tourism transformation and COVID-19: A conceptual touchstone. Tourism Geographies, 22 (3), 514–524.

Chege, P. W., & Mwisukha, A. (2013). Benefits of slum tourism in Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya. International Journal of Arts and Commerce, 2 (4), 94–102.

Chen, M., & Carré, F. (Eds.). (2020). The informal economy revisited: Examining the past, envisioning the future . London: Routledge.

Chen, M., Roever, S., & Skinner, C. (2016). Urban livelihoods: Reframing theory and policy. Environment and Urbanization, 28 (2), 331–342.

Chen, Q., & Huang, R. (2016). Understanding the importance of food tourism in Chongqing, China. Journal of Vacation Marketing, 22 (1), 42–54.

Chianeh, R. H., del Chiappa, G., & Ghasemi, V. (2018). Cultural and religious tourism development in Iran: Prospects and challenges. Anatolia, 29 (2), 204–214.

Christie, I., Fernandes, E., Messerli, H., & Twining-Ward, L. (2013). Tourism in Africa: Harnessing tourism for growth and improved livelihoods . Washington, DC: The World Bank.

Coca-Stefaniak, J. A., & Seisdedos, G. (2021). Smart urban tourism destinations at a crossroads – Being ‘smart’ and urban are no longer enough. In A. M. Morrison & J. A. Coca-Stefaniak (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of tourism cities . London: Routledge.

Coca-Stefaniak, J. A., Morrison, A. M., Edwards, D., Graburn, N., Liu, C., Ooi, C. S., Pearce, P., Stepchenkova, S., Richards, G. W., So, A., Spirou, C., Dinnie, K., Heeley, J., Puczkó, L., Shen, H., Selby, M., Kim, H.-B., & Du, G. (2016). Editorial: Views from the editorial board of the International Journal of Tourism Cities. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 2 (4), 273–280.

Cohen, E., & Cohen, S. A. (2015a). A mobilities approach to tourism from emerging world regions. Current Issues in Tourism, 18 (1), 11–43.

Cohen, E., & Cohen, S. A. (2015b). Beyond Eurocentrism in tourism: A paradigm shift in mobilities. Tourism Recreation Research, 40 (2), 157–168.

Colantonio, A. (2004). Tourism in Havana during the special period: Impacts, residents’ perceptions, and planning issues. Cuba in Transition, 14 (2), 20–42.

Colantonio, A., & Potter, R. B. (2006). Urban tourism and development in the socialist state: Havana during the special period . Aldershot: Ashgate.

Coles, C., & Mitchell, J. (2009). Pro poor analysis of the business and conference value chain in Accra: Final report . London: Overseas Development Institute.

Colomb, C., & Novy, J. (Eds.). (2016). Protest and resistance in the tourist city . Abingdon: Routledge.

Condevaux, A., Djament-Tran, G., & Gravari-Barbas, M. (2016). Before and after tourism(s) – The trajectories of tourist destinations and the role of actors involved in “off-the-beaten track” tourism: A literature review. Via@Tourism Review, 1 (9), 2–27.

Cong, L., Wu, B., Morrison, A. M., & Xi, K. (2014). The spatial distribution and clustering of convention facilities in Beijing, China. Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, 19 (9), 1070–1090.

Crush, J., & Chikanda, A. (2015). South-south medical tourism and the quest for health in southern Africa. Social Science and Medicine, 124 , 313–320.

Crush, J., Skinner, C., & Chikanda, A. (2015). Informal migrant entrepreneurship and inclusive growth in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique (Migration policy series no. 68). Cape Town: The Southern African Migration Programme.

Book   Google Scholar  

Cruz, F. G. S., Tito, J. C., Perez-Galvez, J. C., & Medina-Viruel, M. J. (2019). Gastronomic experiences of foreign tourists in developing countries: The case in the city of Oruro (Bolivia). Heliyon, 5 (7), e02011.

Cudny, W., Michalski, T., & Ruba, R. (Eds.). (2012). Tourism and the transformation of large cities in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe . Lódz: University of Lódz.

Da Cunha, N. V. (2019). Public policies and tourist saturation in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. In C. Milano, J. M. Cheer, & M. Novelli (Eds.), Overtourism; excesses, discontent and measures in travel and tourism (pp. 152–166). Wallingford: CABI.

Daskalopoulou, I., & Petrou, A. (2009). Urban tourism competitiveness: Networks and the regional asset base. Urban Studies, 46 (4), 779–801.

de Jesus, D. S. V. (2020). The boys of summer: Gay sex tourism in Rio de Janeiro. Advances in Anthropology, 10 , 125–146.

Del Lama, E. A., de la Corte Bacci, D., Martins, L., Gracia, M. D. G. M., & Dehira, L. K. (2015). Urban geotourism and the old centre of São Paulo City, Brazil. Geoheritage, 7 , 147–164.

Diaz-Parra, I., & Jover, J. (2021). Overtourism, place alienation and the right to the city: Insights from the historic centre of Seville, Spain. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 29 (2–3), 158–175.

Diekmann, A., & Hannam, K. (2012). Touristic mobilities in India’s slum spaces. Annals of Tourism Research, 39 (3), 1315–1336.

Dirksmeier, P., & Helbrecht, I. (2015). Resident perceptions of new urban tourism: A neglected geography of prejudice. Geography Compass, 9 (5), 276–285.

Dixit, S. K. (Ed.). (2021). Tourism in Asian cities . London: Routledge.

Dovey, K. (2015). Sustainable informal settlements. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 179 , 5–13.

Dovey, K., & King, R. (2012). Informal urbanism and the taste for slums. Tourism Geographies, 14 (2), 275–293.

Drummond, J., & Drummond, F. (2021). The historical evolution of the cultural and creative economy of Mahikeng, South Africa: Implications for contemporary policy. In R. Comunian, B. J. Hracs, & L. England (Eds.), Developing creative economies in Africa: Policies and practice (pp. 97–112). London: Routledge.

Duchesneau-Custeau, A. (2020). ‘Theirs seemed like a lot more fun’: Favela tourism, commoditization of poverty and stereotypes of the self and the other . Masters paper in Globalization and International Development, School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada.

Dumbrovská, V., & Fialová, D. (2014). Tourist intensity in capital cities in Central Europe: Comparative analysis of tourism in Prague, Vienna and Budapest. Czech Journal of Tourism, 1 , 5–26.

Dürr, E., & Jaffe, R. (2012). Theorising slum tourism: Performing, negotiating and transforming inequality. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 93 , 113–123.

Dürr, E., Jaffe, R., & Jones, G. A. (2020). Brokers and tours: Selling urban poverty and violence in Latin America and the Caribbean. Space and Culture, 23 (1), 4–14.

Dyson, P. (2012). Slum tourism: Representing and interpreting ‘reality’ in Dharavi, Mumbai. Tourism Geographies, 14 (2), 254–274.

Ele, C. O. (2017). Religious tourism in Nigeria: The economic perspective. Online Journal of Arts, Management and Social Sciences, 2 (1), 220–232.

Faisal, A., Albrecht, J. N., & Coetzee, W. J. L. (2020). Renegotiating organisational crisis management in urban tourism: Strategic imperatives of niche construction. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 6 (4), 885–905.

Ferreira, S., & Visser, G. (2007). Creating an African Riviera: Revisiting the impact of the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront development in Cape Town. Urban Forum, 18 (3), 227–246.

Fletcher, R., Mas, I. M., Blanco-Romero, A., & Blázquez-Salom, M. (2019). Tourism and degrowth: An emerging agenda for research and praxis. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 27 (12), 1745–1763.

Florida, R., Rodriguez-Pose, A., & Storper, M. (2020). Cities in a post-COVID world (Utrecht University papers in evolutionary geography no 20.41). Utrecht: Utrecht University.

Freire-Medeiros, B. (2014). Tourism and poverty . London: Routledge.

Freire-Medeiros, B., Vilarouca, M. G., & Menezes, P. (2013). International tourists in a ‘pacified’ favela: The case of Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro. Die Erde, 144 (2), 147–159.

Frenzel, F. (2013). Slum tourism in the context of the tourism and poverty (relief) debate. Die Erde, 144 , 117–128.

Frenzel, F. (2016). Slumming it: The tourist valorization of urban poverty . London: Zed.

Frenzel, F. (2017). Tourist agency as valorisation: Making Dharavi into a tourist attraction. Annals of Tourism Research, 66 , 159–169.

Frenzel, F. (2019). Slum tourism. In The Wiley Blackwell encyclopaedia of urban and regional studies. Retrieved from: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118568446.eurs0427

Frenzel, F. (2020). Touring poverty in townships, inner-city and rural South Africa. In J. M. Rogerson & G. Visser (Eds.), New directions in South African tourism geographies (pp. 167–181). Cham: Springer.

Frenzel, F., & Blakeman, S. (2015). Making slums into attractions: The role of tour guiding in the slum tourism development in Kibera and Dharavi. Tourism Review International, 19 (1–2), 87–100.

Frenzel, F., & Koens, K. (2012). Slum tourism: Developments in a young field interdisciplinary tourism research. Tourism Geographies, 14 (2), 195–212.

Frenzel, F., & Koens, K. (Eds.). (2016). Tourism and geographies of inequality: The new global slumming phenomenon . London: Routledge.

Frenzel, F., Koens, K., & Steinbrink, M. (Eds.). (2012). Slum tourism: Poverty, power and ethics . London: Routledge.

Frenzel, F., Koens, K., Steinbrink, M., & Rogerson, C. M. (2015). Slum tourism: State of the art. Tourism Review International, 18 , 237–252.

Frisch, T. (2012). Glimpses of another world: The favela as a tourist attraction. Tourism Geographies, 14 , 320–338.

Füller, H., & Boris, M. (2014). ‘Stop being a tourist!’ New dynamics of urban tourism in Berlin-Kreuzberg. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38 (4), 1304–1318.

Gálvez, J. C. P., López-Guzmán, T., Buiza, F. C., & Medina-Viruel, M. J. (2017). Gastronomy as an element of attraction in a tourist destination: The case of Lima, Peru. Journal of Ethnic Foods, 4 (4), 254–261.

Gálvez, J. C. P., Gallo, L. S. P., Medina-Viruel, M. J., & López-Guzman, T. (2020). Segmentation of tourists that visit the city of Popayán (Colombia) according to their interest in gastronomy. Journal of Culinary Science & Technology . https://doi.org/10.1080/15428052.2020.1738298 .

George, R., & Booyens, I. (2014). Township tourism demand: Tourists’ perceptions of safety and security. Urban Forum, 25 (4), 449–467.

Ghani, E., & Kanbur, R. (2013). Urbanization and (in) formalization . Washington, DC: The World Bank.

Gladstone, D. (2005). From pilgrimage to package tour: Travel and tourism in the Third World . Abingdon: Taylor & Francis.

Gonzalez, S. (2011). Bilbao and Barcelona ‘in motion’: How urban regeneration ‘models’ travel and mutate in the global flows of policy tourism. Urban Studies, 48 (7), 1397–1418.

González-Pérez, J. M. (2020). The dispute over tourist cities: Tourism gentrification in the historic centre of Palma (Majorca, Spain). Tourism Geographies, 22 (1), 171–191.

Gowreesunkar, V. G., Seraphin, H., & Nazimuddin, M. (2020). Beggarism and black market tourism – A case study of the city of Chaar Minaar in Hyderabad (India). International Journal of Tourism Cities . https://doi.org/10.1108/IJTC-12-2019-0210 .

Grant, R. (2015). Africa: Geographies of change . New York: Oxford University Press.

Gravari-Barbas, M., & Guinand, S. (2021). Tourism and gentrification. In A. M. Morrison & J. A. Coca-Stefaniak (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of tourism cities . London: Routledge.

Greenberg, D., & Rogerson, J. M. (2015). The serviced apartment industry of South Africa: A new phenomenon in urban tourism. Urban Forum, 26 , 467–482.

Greenberg, D., & Rogerson, J. M. (2018). Accommodating business travellers: The organisation and spaces of serviced apartments in Cape Town, South Africa. Bulletin of Geography, 42 , 83–97.

Greenberg, D., & Rogerson, J. M. (2019). The serviced apartment sector in the urban global South: Evidence from Johannesburg, South Africa. GeoJournal of Tourism and Geosites, 26 (3), 916–929.

Gregory, J. J. (2016). Creative industries and urban regeneration – The Maboneng Precinct, Johannesburg. Local Economy, 31 (1–2), 158–171.

Hall, C. M. (2002). Tourism in capital cities. Tourism – An International Interdisciplinary Journal, 50 (3), 235–248.

Hall, C. M., Scott, D., & Gössling, S. (2020). Pandemics, transformations and tourism: Be careful what you wish for. Tourism Geographies, 22 (3), 577–598.

Hannam, K., & Zuev, D. (2020). Revisiting the local in Macau under COVID-19. ATLAS Tourism and Leisure Review, 2020-2 , 19–21.

Hayllar, B., & Griffin, T. (2005). The precinct experience: A phenomenological approach. Tourism Management, 26 , 517–528.

Hayllar, B., Griffin, T., & Edwards, D. (Eds.). (2008). City spaces – Tourism spaces: Urban tourism precincts . Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Haywood, K. M. (1992). Identifying and responding to challenges posed by urban tourism. Tourism Recreation Research, 17 (2), 9–23.

Heeley, J. (2011). Inside city tourism: A European perspective . Bristol: Channel View.

Henderson, J. (2006). Tourism in Dubai: Overcoming barriers to destination development. International Journal of Tourism Research, 8 , 87–99.

Henderson, J. (2014). Global Gulf cities and tourism: A review of Abu Dhabi, Doha and Dubai. Tourism Recreation Research, 39 (1), 107–114.

Henderson, J. (2015a). The development of tourist destinations in the Gulf: Oman and Qatar compared. Tourism Planning and Development, 12 (3), 350–361.

Henderson, J. (2015b). Destination development and transformation – 50 years of tourism after independence in Singapore. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 1 (4), 269–281.

Hernandez-Garcia, J. (2013). Slum tourism, city branding and social urbanism: The case of Medellin, Colombia. Journal of Place Management and Development, 6 (1), 43–51.

Higgins-Desbiolles, F. (2020a). COVID-19 and tourism: Reclaiming tourism as a social force. ATLAS Tourism and Leisure Review, 2020-2 , 65–73.

Higgins-Desbiolles, F. (2020b). The “war over tourism”: Challenges to sustainable tourism in the tourism academy after COVID-19. Journal of Sustainable Tourism . https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2020.1803334 .

Hoffman, L. M., Fainstein, S. S., & Judd, D. R. (Eds.). (2003). Cities and visitors: Regulating people, markets and city space . Oxford: Blackwell.

Holst, T. (2015). Touring the demolished slum?: Slum tourism in the face of Delhi’s gentrification. Tourism Review International, 18 , 283–294.

Holst, T. (2018). The affective negotiation of slum tourism: City walks in Delhi . London: Routledge.

Holst, T., Frisch, T., Frenzel, F., Steinbrink, M., & Koens, K. (2017). The complex geographies of inequality in contemporary slum tourism . In Call for papers for the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Boston.

Horner, R., & Carmody, P. (2020). Global North/South. In A. Kobayashi (Ed.), International encyclopedia of human geography (Vol. 6, 2nd ed., pp. 181–187). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

i Agusti, D. P. (2020). Mapping tourist hot spots in African cities based on Instagram images. International Journal of Tourism Research, 22 (5), 617–626.

Ihalanayake, R. (2009). Awaiting attention: Profiling the domestic tourism sector in Sri Lanka. In S. Singh (Ed.), Domestic tourism in Asia (pp. 253–266). London: Earthscan.

Ioannides, D., & Petridou, E. (2016). Contingent neoliberalism and urban tourism in the United States. In J. Mosedale (Ed.), Neoliberalism and the political economy of tourism (pp. 21–36). Avebury: Ashgate.

Iwanicki, G., & Dłużewska, A. (2015). Potential of city break clubbing tourism in Wroclaw. Bulletin of Geography: Socio-Economic Series, 28 , 77–89.

Iwanicki, G., Dłużewska, A., & Kay, M. S. (2016). Assessing the level of popularity of European stag tourism destinations. Quaestiones Geographicae, 35 (3), 15–29.

Jaguaribe, B., & Hetherington, K. (2004). Favela tours: Indistinct and maples representations of the real in Rio de Janeiro. In M. Sheller & J. Urry (Eds.), Tourism mobilities: Places to play (pp. 155–166). London: Routledge.

Jamieson, W., & Sunalai, P. (2002). The management of urban tourism destination: The cases of Klong Khwang and Phima, Thailand . Pathumthani, Thailand: Urban Management Programme – Asia Occasional Paper, 56.

Jeffrey, H. L., Vorobjovas-Pinta, O., & Sposato, M. (2017). It takes two to tango: Straight-friendly Buenos Aires. In Critical tourism studies VII conference: Book of abstracts, 25–29 June . Palma de Mallorca, Spain , p. 77.

Joksimović, M., Golic, R., Vujadinović, S., Sabić, D., Popović, D. J., & Barnfield, G. (2014). Restoring tourism flows and regenerating city’s image: The case of Belgrade. Current Issues in Tourism, 17 (3), 220–233.

Jones, G. A., & Sanyal, R. (2015). Spectacle and suffering: The Mumbai slum as a worlded space. Geoforum, 65 , 431–439.

Jurado, K. C., & Matovelle, P. T. (2019). Assessment of tourist security in Quito city through importance-performance analysis. Tourism – An International Interdisciplinary Journal, 67 (1), 73–86.

Kaczmarek, S. (2018). Ruinisation and regeneration in the tourism space of Havana. Turyzm, 28 (2), 7–14.

Kadar, B. (2013). Differences in the spatial patterns of urban tourism in Vienna and Prague. Urbani izziv, 24 (2), 96–111.

Kalandides, A. (2011). City marketing for Bogotá: A case study in integrated place branding. Journal of Place Management and Development, 4 (3), 282–291.

Kamete, A. Y. (2013). On handling urban informality in southern Africa. Geografiska Annaler Series B, 95 , 17–31.

Kanai, M. (2014). Buenos Aires, capital of tango: Tourism, redevelopment and the cultural politics of neoliberal urbanism. Urban Geography, 35 (8), 1111–1117.

Karski, A. (1990). Urban tourism – A key to urban regeneration. The Planner, 76 (13), 15–17.

Kaushal, V., & Yadav, R. (2020). Understanding customer experience of culinary tourism through food tours of Delhi. International Journal of Tourism Cities . https://doi.org/10.1108/IJTC-08-2019-0135 .

Ketter, E. (2020). Millennial travel: Tourism micro-trends of European Generation Y. Journal of Tourism Futures . https://doi.org/10.1108/JTF-10-2019-0106 .

Khoo, S. L., & Badarulzaman, N. (2014). Factors determining George Town as a city of gastronomy. Tourism Planning & Development, 11 (4), 371–386.

Khusnutdinova, S. R., Sadretdinov, D. F., & Khusnutdinov, R. R. (2019). Tourism as a factor of city development in the post-industrial economy. Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research, 131 , 886–890.

Kieti, D. M., & Magio, K. O. (2013). The ethical and local resident perspectives of slum tourism in Kenya. Advances in Hospitality and Tourism Research, 1 (1), 37–57.

Koens, K., & Thomas, R. (2015). Is small beautiful? Understanding the contribution of small businesses in township tourism to economic development. Development Southern Africa, 32 (3), 320–332.

Koens, K., Postma, A., & Papp, B. (2018). Is overtourism overused?: Understanding the impact of tourism in a city context. Sustainability, 10 (12), 4384.

Komaladewi, R., Mulyana, A., & Jatnika, D. (2017). The representation of culinary experience as the future of Indonesian tourism cases in Bandung city, West Java. International Journal of Business and Economic Affairs, 2 (5), 268–275.

Korstanje, M. E., & Baker, D. (2018). Politics of dark tourism: The case of Cromanon and ESMA, Buenos Aires, Argentina. In P. Stone, R. Hartmann, T. Seaton, R. Sharpley, & L. White (Eds.), Handbook of dark tourism (pp. 533–552). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kotus, J., Rzeszewski, M., & Ewertowski, W. (2015). Tourists in the spatial structures of a big Polish city: Development of an uncontrolled patchwork or concentric spheres? Tourism Management, 50 , 98–110.

Ladkin, A., & Bertramini, A. M. (2002). Collaborative tourism planning: A case study of Cusco, Peru. Current Issues in Tourism, 5 (2), 71–93.

Larsen, J. (2020). Ordinary tourism and extraordinary everyday life: Re-thinking tourism and cities. In T. Frisch, C. Sommer, L. Stoltenberg, & N. Stors (Eds.), Tourism and everyday life in the contemporary city . London: Routledge.

Law, C. M. (1992). Urban tourism and its contribution to economic regeneration. Urban Studies, 29 , 599–618.

Law, C. M. (1993). Urban tourism: Attracting visitors to large cities . London: Mansell.

Law, C. M. (1996). Introduction. In C. M. Law (Ed.), Tourism in major cities (pp. 1–22). London: International Thomson Business Press.

Lee, J. (2008). Riad fever: Heritage tourism, urban renewal and the medina property boom in old cities of Morocco. E Review of Tourism Research, 6 , 66–78.

Leonard, L., Musavengane, R., & Siakweh, P. (Eds.). (2021). Sustainable urban tourism in sub-Saharan Africa . London: Routledge.

Lertwannawit, A., & Gulid, N. (2011). International tourists service quality perception and behavioral loyalty toward medical tourism in Bangkok metropolitan area. Journal of Applied Business Research, 27 (6), 1–12.

Li, J., Pearce, P. L., Morrison, A. M., & Wu, B. (2016). Up in smoke?: The impact of smog on risk perception and satisfaction of international tourists in Beijing. International Journal of Tourism Research, 18 (4), 373–386.

Li, M., & Wu, B. (2013). Urban tourism in China . London: Routledge.

Liu, L., Wu, B., Morrison, A. M., & Ling, R. S. J. (2015). Why dwell in a hutongtel?: Tourist accommodation preferences and guest segmentation for Beijing hutongtels. International Journal of Tourism Research, 17 (2), 171–184.

Loazya, N. V. (2016). Informality in the process of development and growth. The World Economy, 39 (12), 1856–1916.

Lunchaprasith, T. (2017). Gastronomic experience as a community development driver: The study of Amphawa floating market as community-based culinary tourism destination. Asian Journal of Tourism Research, 2 (2), 84–116.

Ma, B. (2010). A trip into the controversy: A study of slum tourism travel motivations . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Mahler, A. G. (2018). From the tricontinental to the global South: Race, radicalism and transnational solidarity . Durham: Duke University Press.

Maitland, R. (2012a). Global change and tourism in national capitals. Current Issues in Tourism, 15 (1–2), 1–2.

Maitland, R. (2012b). Capitalness is contingent: Tourism and national capitals in a globalised world. Current Issues in Tourism, 15 (1–2), 3–17.

Maitland, R. (2016). Everyday tourism in a world tourism city: Getting backstage in London. Asian Journal of Behavioural Studies, 1 (1), 13–20.

Maitland, R., & Newman, P. (2009). Developing world tourism cities. In R. Maitland & P. Newman (Eds.), World tourism cities: Developing tourism off the beaten track (pp. 1–21). London: Routledge.

Maitland, R., & Ritchie, B. W. (Eds.). (2009). City tourism: National capital perspectives . Wallingford: CABI.

Mbaiwa, J. E., Toteng, E. N., & Moswete, N. (2007). Problems and prospects for the development of urban tourism in Gaborone and Maun. Development Southern Africa, 24 , 725–739.

Mbatia, T. W., & Owuor, S. (2014). Prospects for urban eco-tourism in Nairobi, Kenya: Experiences from the Karura forest reserve. African Journal of Sustainable Development, 4 (3), 184–198.

McGehee, N. G., & Andereck, K. (2009). Volunteer tourism and the “voluntoured”: The case of Tijuana, Mexico. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 17 (1), 39–51.

McKay, T. (2013). Leaping into urban adventure: Orlando bungee, Soweto, South Africa. African Journal for Physical, Health Education, Recreation and Dance, 18 (Supplement), 55–71.

McKay, T. (2017). The South African adventure tourism economy: An urban phenomenon. Bulletin of Geography: Socio-Economic Series, 37 , 63–76.

McKay, T. (2020). Locating great white shark tourism in Gansbaai, South Africa within the global shark tourism economy. In J. M. Rogerson & G. Visser (Eds.), New directions in South African tourism geographies (pp. 283–297). Cham: Springer.

Mekawy, M. A. (2012). Responsible slum tourism: Egyptian experience. Annals of Tourism Research, 39 (4), 2092–2113.

Mendoza, C. (2013). Beyond sex tourism: Gay tourists and male sex workers in Puerto Vallarta (Western Mexico). International Journal of Tourism Research, 15 (2), 122–137.

Mikulić, D., & Petrić, L. (2014). Can culture and tourism be the foothold of urban regeneration?: A Croatian case study. Tourism – An International Interdisciplinary Journal, 62 (4), 377–395.

Milano, C., Novelli, M., & Cheer, J. M. (2019). Overtourism and degrowth: A social movements perspective. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 27 (12), 1857–1875.

Miller, D., Merrilees, B., & Coghlan, A. (2015). Sustainable urban tourism: Understanding and developing pro-environmental behaviours. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 23 (1), 26–46.

Miraftab, F., & Kudva, N. (Eds.). (2015). Cities of the global South reader . London: Routledge.

Mitchell, J., & Ashley, C. (2010). Tourism and poverty reduction: Pathways to prosperity . London: Earthscan.

Mogaka, J. J. O., Mupara, L. M., Mashamba-Thompson, T. P., & Tsoka-Gwegweni, J. M. (2017). Geo-location and range of medical tourism services in Africa. African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure, 6 (1), 1–18.

Montes, G. C., & de Pinho Bernabé, S. (2020). The impact of violence on tourism to Rio de Janeiro. International Journal of Social Economics, 47 (4), 425–443.

Moreno-Gil, S., & Coca-Stefaniak, J. A. (2020). Guest editorial. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 6 (1), 1–7.

Morrison, A. M., & Coca-Stefaniak, J. A. (Eds.). (2021). The Routledge handbook of tourism cities . London: Routledge.

Muldoon, M., & Mair, H. (2016). Blogging slum tourism: A critical discourse analysis of travel blogs. Tourism Analysis, 21 (5), 465–479.

Műller, M. (2020). In search of the global East: Thinking between North and South. Geopolitics, 25 (3), 734–755.

Murillo, J., Vaya, E., Romani, J., & Surinach, J. (2011). How important to a city are tourists and daytrippers?: The economic impact of tourism on the city of Barcelona . Barcelona: University of Barcelona, Research Institute of Applied Economics.

Musavengane, R., Siakweh, P., & Leonard, L. (2020). The nexus between tourism and urban risk: Towards inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable outdoor tourism in African cities. Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism, 29 , 100254.

Myers, G. (2020). Rethinking urbanism: Lessons from postcolonialism and the global South . Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Naicker, M. S., & Rogerson, J. M. (2017). Urban food markets: A new leisure phenomenon in South Africa. African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure, 6 (3), 1–17.

Niewiadomski, P. (2020). COVID-19: From temporary de-globalisation to a rediscovery of tourism? Tourism Geographies, 22 (3), 651–656.

Nisbett, M. (2017). Empowering the empowered?: Slum tourism and the depoliticization of poverty. Geoforum, 85 , 37–45.

Nobre, E. A. C. (2002). Urban regeneration experiences in Brazil: Historical preservation, tourism development and gentrification in Salvador da Bahia. Urban Design International, 7 , 109–124.

Novy, J. (2011). Marketing marginalized neighbourhoods: Tourism and leisure in the 21 st century inner city . PhD dissertation, Columbia University, New York.

Novy, J., & Colomb, C. (2019). Urban tourism as a source of contention and social mobilisations: A critical review. Tourism Planning and Development, 16 (4), 358–375.

Nyerere, V. C. Y., Ngaruko, D., & Mlozi, S. (2020). The mediating role of strategic planning on the determinants of sustainable urban tourism: Empirical evidence from Tanzania. African Journal of Economic Review, 8 (1), 198–216.

OECD. (2020). Rebuilding tourism for the future: COVID-19 policy response and recovery . Paris: OECD.

Oldfield, S., & Parnell, S. (2014). From the South. In S. Parnell & S. Oldfield (Eds.), The Routledge handbook on cities of the global South (pp. 1–4). London: Routledge.

Opfermann, L. S. (2020). Walking in Jozi: Guided tours, insecurity and urban regeneration in inner city Johannesburg. Global Policy . https://doi.org/10.1011/1758-5899.12809 .

Oppermann, M., Din, K. H., & Amri, S. Z. (1996). Urban hotel location and evolution in a developing country: The case of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Tourism Recreation Research, 2 , 55–63.

Page, S. J., & Connell, J. (2006). Tourism: A modern synthesis . London: Thomson Press.

Panasiuk, A. (2019). Crises in the functioning of urban tourism destinations. Studia Periegetica, 27 (3), 13–25.

Pandy, W. R., & Rogerson, C. M. (2019). Urban tourism and climate change: Risk perceptions of business tourism stakeholders in Johannesburg, South Africa. Urbani izziv, 30 (Supplement), 225–243.

Park, J., Wu, B., Shen, Y., Morrison, A. M., & Kong, Y. (2014). The great halls of China?: Meeting planners’ perceptions of Beijing as an international convention destination. Journal of Convention & Event Tourism, 15 (4), 244–270.

Parnell, S., & Oldfield, S. (Eds.). (2014). The Routledge handbook on cities of the global South . London: Routledge.

Parnell, S., & Pieterse, E. (Eds.). (2014). Africa’s urban revolutions . London: Zed.

Parvin, M., Razavian, M. T., & Tavakolinia, J. (2020). Importance of urban tourism planning in Tehran with economic approach. Iranian Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research, 8 (4), 95–110.

Pasquinelli, C. (2015). Urban tourism(s): Is there a case for a paradigm shift? (Cities research unit working papers no. 14). L’ Aquila: Gran Sasso Science Institute.

Pasquinelli, C., & Bellini, N. (2017). Global context, policies and practices in urban tourism: An introduction. In N. Bellini & C. Pasquinelli (Eds.), Tourism in the city: Towards an integrative agenda on urban tourism (pp. 1–25). Dordrecht: Springer.

Pasquinelli, C., & Trunfio, M. (2020a). Overtouristified cities: An online news media narrative analysis. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 28 (11), 1805–1824.

Pasquinelli, C., & Trunfio, M. (2020b). Reframing overtourism through the smart city lens. Cities, 102 (July), 102729.

Pearce, D. (2015). Urban management, destination management and urban destination management: A comparative review with issues and examples from New Zealand. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 1 (1), 1–17.

Pechlaner, H., Innerhofer, E., & Erschbamer, G. (Eds.). (2020). Overtourism: Tourism management and solutions . London: Routledge.

Pike, A., Rodriguez-Pose, A., & Tomaney, J. (2014). Local and regional development in the global North and South. Progress in Development Studies, 14 (1), 21–30.

Pinke-Sziva, I., Smith, M., Olt, G., & Berezvai, Z. (2019). Overtourism and the night-time economy: A case study of Budapest. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 5 (1), 1–6.

Pophiwa, N. (2020). Shopping-oriented mobility across the Zimbabwe-South Africa border: Modalities and encounters. In C. Nshimbi & I. Moyo (Eds.), Borders, mobility, regional integration and development (pp. 65–83). Cham: Springer.

Postma, A., Buda, D.-M., & Gugerell, K. (2017). Editorial. Journal of Tourism Futures, 3 (2), 95–101.

Pu, B., Teah, M., & Phau, I. (2019). Hot chilli peppers, tears and sweat: How experiencing Sichuan cuisine will influence intention to visit city of origin. Sustainability, 11 (13), 3561.

Rabbiosi, C. (2016). Developing participatory tourism in Milan, Italy: A critical analysis of two case studies. Via@Tourism Review, 1 (9), 2–16.

Richards, G. (2014). Creativity and tourism in the city. Current Issues in Tourism, 17 (2), 119–144.

Richards, G. (2020). Designing creative places: The role of creative tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 85 , 102922.

Richards, G., & Roariu, I. (2015). Developing the eventful city in Sibiu, Romania. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 1 (2), 89–102.

Rink, B. (2013). Que(e)rying Cape Town: Touring Africa’s ‘gay capital’ with the Pink Map . In J. Sarmento & E. Brito-Henriques (Eds.), Tourism in the global South: Heritages, identities and development (pp. 65–90). Lisbon: Centre for Geographical Studies, University of Lisbon.

Rink, B. (2020). Cruising nowhere: A South African contribution to cruise tourism. In J. M. Rogerson & G. Visser (Eds.), New directions in South African tourism geographies (pp. 249–266). Cham: Springer.

Rockefeller Foundation. (2009). Century of the city . Washington, DC: The Rockefeller Foundation.

Rodríguez-Gutiérrez, P., Cruz, F. G. S., Gallo, S. M. P., & López-Guzmán, T. (2020). Gastronomic satisfaction of the tourist: Empirical study in the creative city of Popayán, Colombia. Journal of Ethnic Foods, 7 , 8.

Rogerson, C. M. (1997). Globalization or informalization?: African urban economies in the 1990s. In C. Rakodi (Ed.), Managing urban growth in Africa (pp. 337–370). Tokyo: The United Nations University Press.

Rogerson, C. M. (2002a). Tourism-led local economic development: The South African experience. Urban Forum, 13 , 95–119.

Rogerson, C. M. (2002b). Urban tourism in the developing world: The case of Johannesburg. Development Southern Africa, 19 , 169–190.

Rogerson, C. M. (2004). Urban tourism and small tourism enterprise development in Johannesburg: The case of township tourism. GeoJournal, 60 , 249–257.

Rogerson, C. M. (2006). Creative industries and urban tourism: South African perspectives. Urban Forum, 17 , 149–166.

Rogerson, C. M. (2013). Urban tourism, economic regeneration and inclusion: Evidence from South Africa. Local Economy, 28 (2), 186–200.

Rogerson, C. M. (2015a). Unpacking business tourism mobilities in sub-Saharan Africa. Current Issues in Tourism, 18 (1), 44–56.

Rogerson, C. M. (2015b). Revisiting VFR tourism in South Africa. South African Geographical Journal, 97 (2), 183–202.

Rogerson, C. M. (2016a). Outside the cities: Tourism pathways in South Africa’s small towns and rural areas. African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure, 5 (3), 1–16.

Rogerson, C. M. (2016b). Secondary cities and tourism: The South African record. African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure, 5 (2), 1–12.

Rogerson, C. M. (2017a). Visiting friends and relatives matters in sub-Saharan Africa. African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure, 6 (3), 1–10.

Rogerson, C. M. (2017b). Unpacking directions and spatial patterns of VFR travel mobilities in the global South: Insights from South Africa. International Journal of Tourism Research, 19 , 466–475.

Rogerson, C. M. (2018a). Informality, migrant entrepreneurs and Cape Town’s inner-city economy. Bulletin of Geography: Socio-Economic Series, 40 , 157–171.

Rogerson, C. M. (2018b). Informal sector city tourism: Cross border shoppers in Johannesburg. GeoJournal of Tourism and Geosites, 22 (2), 372–387.

Rogerson, C. M. (2019). Globalisation, place-based development and tourism. In D. Timothy (Ed.), Handbook of globalisation and tourism (pp. 44–53). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Rogerson, C. M., & Baum, T. (2020). COVID-19 and African tourism research agendas. Development Southern Africa, 37 (5), 727–741.

Rogerson, C. M., & Letsie, T. (2013). Informal sector business tourism in the global South: Evidence from Maseru, Lesotho. Urban Forum, 24 , 485–502.

Rogerson, C. M., & Mthombeni, T. (2015). From slum tourism to slum tourists: Township resident mobilities in South Africa. Nordic Journal of African Studies, 24 (3–4), 319–338.

Rogerson, C. M., & Rogerson, J. M. (2014). Urban tourism destinations in South Africa: Divergent trajectories 2001–2012. Urbani izziv, 25 (Supplement), S189–S203.

Rogerson, C. M., & Rogerson, J. M. (2017). City tourism in South Africa: Diversity and change. Tourism Review International, 21 (2), 193–211.

Rogerson, C. M., & Rogerson, J. M. (2019a). Emergent planning for South Africa’s blue economy: Evidence from coastal and marine tourism. Urbani izziv, 30 (Supplement), 24–36.

Rogerson, C. M., & Rogerson, J. M. (2019b). Tourism in South Africa’s borderland regions: A spatial view. GeoJournal of Tourism and Geosites, 24 (1), 175–188.

Rogerson, C. M., & Rogerson, J. M. (2020). COVID-19 and tourism spaces of vulnerability in South Africa. African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure, 9 (4), 382–401.

Rogerson, C. M., & Rogerson, J. M. (2021). City tourism in southern Africa: Progress and issues. In M. Novelli, E. A. Adu-Ampong, & M. A. Ribeiro (Eds.), Routledge handbook of tourism in Africa (pp. 447–458). London: Routledge.

Rogerson, C. M., & Saarinen, J. (2018). Tourism for poverty alleviation: Issues and debates in the global South. In C. Cooper, S. Volo, B. Gartner, & N. Scott (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of tourism management: Applications of theories and concepts to tourism (pp. 22–37). London: Sage.

Rogerson, C. M., & Visser, G. (Eds.). (2007). Urban tourism in the developing world: The South African experience . New Brunswick: Transaction Press.

Rogerson, C. M., & Visser, G. (2014). A decade of progress in African urban tourism scholarship. Urban Forum, 25 , 407–417.

Rogerson, J. M. (2012). The changing location of hotels in South Africa’s coastal cities, 1990–2010. Urban Forum, 23 (1), 73–91.

Rogerson, J. M. (2013a). Reconfiguring South Africa’s hotel industry 1990–2010: Structure, segmentation, and spatial transformation. Applied Geography, 36 , 59–68.

Rogerson, J. M. (2013b). The economic geography of South Africa’s hotel industry 1990 to 2010. Urban Forum, 24 (3), 425–446.

Rogerson, J. M. (2014a). Hotel location in Africa’s world class city: The case of Johannesburg, South Africa. Bulletin of Geography: Socio-Economic Series, 25 , 181–196.

Rogerson, J. M. (2014b). Changing hotel location patterns in Ekurhuleni, South Africa’s industrial workshop. Urbani izziv, 25 (Supplement), S82–S96.

Rogerson, J. M. (2016). Hotel chains of the global South: The internationalization of South African hotel brands. Tourism – An International Interdisciplinary Journal, 64 (4), 445–450.

Rogerson, J. M., & Slater, D. (2014). Urban volunteer tourism: Orphanages in Johannesburg. Urban Forum, 25 , 483–499.

Rogerson, J. M., & Visser, G. (2020). Recent trends in South African tourism geographies. In J. M. Rogerson & G. Visser (Eds.), New directions in South African tourism geographies (pp. 1–14). Cham: Springer.

Rogerson, J. M., & Wolfaardt, Z. (2015). Wedding tourism in South Africa: An exploratory analysis. African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure, 4 (2), 1–13.

Rohr, E. (1997). Planning for sustainable tourism in old Havana, Cuba . MA dissertation, Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

Rolfes, M. (2010). Poverty tourism: Theoretical reflections and empirical findings regarding an extraordinary form of tourism. GeoJournal, 75 (5), 421–442.

Rolfes, M., Steinbrink, M., & Uhl, C. (2009). Townships as attraction: An empirical study of township tourism in Cape Town . Potsdam: University of Potsdam.

Rowe, D., & Stevenson, D. (1994). ‘Provincial paradise’: Urban tourism and city imaging outside the metropolis. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 30 , 178–193.

Rudsari, S. M. M., & Gharibi, N. (2019). Host-guest attitudes toward socio-cultural carrying capacity of urban tourism in Chalus, Mazandaran. Iranian Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research, 7 (4), 31–47.

Russo, A. P. (2020). After overtourism?: Discursive lock-ins and the future of (tourist) places. ATLAS Tourism and Leisure Review, 2020-2 , 74–79.

Saghir, J., & Santoro, J. (2018). Urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa: Meeting challenges by bridging stakeholders . Washington, DC: Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Sarmento, J. (2010). Fort Jesus: Guiding the past and contesting the present in Kenya. Tourism Geographies, 12 (2), 246–263.

Scarpaci, J. L., Jr. (2000). Winners and losers in restoring old Havana. Cuba in Transition, 10 , 289–299.

Schettini, M. G., & Troncoso, C. A. (2011). Tourism and cultural identity: Promoting Buenos Aires as the cultural capital of Latin America. Catalan Journal of Communication and Cultural Studies, 3 (2), 195–209.

Šegota, T., Sigala, M., Gretzel, U., Day, J., Kokkranikal, J., Smith, M., Seabra, C., Pearce, P., Davidson, R., van Zyl, C., Newsome, D., Hardcastle, J., & Rakić, T. (2019). Editorial. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 5 (2), 109–123.

Seok, H., Joo, Y., & Nam, Y. (2020). An analysis of sustainable tourism value of graffiti tours through social media: Focusing on TripAdvisor reviews of graffiti tours in Bogota, Colombia. Sustainability, 12 (11), 4426.

Seraphin, H., Sheeran, P., & Pilato, M. (2018). Overtourism and the fall of Venice as a destination. Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, 9 , 374–376.

Sharpley, R. (2020). Tourism, sustainable development and the theoretical divide: 20 years on. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 28 (11), 1932–1946.

Shinde, K. (2020). The spatial practice of religious tourism in India: A destinations perspective. Tourism Geographies . https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2020.1819400 .

Shoval, N., McKercher, B., Ng, E., & Birenboim, A. (2011). Hotel location and tourist activity in cities. Annals of Tourism Research, 38 (4), 1594–1612.

Sigala, M. (2020). Tourism and COVID-19: Impacts and implications for advancing and resetting industry and research. Journal of Business Research, 117 , 312–321.

Sima, C. (2013). Post-communist capital city tourism representation: A case-study on Bucharest . PhD Dissertation, London: University of Westminster.

Singh, S. (1992). Urban development and tourism: Case of Lucknow, India. Tourism Recreation Research, 17 (2), 71–78.

Singh, S. (2004). Religion, heritage and travel: Case references from the Hindu Himalayas. Current Issues in Tourism, 7 (1), 44–65.

Smith, A., & Graham, A. (Eds.). (2019). Destination London: The expansion of the visitor economy . London: University of Westminster Press.

Somnuxpong, S. (2020). Chiang Mai: A creative city using creative tourism management. Journal of Urban Culture Research, 20 , 112–132.

Speakman, M. (2019). Dark tourism consumption in Mexico City: A new perspective of the thanatological experience. Journal of Tourism Analysis, 26 (2), 152–168.

Spirou, C. (2021). Tourism cities in the United States. In A. M. Morrison & J. A. Coca-Stefaniak (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of tourism cities . London: Routledge.

Spirou, C., & Judd, D. R. (2014). The changing geography of urban tourism: Will the center hold? disP – The Planning Review, 50 (2), 38–47.

Spirou, C., & Judd, D. R. (2019). Tourist city. In A. M. Orum (Ed.), The Wiley Blackwell encyclopedia of urban and regional studies . Wiley, online library collection.

Steck, J.-F., Didier, S., Morange, M., & Rubin, M. (2013). Informality, public space and urban governance: An approach through street trading (Abidjan, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Lomé and Nairobi). In S. Bekker & L. Fourchard (Eds.), Politics and policies governing cities in Africa (pp. 145–167). Cape Town: HSRC Press.

Steel, G. (2013). Mining and tourism: Urban transformations in the intermediate cities of Cajamarca and Cusco, Peru. Latin American Perspectives, 40 (2), 237–249.

Steinbrink, M. (2012). ‘We did the slum!’ – Urban poverty tourism in historical perspective. Tourism Geographies, 14 (2), 213–234.

Steinbrink, M. (2013). Festifavelisation: Mega-events, slums and strategic city staging – The example of Rio de Janeiro. Die Erde, 144 (2), 129–145.

Stepchenkova, S., Rykhtik, M. I., Schichkova, E., Kim, H., & Petrova, O. (2015). Segmentation for urban destination: Gender, place of residence, and trip purpose: A case of Nizhni Novgorod, Russia. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 1 (1), 70–86.

Stephenson, M. L., & Dobson, G. J. (2020). Deciphering the development of smart and sustainable tourism cities in Southeast Asia: A call for research. Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies, 13 (1), 143–153.

Su, M. M., & Wall, G. (2015). Community involvement at Great Wall world heritage sites, Beijing, China. Current Issues in Tourism, 18 (2), 137–157.

Taherkhani, M., & Farahani, H. (2019). Evaluating and prioritizing urban tourism capabilities in Qazvin. Iranian Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research, 8 (1), 71–85.

Tichaawa, T. (2017). Business tourism in Africa: The case of Cameroon. Tourism Review International, 21 (2), 181–192.

Trupp, A., & Sunanata, S. (2017). Gendered practices in urban ethnic tourism in Thailand. Annals of Tourism Research, 64 , 76–86.

Tzanelli, R. (2018). Slum tourism: A review of state-of-the-art scholarship. Tourism, Culture and Communication, 18 , 149–155.

Uansa-ard, S., & Binprathan, A. (2018). Creating an awareness of halal MICE tourism business in Chiang Mai, Thailand. International Journal of Tourism Policy, 8 (3), 203–213.

Ukah, A. (2016). Building God’s city: The political economy of prayer camps in Nigeria. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40 , 524–540.

Ukah, A. (2018). Emplacing God: The social worlds of miracle cities – Perspectives from Nigeria and Uganda. Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 36 (3), 351–368.

United Nations Human Settlements Programme, & Economic Commission for Africa. (2015). Towards an African urban agenda . Nairobi: UN-Habitat.

UNWTO. (2012). Global report on city tourism – Cities 2012 project . Madrid: UNWTO.

van der Merwe, C. D. (2013). The limits of urban heritage tourism in South Africa: The case of Constitution Hill, Johannesburg. Urban Forum, 24 , 573–588.

van der Merwe, C. D., & Rogerson, C. M. (2013). Industrial heritage tourism at ‘The big hole’, Kimberley, South Africa. African Journal for Physical, Health Education, Recreation and Dance, 19 (Supplement 2), 155–171.

van der Merwe, C. D., & Rogerson, C. M. (2018). The local development challenges of industrial heritage tourism in the developing world: Evidence from Cullinan, South Africa. GeoJournal of Tourism and Geosites, 21 (1), 186–199.

Vandermey, A. (1984). Assessing the importance of urban tourism: Conceptual and measurement issues. Tourism Management, 5 (2), 123–155.

Visser, G. (2002). Gay tourism in South Africa: Issues from the Cape Town experience. Urban Forum, 13 (1), 85–94.

Visser, G. (2003). Gay men, tourism and urban space: Reflections on Africa’s ‘gay capital’. Tourism Geographies, 5 (2), 168–189.

Völkening, N., Benz, A., & Schmidt, M. (2019). International tourism and urban transformation in old Havana. Erdkunde, 73 (2), 83–96.

Wang, F., Lu, L., Xu, L., Wu, B., & Wu, Y. (2020). Alike but different: Four ancient capitals in China and their destination images. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 6 (2), 415–429.

Winter, T. (2009). Asian tourism and the retreat of Anglo-Western centrism in tourism theory. Current Issues in Tourism, 12 , 21–31.

Wonders, N. A., & Michalowski, R. (2001). Bodies, borders, and sex tourism in a globalized world: A tale of two cities – Amsterdam and Havana. Social Problems, 48 (4), 545–571.

Wu, B., Liu, L., Shao, J., & Morrison, A. M. (2015). The evolution and space patterns of hutongels in Beijing historic districts. Journal of Heritage Tourism, 10 (2), 129–150.

Wu, B., Li, Q., Ma, F., & Wang, T. (2021). Tourism cities in China. In A. M. Morrison & J. A. Coca-Stefaniak (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of tourism cities . London: Routledge.

Xiao, G., & Wall, G. (2009). Urban tourism in Dalian, China. Anatolia, 20 (1), 178–195.

Yang, Y., Wong, K. K. F., & Wang, T. (2012). How do hotels choose their location?: Evidence from hotels in Beijing. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 31 , 675–685.

Yin, N. L. (2014). Decision factors in medical tourism: Evidence from Burmese visitors to a hospital in Bangkok. Journal of Economics and Behavioral Studies, 6 (2), 84–94.

Ziaee, M., & Amiri, S. (2018). Islamic tourism pilgrimages in Iran: Challenges and perspectives. In S. Seyfi & C. M. Hall (Eds.), Tourism in Iran: Challenges, development and opportunities . London: Routledge.

Download references

Acknowledgements

Thanks to comments received from two reviewers which influenced the final revision of this chapter. Arno Booyzen produced the accompanying maps. Dawn and Skye Norfolk assisted the writing process.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

School of Tourism & Hospitality, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

Christian M. Rogerson & Jayne M. Rogerson

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christian M. Rogerson .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Christian M. Rogerson

Jayne M. Rogerson

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Cite this chapter.

Rogerson, C.M., Rogerson, J.M. (2021). The Other Half of Urban Tourism: Research Directions in the Global South. In: Rogerson, C.M., Rogerson, J.M. (eds) Urban Tourism in the Global South. GeoJournal Library(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71547-2_1

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71547-2_1

Published : 14 July 2021

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-71546-5

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-71547-2

eBook Packages : Social Sciences History (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

TrekFunTrek

Never stop exploring

Urban Eco-Tourism: Exploring Cities Sustainably

• Eco-Tourism

Urban eco-tourism refers to visiting urban areas that have implemented sustainable practices and initiatives to preserve their natural environment and cultural heritage. It differs from traditional tourism in that it encourages visitors to explore cities and appreciate their sustainable initiatives, promotes environmentally-friendly options for accommodations and transportation, and emphasizes reducing environmental impact. The benefits of urban eco-tourism include promoting sustainability, preserving cultural heritage, and contributing to economic growth.

Key Takeaways:

• Urban eco-tourism promotes sustainable travel within cities, allowing visitors to explore urban environments while minimizing their impact on the environment.
• It offers opportunities to learn about and appreciate the natural and cultural heritage of urban areas, including parks, green spaces, and historical landmarks.
• By engaging in eco-friendly activities such as walking tours, cycling, or using public transportation, tourists can reduce carbon emissions and contribute to the overall sustainability of cities.
• Urban eco-tourism encourages local economic development by supporting small businesses, promoting local products and services, and creating job opportunities in the tourism sector.
• Through responsible tourism practices, urban eco-tourism aims to foster a sense of environmental stewardship among both tourists and local residents, encouraging them to protect and preserve their city’s natural resources for future generations.

1. What is urban eco-tourism and how does it differ from traditional tourism?

Definition of urban eco-tourism.

Urban eco-tourism refers to the practice of visiting urban areas that have implemented sustainable practices and initiatives to preserve their natural environment and cultural heritage. It involves exploring cities in a way that minimizes negative impacts on the environment and maximizes positive contributions to local communities.

Related Travels

Differences from Traditional Tourism

Urban eco-tourism differs from traditional tourism in several ways. Firstly, traditional tourism often focuses on popular tourist destinations such as beaches or historical sites, while urban eco-tourism encourages visitors to explore cities and appreciate their sustainable initiatives. Secondly, traditional tourism may prioritize luxury accommodations and activities, whereas urban eco-tourism promotes environmentally-friendly options such as eco-friendly hotels, public transportation, and locally-sourced food. Lastly, traditional tourism may have a larger carbon footprint due to air travel and resource-intensive activities, while urban eco-tourism emphasizes reducing environmental impact through sustainable transportation options like walking or cycling tours.

Overall, urban eco-tourism aims to provide visitors with an immersive experience that combines exploration of the city’s natural beauty with an understanding of its sustainable practices, ultimately fostering a sense of environmental stewardship among tourists.

Benefits of Urban Eco-Tourism:

• Promotes sustainability: By showcasing cities’ efforts in implementing sustainable practices, urban eco-tourism raises awareness about the importance of environmental conservation.
• Preserves cultural heritage: Urban eco-tourism allows visitors to learn about a city’s history, traditions, and cultural landmarks while supporting their preservation.
• Economic growth: Sustainable tourism practices can stimulate the local economy by creating jobs in sectors such as hospitality, transportation, and local businesses.
• Community engagement: Urban eco-tourism encourages interaction between tourists and local communities, fostering cultural exchange and mutual understanding.

2. How are cities incorporating sustainable practices into their tourism offerings?

Cities around the world are increasingly recognizing the importance of incorporating sustainable practices into their tourism offerings. One way they are doing this is by promoting eco-friendly accommodations and transportation options. Many cities now have a range of environmentally-conscious hotels and guesthouses that prioritize energy efficiency, waste reduction, and water conservation. Additionally, cities are encouraging visitors to use public transportation or rent bicycles to explore the city, reducing reliance on cars and minimizing carbon emissions.

Another way cities are incorporating sustainable practices is through the promotion of local and organic food options. Many urban areas now have farmers markets or food festivals that showcase locally sourced produce and products. This not only supports local farmers and businesses but also reduces the carbon footprint associated with transporting food long distances.

Cities are also investing in green spaces and parks to provide visitors with opportunities to connect with nature. These green spaces often include walking trails, bike paths, and wildlife habitats, allowing tourists to experience the natural beauty of a city while minimizing their impact on the environment.

Copenhagen, Denmark

Copenhagen has been at the forefront of sustainable tourism practices for many years. The city has implemented an extensive network of bike lanes and rental bikes, making it easy for visitors to explore the city without relying on cars. Copenhagen also promotes eco-friendly accommodations and has set a goal to become carbon neutral by 2025.

Vancouver, Canada

Vancouver is known for its commitment to sustainability and has implemented various initiatives to incorporate sustainable practices into its tourism offerings. The city encourages visitors to use public transportation or walk instead of driving, offers numerous green spaces such as Stanley Park, which provides opportunities for outdoor activities while preserving natural habitats.

– Promotion of eco-friendly accommodations – Encouragement of public transportation usage – Support for local food options – Investment in green spaces and parks

3. What are some popular urban eco-tourism destinations around the world?

Urban eco-tourism destinations have gained popularity in recent years as travelers seek to explore cities while minimizing their impact on the environment. Some popular urban eco-tourism destinations around the world include:

1. Portland, Oregon, USA: Known for its commitment to sustainability, Portland offers a range of eco-friendly activities and attractions. Visitors can explore the city’s extensive network of bike lanes, visit local farmers markets, and enjoy the abundant green spaces such as Forest Park.

2. Stockholm, Sweden: Stockholm is renowned for its sustainable practices and has been named Europe’s Green Capital. The city boasts numerous green spaces, including Djurgården Island, which offers opportunities for outdoor activities and wildlife spotting.

3. Singapore: Despite being a highly urbanized city-state, Singapore has made significant efforts to incorporate sustainable practices into its tourism offerings. The city is known for its impressive vertical gardens and green buildings, such as Gardens by the Bay and Marina Barrage.

4. Reykjavik, Iceland: Reykjavik is a prime example of how cities can integrate sustainability into their tourism offerings while preserving their natural surroundings. Visitors can explore geothermal pools, hike in nearby national parks, and experience sustainable architecture throughout the city.

5. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne has been recognized as one of the world’s most livable cities due to its commitment to sustainability. The city promotes cycling through its extensive bike lane network and offers various eco-friendly attractions such as rooftop gardens and sustainable food markets.

These urban eco-tourism destinations offer visitors a unique blend of vibrant city life with opportunities to engage in environmentally-friendly activities and experiences.

– Portland, Oregon: Bike lanes, farmers markets – Stockholm, Sweden: Green spaces like Djurgården Island – Singapore: Vertical gardens, green buildings – Reykjavik, Iceland: Geothermal pools, sustainable architecture – Melbourne, Australia: Bike lanes, rooftop gardens

4. How can urban eco-tourism contribute to the local economy while preserving the environment?

Urban eco-tourism has the potential to contribute significantly to the local economy while preserving the environment. By promoting sustainable practices and attractions, cities can attract environmentally-conscious tourists who are willing to spend money on eco-friendly experiences.

One way urban eco-tourism contributes to the local economy is through job creation. Sustainable tourism initiatives often require a workforce dedicated to maintaining green spaces, managing eco-friendly accommodations, and providing guided tours focused on environmental conservation. This creates employment opportunities for local residents and stimulates economic growth.

Furthermore, urban eco-tourism can support local businesses that prioritize sustainability. Visitors who choose to stay in eco-friendly accommodations or dine at restaurants that source their ingredients locally contribute directly to the local economy. This encourages businesses to adopt sustainable practices and invest in environmentally-friendly initiatives.

Additionally, urban eco-tourism can generate revenue through entrance fees or donations for access to natural parks or protected areas within a city. These funds can be reinvested into environmental preservation efforts and infrastructure development.

Overall, by embracing urban eco-tourism and integrating sustainable practices into their tourism offerings, cities can create a positive economic impact while ensuring the long-term preservation of their natural resources.

– Job creation in sustainable tourism sector – Support for local businesses prioritizing sustainability – Revenue generation through entrance fees or donations for access to natural parks

5. What types of activities and attractions can visitors expect to find in urban eco-tourism destinations?

Outdoor adventures.

In urban eco-tourism destinations, visitors can expect a wide range of outdoor adventures. These may include hiking and biking trails through natural parks or green spaces within the city. Urban eco-tourism destinations often have designated areas for bird watching, where visitors can observe a variety of bird species in their natural habitats. Additionally, some cities offer guided nature walks or eco-friendly boat tours along rivers or coastlines.

Sustainable Cultural Experiences

Urban eco-tourism also offers visitors the opportunity to engage in sustainable cultural experiences. This may involve visiting local farmers’ markets to learn about organic farming practices and sample fresh produce. Visitors can also participate in workshops or classes that teach traditional crafts or skills, such as pottery making or weaving using sustainable materials. Urban eco-tourism destinations often organize cultural festivals that showcase local traditions and promote sustainable practices.

List of Activities:

– Hiking and biking trails – Bird watching – Nature walks – Eco-friendly boat tours – Visiting farmers’ markets – Participating in workshops or classes on traditional crafts – Attending cultural festivals

6. How do urban planners and policymakers ensure that urban eco-tourism is integrated seamlessly into the city’s infrastructure?

Sustainable infrastructure development.

To integrate urban eco-tourism seamlessly into a city’s infrastructure, urban planners and policymakers focus on sustainable development strategies. They prioritize creating green spaces within the city, such as parks and gardens, which provide recreational areas for both residents and tourists while preserving biodiversity. Additionally, they promote the use of renewable energy sources by implementing solar panels on buildings and encouraging electric transportation options.

Collaboration with Stakeholders

Urban planners and policymakers also collaborate with various stakeholders, including local businesses, community organizations, and residents. They engage in dialogue to understand the needs and concerns of these groups and incorporate their input into the planning process. This collaboration ensures that urban eco-tourism initiatives align with the city’s overall vision and benefit all stakeholders involved.

List of Strategies:

– Creating green spaces within the city – Implementing renewable energy sources – Encouraging electric transportation options – Collaborating with local businesses, community organizations, and residents

7. What are some challenges faced by cities in promoting and implementing sustainable tourism practices?

Lack of awareness.

One challenge faced by cities in promoting sustainable tourism practices is a lack of awareness among both tourists and locals. Many people may not be familiar with the concept of sustainable tourism or its benefits. Cities need to invest in educational campaigns to raise awareness about sustainable practices and encourage visitors to make environmentally conscious choices during their stay.

Resistance to Change

Another challenge is resistance to change from established businesses or individuals who may be hesitant to adopt new sustainable practices. This resistance can stem from concerns about increased costs or disruptions to existing operations. Cities must address these concerns through incentives, subsidies, or regulations that promote sustainability while also addressing the economic viability of businesses.

List of Challenges:

– Lack of awareness among tourists and locals – Resistance to change from established businesses or individuals

8. Are there any specific certifications or standards that cities can obtain to showcase their commitment to urban eco-tourism?

Leed certification.

Cities can obtain LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for their buildings and infrastructure projects. This certification demonstrates a commitment to sustainability by meeting specific criteria related to energy efficiency, water conservation, and materials usage.

Green Globe Certification

The Green Globe certification is another standard that cities can obtain to showcase their commitment to urban eco-tourism. This certification focuses on sustainable tourism practices and requires compliance with criteria related to environmental performance, social responsibility, and cultural heritage preservation.

List of Certifications:

– LEED Certification – Green Globe Certification

9. How do local communities benefit from urban eco-tourism initiatives?

Economic opportunities.

Urban eco-tourism initiatives provide local communities with economic opportunities. As tourists visit the city to engage in sustainable activities and experiences, local businesses thrive. This leads to job creation and increased revenue for the community. Additionally, eco-tourism often promotes the consumption of locally sourced products, supporting local farmers and artisans.

Preservation of Cultural Heritage

Urban eco-tourism initiatives also contribute to the preservation of cultural heritage within local communities. By showcasing traditional crafts, customs, and festivals, these initiatives help preserve cultural practices that may be at risk of being lost over time. This not only benefits the community but also provides visitors with unique cultural experiences.

List of Benefits:

– Economic opportunities through job creation and increased revenue – Preservation of cultural heritage

10. Can you provide examples of successful urban eco-tourism projects that have positively impacted both visitors and the environment?

1. the high line, new york city.

The High Line is an elevated park built on a historic freight rail line in Manhattan, New York City. This urban eco-tourism project has transformed an abandoned industrial structure into a beautiful green space, attracting millions of visitors each year. The park features native plants, sustainable design elements, and provides habitat for birds and insects.

• Enhanced visitor experience: The High Line offers a unique perspective of the city skyline while providing a tranquil escape from the bustling streets below.
• Improved air quality: The park’s vegetation helps filter pollutants and reduce carbon dioxide levels in the surrounding area.
• Biodiversity conservation: Native plantings attract various bird species and pollinators, contributing to local biodiversity.

2. Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay

Gardens by the Bay is a nature park spanning over 250 acres in Singapore. It showcases sustainable horticulture and garden artistry while promoting environmental awareness among visitors. The project incorporates innovative technologies such as solar energy and rainwater harvesting systems to minimize its ecological footprint.

• Educational opportunities: Gardens by the Bay offers educational programs and workshops on topics like sustainability, biodiversity, and conservation for both locals and tourists.
• Enhanced urban aesthetics: The park’s iconic Supertrees, vertical gardens covered in plants, create a visually stunning landscape that blends nature with modern architecture.
• Promotion of green practices: Through its sustainable initiatives, Gardens by the Bay inspires visitors to adopt eco-friendly behaviors in their daily lives.

These examples demonstrate how urban eco-tourism projects can successfully combine environmental conservation with visitor enjoyment. By repurposing existing infrastructure and incorporating sustainable practices, these projects have not only revitalized urban spaces but also raised awareness about the importance of protecting the environment.

In conclusion, urban eco-tourism offers a sustainable and immersive way to explore cities, allowing travelers to appreciate the natural beauty and cultural heritage while minimizing their impact on the environment.

How is eco tourism sustainable?

Ecotourism is a form of sustainable development with the purpose of minimizing the negative effects of tourism on natural environments. Any tourist destination can be negatively affected by high levels of tourism, potentially leading to permanent damage or loss of access for future generations. The goal of ecotourism is to mitigate these impacts and preserve the beauty of these areas.

What is sustainable urban tourism?

Solutions for sustainable urban tourism tackle concerns such as making cities more accessible, enhancing resilience, taking climate-friendly actions, and promoting diversity.

What are the 3 parts of urban sustainability?

Urban sustainability refers to the development of cities or urban areas that promote the long-term sustainability of social, financial, and environmental systems. It is focused on three main pillars: social, environmental, and financial/economic. This concept is specifically applied to the city environment.

What are the 3 main focus of sustainable tourism?

Sustainability principles in tourism development encompass the environmental, economic, and socio-cultural aspects, and it is crucial to find a harmonious equilibrium among these three dimensions to ensure its sustainability in the long run.

Why is sustainable eco tourism important?

The goal of ecotourism is to preserve the natural environment, support local communities in a culturally respectful manner, and educate travelers about the significance of sustainable travel. Energy efficiency, water conservation, and the safeguarding of wildlife and indigenous communities are all essential aspects.

How does ecotourism affect sustainability?

The goal of eco-tourism is to encourage greater awareness of the environment, create sustainable communities, provide cultural experiences, and promote the preservation and conservation of the environment. (Date: 18-Jan-2023)

Share this post

• Tourism and Urban Planning
• Uncategorized

Urban planning can play an important role in tourism promotion. Tourism and urban planning is essentially based on how traditions, lifestyles, cultural attractions and historic sites can be combined in a coherent city tourist map. Below are some ways efficient urban planning can help the tourism industry grow.

Information : Administrator and planners should ensure that enough information is available on the internet about their city for the tourists to make plans and take informed decisions. More importantly, there should be a provision of tourist information centres and signage at prominent places in the city for providing practical information to tourists.

Saving time and Convenience : Tourists want to maximize their time in a new city, there should be practical provisions for their fast and convenient travel between various tourist destinations. Several cities run Hop-on Hop-off (HoHo) buses taking the tourists on city tours and stopping at prominent tourist destinations.

Efficient public transport : Effectiveness of public transport can be the difference between the success and the failure of any city in terms of trade, investment and development, whether in traditional or smart city. The public transport system needs to provide last mile connectivity to every part of the city. This could be a combination of various modes and at every interchange or stops there should be digital information system about route and waiting time of upcoming modes of transportation.

Accessibility and connectivity : Accessibility to the city itself and tourist destinations within the city is utmost important to attract tourists. Quick and comfortable travel to tourist destinations not only attracts tourists but also motivates them to visit again. On the basis of tourist place importance, proper package & circuit need to be designed with all tourist facilities.

Safety and hygiene : Properly covered drainage system, provision of suitable waste dumping and processing grounds etc. could greatly help in keeping the cities clean and healthy. Green spaces in urban areas greatly enhance the beauty and appeal of any city. Disaster preparedness and emergency response provisions also make cities lucrative for tourists. Any help in one call at the time of distress is more important.

Tourism plays an important role in employment and in economic growth. To realise the potential of tourism as a tool for sustainable inclusive growth, a multi-stakeholder and multi-level approach is required, based on close cooperation at the various levels of tourism and non-tourism administrations. But unattended growth can negatively affect the destination. It is therefore sensibly necessary, through a careful planning and execution, to ensure that tourism development improves or maintains the environment and culture of the destination while providing maximum visitor satisfaction. Therefore, while developing or re-developing the cities, administrators need to draw-up Tourism Master Plan as it is important to plan for the basic infrastructure that enables tourists to access resources easily. Though strategic planning and marketing make city destination for tourist rather than transit for other city.

Tourism Planning and Traditional Urban Planning Theory: Planners as Agents of Social Change

• Geography, Planning, and Recreation

Research output : Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Fingerprint

• planning theory Earth & Environmental Sciences 100%
• social change Earth & Environmental Sciences 81%
• urban planning Earth & Environmental Sciences 65%
• tourism Earth & Environmental Sciences 59%
• planning Earth & Environmental Sciences 41%
• regional planning Earth & Environmental Sciences 33%
• planning method Earth & Environmental Sciences 12%
• higher education Earth & Environmental Sciences 12%

T1 - Tourism Planning and Traditional Urban Planning Theory: Planners as Agents of Social Change

AU - Lew, Alan A

N2 - In terms of community focus, the field of urban and regional planning is much more comprehensive in both subject matter and outcomes than is most tourism planning, as least as each is taught in higher education around the world. Tourism planning, however, draws upon a good portion of urban and regional planning methods, especially in the area known as rational planning. As such, the more narrow area of tourism planning could be considered a subfield of urban and regional planning. One major shortcoming of tourism planning is an apparent lack of attention to the normative issues of (1) how planners should plan and (2) what issues planners should focus on in their planning efforts. These questions address the complexity of data and issues that planners deal with, including questions of what data or information is collected, how it is organized, and how the information will be used to make decisions. Tourism planners could benefit from greater familiarity with these fundamental concepts of planning theory. Keywords: tourism planning, urban planning, planning theory

AB - In terms of community focus, the field of urban and regional planning is much more comprehensive in both subject matter and outcomes than is most tourism planning, as least as each is taught in higher education around the world. Tourism planning, however, draws upon a good portion of urban and regional planning methods, especially in the area known as rational planning. As such, the more narrow area of tourism planning could be considered a subfield of urban and regional planning. One major shortcoming of tourism planning is an apparent lack of attention to the normative issues of (1) how planners should plan and (2) what issues planners should focus on in their planning efforts. These questions address the complexity of data and issues that planners deal with, including questions of what data or information is collected, how it is organized, and how the information will be used to make decisions. Tourism planners could benefit from greater familiarity with these fundamental concepts of planning theory. Keywords: tourism planning, urban planning, planning theory

M3 - Article

JO - Leisure/Loisir: Journal of the Canadian Association of Leisure Studies

JF - Leisure/Loisir: Journal of the Canadian Association of Leisure Studies

• Previous Chapter
• Next Chapter

The Encyclopedia of Tourism Management and Marketing is, quite simply, the definitive reference work in the field. Carefully curated by leading tourism scholar Dimitrios Buhalis, this is the largest tourism management and marketing ontology that has ever been put together and offers a holistic examination of this interdisciplinary field.

Use the Search within Book (below right) or browse the list of entries alphabetically to navigate over 1200 entries from leading international scholars.

An invaluable resource for academics, students and practitioners providing an ideal starting point for any research journey. The concise entries present an accessible and condensed overview of each topic and the selected references that follow each entry suggest directions for further detailed exploration.

You are not authenticated to view the full text of this chapter or article.

Access options

Get access to the full article by using one of the access options below.

Other access options

Institutional Login

Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials

Table of Contents

• Tourism Management
• Development Studies

• [66.249.64.20|81.177.182.154]
• 81.177.182.154

Character limit 500 /500

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Int J Environ Res Public Health

Can Tourism Development Make Cities More Livable? Investigating 40 Cities in China

1 State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi 830011, China; nc.ca.sacu.sliam@61ielgnak

2 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China; nc.ca.rrnsgi@zwgnahz

Zhaoping Yang

Yunxiao dang.

3 College of Land and Urban-Rural Development, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, Hangzhou 310023, China; moc.621@781oaixoaix

Wenzhong Zhang

4 Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

5 Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730030, China

Associated Data

Not applicable.

The field of rapid urbanization has recently paid more attention to the relationship between tourism development and liveable city construction. Previous studies have mainly focused on the experiences of tourists in tourist cities and seldom paid attention to the perceptions of local residents. Based on survey data of nearly 10,000 permanent residents in 40 key tourist cities in China, this study uses a multilevel model to quantitatively analyse the natural environment characteristics, sociocultural environment characteristics and comprehensive attraction of tourism in different tourist cities to explore their impact on urban liveability satisfaction. Results show that the developed tourist cities do not exactly correspond to the cities with a high liveability evaluation. The objective evaluation of both the natural environment and the sociocultural environment has an important influence on the liveability of cities, but the influence of the natural environment is stronger than that of the sociocultural environment. An intermediary effect exists in the subjective evaluation of the natural environment and environments for liveability perception. Simultaneously, residents’ liveability satisfaction varies according to their age, education level, annual household income and other social and economic conditions. These findings provide insights for developing countries to further improve residents’ living quality and urban construction under the condition of the rapid development of tourism.

1. Introduction

With the rapid development of China’s economy and the improvement of people’s living standards, people are paying more attention to their quality of life, living environment and living conditions [ 1 ]. City dwellers pay more attention to the recreational function of the city. Urbanization and tourism have become closely intertwined phenomena [ 2 ], and tourism has become an important driving force for China’s urban economic transformation. The government has spared no effort to promote tourism in China [ 3 ]. In 2018, the overall contribution of tourism to China’s urban economy has exceeded 10%. By the end of 2018, more than 30 provinces in China had made tourism a pillar or leading industry [ 4 ]. Therefore, the development of tourism is bound to have an impact on the liveability of cities.

A liveable city is an important direction in the study of urban living environments in recent years and is also an inevitable way for future urban development. The proposal of a “liveable city” provides a new goal and direction for urban development [ 5 ]. This concept advocates for improving the living environment of residents, establishing a new model of harmonious interpersonal relationships and managing healthy urban development [ 6 ]. Previous studies on liveable cities have mainly studied the evaluation indexes, spatial distribution characteristics, factors affecting liveability, residents’ knowledge of liveability and its influence on liveable cities on different scales [ 7 , 8 , 9 ]. Tourist cities are supposed to be pleasant places for tourists, but for local residents, how they feel gets little attention. The development of urban tourism can stimulate the economy so that the government invests more financially in urban construction [ 6 , 10 ]. It will also enrich the city’s social culture and promote the construction of a civilized city. Simultaneously, it will bring about many problems, such as overpopulation and public resource crowding. Chinese tourist cities tend to attach importance to the scale expansion of scenic spots and often neglect urban infrastructure construction, environmental pollution control and other issues [ 11 ]. Therefore, it remains a question as to how tourist cities can develop into efficient and high-level liveable cities in the future.

Analyzing the present studies, we found some deficiencies in the existing research about tourist cities and liveable cities. We mainly want to answer two questions: (1) Are tourist cities liveable for local residents? (2) How the attractiveness of a city’s natural and sociocultural environment influences residents’ perception of urban liveability. (3) Does the development of tourism truly promote the improvement of the liveability of cities? Based on data comprising nearly ten thousand questionnaire surveys in 40 key cities in China, this paper analyses the differences in residents’ satisfaction evaluation of cities’ liveability and then explores the influence of urban tourism development factors on residents’ liveability satisfaction using a multi-level model. It is expected that through the analysis of these problems, the relationship between urban tourism development and urban liveability can be effectively recognized. It also reveals the possible ways to improve the evaluation of residents’ liveability at the city level, providing a reference for the government to build a livable city.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. We begin with a brief review of previous studies on urban liveability and then present our theoretical framework. This is followed by a discussion of the data, model specification and results of the multilevel models. We conclude the paper with a summary of the key findings and policy implications.

2. Literature Review

Liveable cities have been defined and measured in a range of different ways in the literature. European and American countries studied liveable cities first. In 1996, the second United Nations conference on human settlements introduced the concept that cities should be liveable places for human beings, advocating mainly for the importance of a pleasant living environment [ 12 ]. Since then, the study of liveable cities has been gradually carried out in the fields of geography, urban planning, sociology and other fields. A series of studies have been carried out mainly concerning healthy cities, sustainable cities and cities with comprehensive development of economic and social environments [ 9 , 13 ]. Some authors believe that a liveable city refers to a city with strong liveability, that is, a residence with a good living and space environment, humanistic and social environment, ecological and natural environment and clean and efficient production environment [ 14 ].

Under the influence of humanism, the city gradually becomes an aggregated function integrating life, work and leisure. Urban rest function begins to be integrated into a wider range of urban spaces and industries, and the urban leisure function also becomes an important indicator of urban liveability [ 15 ]. In this context, the improvement of residents’ spiritual and cultural needs gradually promotes the “tourization” of urban residents [ 16 ]. Additionally, the development of tourism will be important for regional economic development and will play an important role in promoting the improvement of urban functions and industrial transformation [ 17 ]. Therefore, to some extent, the rise of urban tourism promotes the improvement of urban liveability.

Tourism is an important part of urban functions. As the spatial carriers of tourism development, cities are the most important tourist destinations. The empirical research has shown that excellent tourist cities are of great significance to the improvement of the quality of the tourism destination and the tourism experience environment, the promotion of the tourism brand of the marketing towns and the promotion of urban tourism as the leading modern service industry [ 18 ]. Some studies have found that there are driving forces to improve the liveability of urban spaces in the process of tourism development [ 19 , 20 ]. The development of tourism brings people, information and money into cities. The function of the city as a shopping, entertainment and cultural centre will be strengthened, and the motivation to improve the attractiveness of the city will promote the city itself to continuously optimize its tourism products and city image. Other scholars believe that the development of urban tourism is conducive to enriching the attraction elements of tourist cities and improving the quality of the urban tourism experience environment, which is conducive to promoting the process of harmonious and liveable urban ecological civilization [ 8 ].

However, from another point of view, the development of tourism will also have a significant negative impact on urban development. Some studies have found that once tourism development reaches a certain threshold, the tourist attraction of a city decreases. Excessive tourism development easily leads to low efficiency in urban planning, disorderly land use, unreasonable layout and uncontrolled investment. In turn, some environmental and social problems may arise, and the liveability level of the city may be adversely affected [ 20 , 21 ]. Haija found that if a country relies too much on tourism and regards it as the main industry pillar of economic development, it will cause certain damage to other industries, such as manufacturing and agriculture, and will also bring a series of environmental problems, including the pollution of water sources, traffic jams, population congestion, inconvenient management and so on [ 22 ]. Balaban found that a significant influx of tourists into a tourist destination in a study of South Carolina easily caused a general rise in prices and reduced the living standards of local people [ 23 ]. Therefore, how to combine the healthy and sustainable development of urban tourism with the promotion of liveable city construction has become a pressing issue for scholars, planners and the government.

Through the literature review, the academic circle has conducted many studies on both tourist and liveable cities. The relationship between tourism and the city is becoming clearer. The city is the carrier of tourist reception facilities, while tourism relies on urban development. The development of tourism has a dual impact on the development of cities. In fact, there are many factors that affect the liveability of cities, but there is still a lack of empirical research on the impact mechanism of the environmental characteristics of tourist cities on the construction of liveable cities. Existing research has focused on the experiences of tourists in tourist cities but has paid little attention to the feelings of local residents. Furthermore, the data from the research has been limited, and the existing research is mainly from social census data and relevant national statistical data, and there is a lack of inquiry from the subjective social investigation of the population. Moreover, there is no objective statistical data or integration of subjective survey data.

3. Theoretical Framework

The living environment level of a tourist city will directly affect the environmental quality of the city. The quality of the urban environment has an important influence on the development planning, infrastructure construction, external image, external attraction and tourism of a tourist city [ 24 ]. The tourism and rest function of a city has gradually become an important indicator affecting the liveability of a city. According to the literature review above, the development of tourism has a double effect on the liveability of cities. Geographers have paid more attention to the influence of the natural environment and sociocultural environment characteristics of tourist cities on the liveability of cities. The following will explore the impact of tourism on urban liveability perceptions from three aspects: the natural environment, sociocultural environment and tourism attraction.

The natural environment is the foundation of the human settlement environment, and the production and life of human beings and the concrete construction activities of the human settlement environment cannot be separated from the broader natural environment background [ 25 ]. A liveable urban living environment should have a natural background of open space, fresh air, clean water and a pleasant green environment. Currently, the construction of world-renowned liveable cities not only emphasizes the need for a comfortable climate and beautiful natural environment, but also pays attention to urban ecological environment protection and environmental pollution control [ 26 ]. The development of tourism cities cannot be separated from the support of the urban natural environment, which is the basis for the development of tourism. Existing studies have shown that a favourable natural environment can attract more tourists and promote the smooth development of tourism projects to achieve better economic benefits and enhance cities’ tourist attraction [ 27 ]. Therefore, the natural environmental attraction of tourist cities has an important impact on urban liveability.

The urban cultural atmosphere is an important factor influencing residents’ living quality and liveability. Mahmoudi found that the fairness of the allocation of public service facilities in the process of urban development had an impact on the liveability awareness of residents through structured observation and a questionnaire survey [ 28 ]. Other scholars believe that open and inclusive cities can improve the competitiveness and attractiveness of cities and promote the construction of harmonious and liveable cities [ 29 ]. A positive cultural atmosphere and rich cultural activities can improve the quality of the city, and can also improve the cultural taste of residents, and promote people’s physical and mental happiness, and healthy development. The historical relics and unique culture of the city are the eternal memory and spiritual home of every resident living in the city [ 30 ]. The unique historical and cultural relics and cultural environment of a city can not only improve the quality of a city, but also enhance the cohesion of a city, providing a strong spiritual power for the development and construction of a city, to build a liveable city, improve the happiness of residents, and increase the attractiveness of a city and the unique history and culture of a city [ 31 ]. The historical and cultural deposits and characteristic cultural atmosphere of the city itself can play a positive role in the living environment of urban residents.

The comprehensive attraction of urban tourism is not only the comprehensive embodiment of its natural environment and sociocultural environment, but also an important symbol of the development of urban tourism. On the one hand, urban tourism resources determine the quality of urban tourism products. Excellent tourism resources are usually the brand representatives of regional or urban tourism, and they are also key factors influencing urban tourism suitability [ 32 ]. On the other hand, the high-quality living environment and lifestyle in liveable cities have become important sources of urban tourism attraction. The existing research shows that with the construction of tourism city culture, the improvement of city appearance and the construction of environmental supervision and public service, the urban living environment can be beautified, which is beneficial to further promoting urban construction and function optimization [ 33 ].

The characteristics of the natural environment, sociocultural environment and tourism’s comprehensive attraction at the objective level of tourist cities have an important influence on the liveability of cities. However, the intermediary role of the natural environment, cultural environment and subjective evaluation of comprehensive tourism attraction in tourist cities is easy to ignore [ 34 , 35 ]. Relevant studies have shown that the influence of the subjective satisfaction of individual living environments on life satisfaction may be greater than that of objective physical environments [ 36 ]. Therefore, this study takes the subjective evaluation of the natural and human environments as the intermediary variable and discusses the influence of the objective environment of the tourist city on the liveability awareness of the city by acting on the subjective environmental perception and the residents.

To summarize, this paper establishes the mechanism analysis framework of the influence of the subjective and objective characteristics of the natural, sociocultural and comprehensive environments on residents’ liveability evaluations in tourist cities ( Figure 1 ). This paper first establishes the influence of objective environment, such as the effect of the natural and sociocultural environments on residents’ evaluation of city liveability, and then discusses the mediating effect of residents’ subjective satisfaction with natural and sociocultural environments. In other words, subjective satisfaction can mediate the influence of the objective environment on happiness.

Conceptual framework of the study.

4. Research Area and Data Sources

Tourist cities refer to those that are representative, have good planning and development of tourist attractions and can reflect the development level of China’s tour-ism industry [ 24 ]. In this study, we mainly chose 40 key tourist cities in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities ( Figure 2 ). By the end of 2013, China tourism administration had approved 339 outstanding tourism cities. However, due to geographical and historical factors, the development of China’s tourism industry presents a regional imbalance, with the underdeveloped areas mainly concentrated in the northwest and southwest. In order to ensure the balance between the geographical and administrative division distribution of the case cities, this study mainly selected the provincial capitals of each provincial administrative division. In addition, this paper also selected some recognized more liveable tourist cities. Considering these factors, this paper selects 40 influential tourist cities in China, taking into account not only the representativeness of tourist cities, but also the unbalanced factors of regional development. There are 40 influential tourist cities in China, including 21 in the east, 8 in the central and 11 in the west ( Figure 2 ). It provides good material for studying an individual’s demand for different types of living environment.

Research area. These maps were drawn according to the standard map with the drawing No. GS (2019) 1673, which was downloaded from the standard map service website of the Ministry of Natural Re-sources of the People’s Republic of China. No modifications were made on the base map.

The subjective data were obtained from a questionnaire survey conducted by the Research Group of Liveability City in China and comprised 40 key tourist cities in 2015. The survey participants were permanent residents who had lived in the city for more than half a year. The survey assessed 250 of the 300 municipalities directly under the central government, provincial capital and deputy provincial city according to the population size of 150–200 cities used in standard questionnaires; 12,000 questionnaires were sent out, recycling effective questionnaires, and 9,325 were returned for a questionnaire efficiency of up to 77.7%. The statistical analysis of gender, age and urban distribution of the participants showed that the samples met the control requirements, and the number and distribution structure of qualified questionnaires met the sampling design and research requirements. The statistics of individual attribute characteristics and urban characteristics of interviewees are shown in Table 1 and Table A1 .

Descriptive statistics of variables.

Note: 1–5 means degree of satisfaction (1 = extremely dissatisfied; 2 = relatively dissatisfied; 3 = neutrally satisfied; 4 = relatively satisfied; 5 = extremely satisfied).

In this survey, the city’s natural environment, urban sociocultural environment, service facilities’ accessibility, transportation convenience, environmental health, safety and other important components of liveable cities were assessed. Residents’ evaluation of their satisfaction constituted the main part of the questionnaire. The questionnaire also included the socio-economic attributes of the respondents. The objective data were taken from the China Urban Statistical Yearbook [ 4 ], the official website of the National Tourism Administration, the official website of the State Administration of Cultural Relics.

5. Research Design

5.1. methodology: the multilevel model.

This paper simulates the impact of the urban natural environment, the cultural environment and tourism comprehensive attraction factors on residents’ liveability satisfaction at the micro-individual level and macro-city level. On this basis, attribute elements at the individual level of residents were included. When analysing such nested data, the traditional linear regression model tends to ignore the hierarchical nature of the data, which also means ignoring the role of geographical environment factors under spatial scale differentiation [ 35 , 37 ]. Compared with the single-layer regression model, the biggest difference of the multi-layer model is that the intercept and slope of the regression model are not fixed constants, but random variables. The remarkable advantage of the multilevel model is that it can distinguish the influence of each level of elements on the independent variables and simultaneously analyse the contribution of the level of each element to explain the differences between the independent variables. Using this model, we can better explore the influence of the natural environment, the human environment and tourism comprehensive attraction on residential satisfaction at the two levels of urban and individual residents. The model used in this study is presented below.

Individual level:

City level:

A multilevel model was used to analyse the factors influencing the evaluation of urban liveability by residents of major tourist cities in China. The dependent variable of the multilevel regression model was the satisfaction of the residents with the perception of urban liveability. Among them, the information on residents’ liveability in their cities is the overall evaluation of the existing living conditions by residents via questionnaires (including ease of living, safety, comfort of the natural and cultural environments, travel convenience and environmental health). Responses were quantified on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (extremely dissatisfied) to 5 (extremely satisfied). This paper focuses on the factors that affect the perception of liveability in cities. The explanatory variables of the city level include natural environment, Sociocultural environment and comprehensive attraction of tourism cities. The index of the individual level is evaluated by the indexes of each dimension of the interviewees in the questionnaire.

5.1.1. Natural Environmental Attraction

The attraction of the urban natural environment mainly refers to the unique advantages of cities in terms of the natural environment. In terms of objective indicators, we mainly choose the number of urban parks, urban green rate, urban air quality days and urban scenic spots to express this aspect. In terms of subjective indicators, we mainly choose climate comfort, the urban green coverage rate and comprehensive evaluation of the urban natural environment to express this aspect.

5.1.2. Sociocultural Environment Attraction

The attraction of an urban sociocultural environment mainly refers to the unique advantages of a city in terms of its social and humanistic environment. In terms of objective indicators, we mainly choose the number of libraries per 100 people in the city, the number of museums in the city and the number of key cultural relic protection units in the city to express this aspect. In terms of subjective indicators, we mainly choose the characteristic cultural atmosphere of the city and the social and cultural environment of the city to express this aspect.

5.1.3. Comprehensive Attraction

The comprehensive attraction of tourists is an important reflection of a city’s comprehensive strength. The existing research has often studied the tourism attraction of cities according to tourism resource endowment and other indicators of tourism economic influence [ 15 ]. According to this study, the comprehensive attraction of tourist cities not only refers to the advantages of tourist cities in natural sociocultural environments but also further advantages in the tourism industry and infrastructure. The objective index of the comprehensive attraction of tourist cities is mainly expressed by the GDP proportion of the tourist industry, the proportion of tourism practitioners and the number of scenic spots above a 4A level (Comprehensive evaluation of tourism resources by national Tourism Administration).

5.1.4. Personal Features

Existing empirical studies have shown that individual characteristic factors such as the gender, age, household registration, education background, income and family population of residents have a significant impact on residents’ life satisfaction [ 36 ]. Therefore, the above individual attribute characteristics are taken as control variables in this paper. The specific variables and their definitions are shown in Table 1 .

6. Empirical Analysis

6.1. comparison of livability satisfaction between cities.

Liveability mainly reflects the city’s suitability for human living and living comfort. The cities with a high liveable index were mainly concentrated in the eastern coastal areas, and the cities where residents were most satisfied with their liveable cities included Qingdao, Kuming, Sanya, Dalian and Weihai ( Figure 3 ). The high liveability index of cities in eastern coastal areas is inseparable from its high level of economic development. Secondly, coastal cities have pleasant natural environments, such as beautiful environments, fresh air, and clean and adjacent water, which are incomparable advantages of other cities. Finally, these cities have developed a tourism industry and advantages in ecological protection and environmental beautification. Their economic structure is dominated by tertiary industry. Their excellent public services and infrastructure make it easy to secure good evaluations from residents.

Evaluation of Urban liveability. These maps were drawn according to the standard map with the drawing No. GS (2019) 1673, which was downloaded from the standard map service website of the Ministry of Natural Re-sources of the People’s Republic of China. No modifications were made on the base map.

The cities where residents were least satisfied with urban liveability are Nanchang, Taiyuan, Harbin, Guangzhou and Beijing ( Figure 3 ). All these cities, except Beijing and Guangzhou, belong to the central and western regions. The development of tourism lags behind; urban infrastructure is not perfect, and large-scale industrial development has created environmental pollution. Although Guangzhou and Beijing are first-tier cities with developed tourism, the large population concentration has yielded many negative impacts on the cities, such as unbalanced service facilities, housing difficulties and traffic congestion.

This section explicates that more developed tourism cities and a higher evaluation of liveable cities do not correspond to each other. Cities with high liveability evaluations are mostly cities with high levels of tourism industry development, while cities with low liveability evaluations have both cities with developed tourism and cities with backward tourism. This article will elaborate in the next section on the influence mechanism of the natural and sociocultural environments and the comprehensive attraction of tourism cities on the liveability of cities.

6.2. Analysis of Factors Influencing Urban Liveability

To analyse the objective characteristics of the urban natural environment, the sociocultural environment and comprehensive tourism attraction and the influence of subjective satisfaction on urban liveability satisfaction, this paper used the respondents’ liveability satisfaction as the main dependent variable and introduced individual-level variables and city-level variables into the multilevel model respectively. To compare the effects of the influencing factors, all explanatory variables were standardised before being introduced into the model. All the models studied in this paper are estimated by STATA software, and Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) is used to compare the fitting effect of different models. The smaller the value is, the higher the fitting degree of the model is [ 29 ]. In order to understand whether there are differences in the living environment of the subjective evaluation at the city scale, we use the multi-layer linear model method to extract the explicable variance proportion of the subjective evaluation at the city and resident level respectively. The results show that the variance proportion of urban and resident level is 19.3% and 80.7% respectively, indicating that there are significant differences in the subjective evaluation of urban scale, that is, residents’ evaluation of residential environment is very inconsistent among different cities.

Firstly, an empty model without introducing any individual and community variables was constructed to calculate the differences in liveability satisfaction of all samples at the city and individual levels. The chi-square value of the model was 445.38 ( P < 0.001), indicating that the model passed the test. The LR test results show that the explanatory power of multi-layer model is significantly higher than that of the single-layer model. The influencing factors of residents’ liveability satisfaction mainly include six models ( Table 2 and Table 3 ). Models 1–3 introduce objective variables of natural environment attraction, sociocultural environment attraction and tourism comprehensive attraction to explore their influence on liveability satisfaction. Natural environment satisfaction and sociocultural environment were added in Models 4 and 5 to examine the impacts of subjective contextual variables at different geographic scales on life satisfaction. Additionally, variables of urban location were added in Model 6. The chi-square statistics of all models were significant at the 1% level, and the Deviance Information Criterion (DIC) was within a reasonable range, indicating that the models fit well [ 37 ]. Table 3 shows that the DIC value decreased to different degrees after the introduction of the subjective satisfaction factor variables in Models 4–5, indicating that the introduction of the subjective variables of the natural environment and the social and humanistic environment had a better explanatory effect on residents’ liveability satisfaction.

Model estimation results with socio-demographics and objective variables.

Notes: * significant at 5%; ** significant at 1%; *** significant at 0.5%. # indicates the reference variable.

Model estimation results with objective variables and subjective variables.

The results of Model 1 show that the number of urban parks, the rate of urban greening, the urban air quality and the urban scenic spots were statistically significant for the satisfaction of residents with the attractiveness of the urban natural environment. Among the four indicators, urban air quality, a natural environment indicator, had the most significant impact on the city’s liveability. This indicates that urban air quality is the key factor affecting urban liveability.

The number of urban parks and the rate of urban greening also had a significant positive impact on urban liveability. The improvement of the greening rate is beneficial for improving the natural environment of urban residential areas and for creating a good activity space for residents. City parks not only represent the image of the city but are also a good place for residents to move and exercise. These two factors are also an important part of tourism cities’ efforts to improve the natural environment. Studies have shown that urban parks not only play an important role in maintaining the urban ecosystem and providing ecological products, but they can also meet the leisure needs of urban residents and play an important role in the construction of liveable cities [ 27 ].

However, the number of urban scenic spots had a significant negative impact on urban liveability. The natural scenic area of the city is an important destination for attracting tourists, and many urban scenic spots are of great significance to the improvement of the city’s image and the natural environment of the city. However, many visitors gather in cities, which has a negative impact on the production and life of local residents, such as rising prices, traffic congestion and environ-mental noise.

The results of model 2 show that the attractiveness of objective socio-cultural environment also has a certain influence on urban liveability. Among them, urban cultural relic protection units and urban museums have a positive impact on the satisfaction of liveability. A good social and cultural environment plays a positive role in the high-quality living environment of a city, which is conducive to residents’ positive evaluation of the social and economic development of a city, and also improves the liveability of a city. However, compared with the attractiveness of natural environment, the influence of social and cultural attraction on urban liveability is relatively low. The possible reason is that museums and other cultural service facilities in many cities in China are relatively single, and no effective cultural service product system has been formed. The natural environment may be more valued by residents.

The results of Model 3 show that the proportion of tourism GDP and the number of scenic spots above a 4A grade have a negative influence on urban liveability in the comprehensive attraction of urban tourism. This also further shows that a good tourist city is not necessarily a very liveable one. Tourism is an important driving force for urban development, and a city’s 4A and 5A scenic spots are important symbols of urban tourism attraction. However, the large-scale development of tourism has had many negative effects on the construction of liveable cities. Tourists entering destinations on a large scale not only create more pressure for the natural environment, but also lead to intensified competition in urban public spaces and even potential cultural shock and social equity problems.

Model 4 added subjective satisfaction with the natural environment to the basis of Model 1. The results showed that the significance of objective variables describing the natural environment was reduced after the introduction of subjective variables of the natural environment. The subjective variables of the natural environment comprised the overall evaluation of the natural environment and climate comfort, which were significant. This suggests that perceived natural environment is a more important predictor of urban liveability than objective variables of the natural environment and that perceived natural environment substantively mediates the relationship between the objective variables of the natural environment and urban liveability.

Model 5 added the subjective satisfaction of sociocultural environment to the basis of Model 2, and also found that the indicators of objective sociocultural environment are no longer significant, while the subjective evaluation of sociocultural environment is more significant, which indicates that subjective sociocultural environment assessment also has a mediating effect. These findings provide solid grounds for our postulation that subjective measures of satisfaction might act as mediators in the links between objective measures and the liveability of cities. In Model 6, urban location is introduced into the model as a classification variable, indicating that the groups living in eastern tourist cities are more affected by the living environment, followed by western cities and central cities. The eastern region has a humid climate and superior natural conditions. Existing studies have also shown that wetter climates near large water sources have a more significant impact on life satisfaction [ 38 ].

In terms of individual economic and social characteristics, gender, age and family income have a certain influence on residents’ liveability satisfaction, which is similar to some existing research results [ 39 ]. Compared with men, women may have higher liveability satisfaction, which indicates that men may face greater housing pressure in China. Concerning family income, with the increase of family income, residents have better economic conditions to improve living conditions, thus improving residents’ liveability satisfaction. The model shows that the influence of age on liveability satisfaction is positive. Middle-aged people with mature careers and families gradually have the ability to meet their own living needs, while the living conditions of young people in the initial stages of their careers make it difficult to meet their existing needs. Unexpectedly, the impact of household registration on residents’ liveability satisfaction was not obvious. One possible reason for this that with the expansion of urbanization, the local poor and low-income population are faced with large housing, employment and social problems, and their liveability satisfaction may be low.

7. Discussion

This study explored the impact of urban tourism attraction on urban liveability from the aspects of natural environment and socio-cultural environment. The natural environment is an important part of realizing the liveable function of the city. Many studies have found that the natural environment has a significant impact on residential satisfaction [ 40 , 41 ]. This aligns with the results of this paper, and the impact of the sociocultural environment on urban liveability is relatively limited. The reason may be that China’s current urbanization quality is not high, the city’s social and cultural service facilities are not perfect and it is difficult to meet the needs of residents.

Furthermore, subjective environmental assessment has a greater impact on urban liveability than objective environmental assessment, which is consistent with the results of previous studies [ 41 , 42 ]. These subjective indicators have stronger explanatory power than objective variables, and they mediate the relationship between urban liveability and objective indicators. This provides a novel way to study urban liveability in the future.

This study found that areas with strong tourist attraction and good natural and social and cultural environment are not positively correlated with urban livability, which is inconsistent with existing studies. Most studies have found that high-quality living environment is positively correlated with life satisfaction [ 43 , 44 ]. One reason of the mismatch between the rate of touristic cities and their low liveability may be the impossibility of them to accommodate to the increasing affluent of tourist and the lagging of infrastructure investment as a response to that rapid change.

Although based on subjective evaluation of habitability evaluation will be affected by individual differences, but this article uses the multi-layer linear model analysis, and notes that city level variance can explain the urban liveability evaluation result difference of nearly 20%, subjective data research indicates that using the habitability of city scale differences, the scale effect plays an important role. This conclusion also provides a worthy reference for similar research in the future, that is to use the idea of data stratification to solve the problem of scale difference in subjective evaluation.

This research has important policy implications. First, from the point of view of liveable cities, although tourism is an important driving force for urban development, the excessive development of tourism in cities has a greater negative effect on the whole. The tourism development level of the city should be in a moderate level, neither too low nor too high; Urban construction needs to improve the construction level and protection of regional ecological, cultural and tourism resources, and optimize the regional features and characteristics of human settlements. We will promote the transformation and upgrading of regional features such as tourist attractions, nature reserves, and famous historical and cultural cities and towns. Keeping urban tourism within an appropriate range is conducive to improving the liveability of cities and reducing the negative effects generated by tourism.

Second, compared with the cultural environment of the tourist city, the natural environment of the tourist city has a more obvious influence on the liveability of the city. The city park and the city green rate are not only important guarantees of the attraction of the tourist city but also play an important role in urban liveability. In the future, tourism cities should pay attention to the optimal layout of urban parks, improve environmental pollution and build green ecology in harmonious and liveable cities.

Finally, in the major developed cities in Europe and America, a good urban cultural atmosphere can bring citizens healthy physical and mental development, and the quality of life of urban residents is closely linked to it. The construction of urban cultural atmosphere features is an important part of the construction of liveable cities. Although the social and cultural environment of Chinese cities has little influence on urban liveability, the diversified urban cultural atmosphere will be the direction of the high-quality development of liveable cities in the future. Urban construction in the future should pay more attention to urban humanistic environment and retain the unique regional environment, cultural characteristics and architectural style of the city, which is of great significance to improve the sense of belonging and civilized quality of urban residents.

8. Conclusions

How the development of tourism affects the liveability of cities is controversial in academic circles. In the context of rapid urbanization, research on urban human settlements represented by liveable cities has drawn extensive attention from scholars. In the past, researchers mainly focused on urban background environmental factors and rarely considered the impact of tourism development on liveable cities. This study developed an analytical framework to investigate the effects of both objective and subjective measures on urban liveability within 40 key tourism cities in China. First, it presented the spatial distributions of diversified evaluations of the natural environment, sociocultural environment and urban liveability at the city scale in China. The study further investigated the impact of subjective living environment evaluations on urban liveability and how they mediate the relationship between objective measures and urban liveability.

Our key findings can be organised in several aspects. First, cities with good tourism development do not correspond to cities with high liveability evaluations. A city with a high-level economy and developed tourism is not the most liveable. A liveable city with a high evaluation from residents is a city that adapts to the natural environment, sociocultural environment and urban development. Second, the objective evaluation of both the natural environment and the sociocultural environment has an important impact on the liveability of cities, but the impact of the natural environment is greater than that of the social and cultural environments. Third, after adding the subjective evaluation of the natural and sociocultural environments, it was found that the objective variables of the objective environment were weakened, which indicates that the subjective evaluation of the natural and sociocultural environments is the intermediary variable of the influence of the objective living environment on urban liveability. Finally, the difference in residents’ evaluations of urban liveability relates more to the difference of individual attributes. Among them, family income, age and gender have significant influence on urban liveability.

We acknowledge that our paper inevitably has some limitations. First, the relevant environmental indicators affecting urban liveability are not comprehensive. Due to limited data, urban parks, green spaces, libraries and other public services are only considered in terms of the objective indicators of liveability, rather than the fairness of distribution. We also did not consider the impact of urban unemployment rate, education level, affordability of medical system, availability of public transport and other indicators on liveability. We found that the objective socio-cultural environment index is no longer significant, while the subjective evaluation of socio-cultural environment is more significant. This finding may also indicate that the definition of objective variables is somewhat simplified or incomplete. Second, this paper mainly discusses the influence of urban tourism development on liveable cities but does not discuss the influence of liveable city construction on tourism city development. This will be an important direction for further research in the future.

Socioeconomic characteristics of the study population.

Author Contributions

Writing—original draft, L.K.; funding acquisition, Z.Y. and W.Z.; supervision, Y.D. and C.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This study was supported by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program, Grant No. (2019QZKK1004).

Institutional Review Board Statement

Informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

'Things have started to improve': Moscow residents share thoughts on the city's changes

From cycling infrastructure to public spaces, how do Moscow’s residents feel about the city’s urban renewal projects? Here they share their stories

The ‘Moscow experiment’ has seen the city undergo renewal efforts over the last five years to improve liveability. But what do Moscow’s residents really think about the changes? We asked you to share your stories of life in the Russian capital, and reflect on whether Moscow is changing for better or worse.

The city centre may be seeing improvements in infrastructure and public space, but what about the suburbs? How involved have local citizens been in the changes? And what does the future hold for Moscow? We’ve rounded up a selection of your GuardianWitness contributions , comments and emails, which reveal the everyday experiences of Moscow’s transformations:

About pedestrians and automobilists

Moscow has undergone massive change in the last five years, but the most obvious developments concern parks, streets, and general navigation in the capital. Most of the developments are surely positive: the city has seemed to get more air. There have appeared more walking paths, pedestrian zones have been expanded, some streets have been closed for traffic altogether, parks are being renovated, and new bicycle lanes are being offered now to city residents and its guests. However, there are negative changes as well, which have largely affected car owners: extension of the paid parking areas, and the increase of the average price, the need to navigate a bypass route in order to drive round pedestrian zones. But this coin has another side too: fewer cars in the centre means less exhaust fumes and cleaner air. Muscovites look forward to the old parks being renovated, and the new ones being opened. New plans make excited everyone: new metro stations, new roads, new bicycle lanes and pedestrian footpaths.

It's changing for better

Moscow is definitely changing for better now. As I see it, the authorities are trying to make a city a better place to live in, especially in remote residential neighborhoods, which is very good. Many parks were renovated, cycle lanes appeared. Moscow has become a nice place for long walks and cycling. The city has a lot to offer now including museums, and different events like exhibitons, summer outside activities and others. It's a pity that it takes so long but taking into account the size of the city and its population I can say the situation has changed even if compared to what it was like 4-6 years ago.

I grew up in Moscow and lived here until two years ago. My general impression is that the people making the decisions are trying to copy some European practices like bike rental, parks, etc, but the general success is limited. The streets still belong to drivers, not to pedestrians, to an unbelievable extent. Another thing is that street retail was banned in an attempt to improve the city. It works for the city centre, where retailers really spoiled the overall impression of the scene, but 80% of Moscow is not a city centre. And there, this removal makes your life more difficult. The positive trend is all these multiple festivals, exhibitions, etc, but the best of all these events were initiated by citizens, so I would say that it is due to improving integration of Muscovites into the global world. Overall, I should admit that I love my homeland, but there is still a far way to go to make the city as comfortable as it could be, and the incentives of the people in charge in many cases do not have a lot to do with the wellbeing of Muscovites. - Ekaterina Ivanova

In the city

Gorky central park of culture and leisure

Better, definitely.

I was born in Moscow, emigrated to the UK ten years ago, and have been coming back at least once a year ever since. Although it's hard to tell from only a short visit, I can definitely see improvement in the capital: public transport operates better, local government services are better organised, the streets are cleaner... in my old neighbourhood (a very working-class, high-immigrant community), there are more 'high-street' shops appearing, less potholes on the roads, new playgrounds, new trees being planted and even the occasional fountain being built. These things may seem little and shallow, but I can certainly see improvement in this sense, at least.

It’s better on the surface, but still has inclusion and institutional issues. What do I mean? I mean that no one really asked us, Moscow residents, about the changes being made in the city (although we really welcome a big part of them). And lack of inclusion and mutual trust between the residents is in the end the main problem of Moscow as a city and a community (in my opinion). You can build as much fancy stuff as the money allows you to but if the Muscovites do not trust each other and don’t consider this city to truly belong to them, it will never become a real city and will continue to exist as “a big village” with fancy parks, craft beer and bicycle service. - Sergey Kurakov

When you smiling

Moscow is beautiful with the history, but it's even more beautiful when history meets modern cultural programmes. This installation is a part of one of them. Such things can be seen in the city when we have holidays

The transformation of Gorky park was nice but it is now overly popular which means it is not so pleasant to go to. The boulevard ring has in the main been transformed and makes for a pleasant walk. The banks of the Moskva have been transformed and the walk from Red October down to Gorky park is now interesting, however I always feel that Moscow does not make as much as it's river as other cities (Paris or London for example) do. The area around modern tretyakov could be transformed into an area more like the south bank.

However the biggest killer of Moscow life are simply the size of the roads. They are everywhere and take priority over pedestrians. To really improve Moscow life would be deal with the massive structural change required for dealing with traffic. And that, unfortunately, costs more than plants.

I was born in Moscow and truly love it. And this city inspired me to take an urban planning course: I honestly just couldn’t figure out how one of the wealthiest cities in the whole world could experience such a plethora of problems ranging from car invasion to banal low visual and urban design culture. Many things have changed for the better. A lot of new creative things emerged, such as anti-cafes, high-quality bars and famous Moscow art-clusters. These all influence the city and make it somewhat more democratic. On top of that, there are more direct influences on its physical fabric due to new urban design studios like StrelkaKB, Wowhaus and many others. However, the overall system is still underdeveloped. Moscow is not really clean, it is over-reliant on cars and it seems not much action is taken to improve that; it’s incredibly unfriendly to wheelchairs and people of similar mobility. We still get enormous unnecessary shopping malls planted close to the centre. Moscow is a wonderful city and sure enough it is gradually developing, however, only in a discrete, tactical way, largely and mostly driven by private interests. The public sector, in turn, seems to provide no clear strategic policy to turn Moscow in a healthy modern democratic city with all its problems tackled in one way or another. - dmitryBooM

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

• Contributors : About the Site

Newgeography.com

• Urban Issues
• Small Cities
• Demographics

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)

• Login to post comments
• Evolving Urban Form: Development Profiles of World Urban Areas
• Transportation

Comment viewing options

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.

Subscribe to NG Articles

Get new posts by email:, connect with us:.

NewGeography.com is a joint venture of Joel Kotkin and Praxis Strategy Group

Featured Content

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism

Infinite Suburbia

Recent blog posts

• Feudal Future: The Impact of Third-Party Candidates in Tipping the Election Scale
• Multiple More Jobs Accessible by Automobile Than by Transit
• Large Majority of Minorities Live in Suburbs
• Feudal Future: Addressing the Housing Affordability Crisis & Protecting the Middle Class Dream
• Shift of Net Domestic Migration to Smaller MSAs and Outside CBSAs
• Feudal Future Podcast: Navigating the Global Politics That May Shape America's 2024 Elections
• YIMBY Can Populate Conference Halls (at Least)
• Feudal Future Podcast: Exploring the Impact of Catholic Schools on Underserved Communities
• Feudal Future Podcast: Exploring the Paradox of Peace and Economics in Taiwan-China Relations
• Feudal Future Podcast: Navigating the Future of Higher Education

Recent popular content

• California's Broken Diversity Promise
• What Is a Global City?
• 2011 How We Pick the Best Cities For Job Growth
• Large Cities Rankings - 2016 Best Cities for Job Growth
• Don't Go Looking for Work in California
• We Sneezed, They Got Pneumonia
• Transportation Aborted
• Canada and the U.S. are Not Systemically Racist — and the Numbers Prove It

More from this author

• Largest World Cities: 2014
• Largest Cities in the World: 2016
• World Urban Areas Population and Density: A 2012 Update
• Largest 1,000 Cities on Earth: World Urban Areas: 2015 Edition
• The Evolving Urban Form: Rio de Janeiro

Recommended Books

Blogroll and partner sites.

• Burgh Diaspora
• Center for Economic Research and Forecasting
• China Urban Development Blog
• Chris Bradford - Austin Contrarian
• Houston Strategies
• LA Observed
• Multiplier Effect: Levy Economics Institute
• The Rural Blog
• The Urbanophile
• Request new password
• © 2024 New Geography
• CONTRIBUTORS :
• PRIVACY POLICY
• Stay up to date:

• Industry Trends
• Tips & Resources
• Press Releases
• Dean's Messages
• COVID-19 Protocols

New Tools Revolutionize Urban Planning

The study is small, but its results are encouraging. After analyzing transportation and economic data from nearly a mile of K Street, within the Mt. Vernon Triangle neighborhood in Washington, D.C., Josiah Blackwell-Lipkind, a 2024 master’s candidate in the Urban & Regional Planning program at Georgetown University, found that replacing on-street parking and some automobile travel lanes with bike lanes not only increased bicycle traffic but spurred economic activity in the neighborhood as well.

Yet this research exercise represents much more than a brief, if promising, analysis of eight city blocks. It is one of the university’s first uses of a new urban data platform called Replica . The proprietary platform utilizes artificial intelligence to piece together thousands of pieces of anonymized cell phone and vehicle GPS records to enable urban planners to tackle problems that were once nearly impossible to solve without conducting costly manual traffic studies or using oversimplified traffic models that do not account for real-world human behaviors.

“For a long time, travel surveys and resulting travel models were used for transportation behavior studies and planning decisions,” says Blackwell-Lipkind, who also works as an urban planner for the U.S. Department of Transportation. “What’s happening now is, instead of conducting these types of intermittent surveys every few years, there’s a push to use more live data based on real-world activity. Pings from GPS and phone data can tell us where people are actually going throughout the day.”

Replica, which was founded as part of Alphabet in 2017 and is now an independent company, combines privatized cell phone-generated location data together with information from the U.S. Census Bureau and other public travel surveys “to build out an entire population,” Blackwell-Lipkind says. “Replica creates a synthetic population of people using the GPS data from a sample of people.” This mobility data enables users to determine not just regional traffic patterns but the demographic characteristics of trip takers as well.

An Evolving Neighborhood

The Urban & Regional Planning program piloted Replica in the summer of 2023 in its Planning Studio course, which examined the community development issues in the broader area known as Downtown East. “Our students are interested in new sources of data which relate directly to real-world challenges,” says Uwe Brandes, Faculty Director of the program. “Our partnership with Replica enabled students to critically explore the utilization of one of the most cutting edge urban planning tools on the market, one which is being rapidly adopted by professionals in the field.”

In early 2024, the planning program entered into a demonstration agreement with Replica that allows the company to use the program “as a kind of testbed for the software,” Brandes says. The agreement enabled students in the course to use the software. The demonstration with the Urban Planning Program was so successful that Georgetown has now made the tool available to all students in the entire university.

“It’s a very fine-grained source of data that urban planners have typically not been able to access unless they manually collected the data themselves,” he says. “The practice of urban planning is changing very rapidly. AI-enabled data sets are not widely adopted and there is some level of skepticism associated with the algorithms producing this data. But what better than an academic setting for asking critical questions like, ‘Should we be using artificial intelligence in this way?’”

A ‘Fantastic Opportunity’

Izzy Youngs, a program alumna and visiting lecturer in the planning program and Blackwell-Lipkind’s advisor on the project, believes the answer will be a qualified “yes.”

“One of the reasons it’s so important to introduce this application into an academic setting is because we can really honestly engage with what kinds of questions are not suitable to be answered with this kind of data; and what kinds of assumptions and data quality issues there might be which bias the data or results,” says Youngs, who also works as a civic data analyst at Alta Planning + Design.

That said, introducing Replica to students “is a really fantastic opportunity” that puts Georgetown “at the front edge of what’s happening in the field,” Youngs says. “I don’t know of any other universities or schools that have partnerships like this. And I think the ability for students to access this kind of data is going to be so important not just for their education but for their professional development” because a lot of companies are looking to hire people who have worked with this technology.

Replica data can help answer questions that go far beyond the scope of traditional travel demand models. For example, traditional models do not take into account that people often take trips in a chain, Youngs says. Rather than going from Point A to Point B and back again, they may drive from the office to the grocery store, to the pharmacy, and to the school to pick up their children. Replica documents each of these individual trips.

Mobility data can also be useful in other fields, such as public health. Health agencies could use Replica to see how travel patterns changed for different demographic groups during the pandemic and then use this data to target outreach campaigns. That’s because the data can show how different users tend to move during the day.

A Surge in Bicycle and Economic Activity

Blackwell-Lipkind’s study examined K Street between Seventh Street NW and First Street NE. This is the site of a 2021 District Department of Transportation project that replaced on-street parking and vehicle travel lanes with protected bike lanes. K Street now has the only east-west protected bike lane in the area. Between the years 2019 and 2021, Blackwell-Lipkind found that bike trips increased 350 percent relative to nearby corridors, accidents per trip for all travel modes declined, and vehicular traffic was only marginally affected. But perhaps the biggest surprise was business sales, which outpaced the District of Columbia average by 200 percent.

Did the addition of bike lanes help cause this surge? That’s what the data suggest, Blackwell-Lipkind says, but he adds that more research will need to be done. And with the addition of Replica, that can be accomplished much more easily than in the past.

Helping people get safely from one place to another, making those trips less hectic and more enjoyable—these are some of the reasons why Blackwell-Lipkind went into urban planning in the first place. And he welcomes any tool that will help him do his work better.

“One of the most visible forms of government influence is on the street,” Blackwell-Lipkind says. “It’s the most ubiquitous public space, and everyone has an opinion about it. You can ask any person, ‘How do you feel about this street? What is your experience traveling on it?’ and they will have something to say. Every investment that the government makes in the street is immediately apparent to everyone. And I think that’s kind of beautiful.”

Master's in Urban & Regional Planning

Develop the skills needed for success in the urban planning industry through a combination of academic theory and applied studio work.

Choose Your Term

We are transitioning to a new system for applications to the Spring 2019 term and later. Please select the term of your application:

• Fall 2018 or earlier
• Spring 2019 or later

UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering

• Undergraduate
• Master's
• Scholarships
• What our students say
• Short courses
• Partnerships

Virtual Decision Rooms for Water Neutral Urban Planning (VENTURA)

Ventura is a collaborative research project between Imperial College (ICL), University College London (UCL) and the British Geological Survey (BGS).

15 April 2024

The VENTURA project  is schedule to run from October 2021 to April 2024) and was funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of a programme entitled, 'Digital Economy: Sustainable Digital Society'.

The project team for this collaborative project include academics from ICL, UCL and the BGS and the UCL Ventura team is led by Nici Zimmermann , Ke (Koko) Zhou ,  Irene Pluchinotta  and Pepe Puchol-Salort . The broader aim of Ventura is to support water neutrality decisions through digital tools.

The UCL team led the participatory systems thinking activities in case studies in Greater Manchester and Enfield, London. They engaged with a range of stakeholders including the trilateral group, namely Greater Manchester Combined Authority, United Utilities, and the Environment Agency. They also engaged with local boroughs, the Greater London Authority, and broader environmental stakeholders. The aim of the project's stakeholder engagement activities is to understand stakeholders’ experience and perspectives of the water neutrality governance challenges and complexities, supporting the exploration of the interconnections between hydrological and institutional dynamics towards sustainable growth.

The team employed comprehensive participatory approaches: identifying challenges with stakeholders and mapping the complex core problem. They developed connection circles and causal loop diagrams (CLDs) representing the system's complexity. The team drew from systems thinking, behavioural operational research, and organisational management studies (institutions, attention and emotions) to inform their reflections on the CLDs. They also analysed the decision-making process and compared stakeholders’ perceived boundaries of the system, specifically on how different groups of stakeholders perceive the system differently, and their reflections to achieve integrated decision-making.

Figure: Manchester workshop, causal loop diagrams developed by stakeholder groups

In their collaborated with Imperial College London and the British Geological Survey integrating systems modelling and CLDs in a digital tool, the UCL team called a virtual decision room (VDR) for the Manchester case study. They used this combination of systems thinking with GIS-based modelling in a virtual decision room to enhance practical decision-making by offering an easily accessible interface. This integration facilitates a holistic understanding of specific policy issues and broader governance challenges.

The VENTURA project operated in an highly interdisciplinary setting, and it followed principles of transdisciplinary, and they also used it as a basis to reflect on the process of collaborating across disciplines and working with stakeholders—with the aim to better understand the development of digital tools in participatory, inter- and transdisciplinary contexts.

For more information about the project, please visit following resources. If there are specific questions about the project, you are welcome to contact the team directly.

Figure: the VENTURA virtual decision room

Publications and conference papers:.

VENTURA - virtual decision rooms for water neutral planning  https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/535476/

Comparisons of Emotional Boundaries: A case study of water neutrality and sustainable urban development in London: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10180093/

Other documents:

Ventura VDR and the CLD:  https://ventura.bgs.ac.uk

Ventura project summary and more details about the development of CLD:  https://www.imperial.ac.uk/systems-engineering-innovation/research/ventura/

Ventura Github:  https://github.com/ventura-water

Researchers (with profile links):

Ke (Koko) Zhou

Irene Pluchinotta  

Nici Zimmermann

Pepe Puchol-Salort

Image credit: pexels.com

University of Birmingham

The ongoing growth of a major Indian city has helped experts to create a new way of understanding how ‘urban sprawl’ happens – providing potential to improve people’s lives across the Global South through better urban planning.

Researchers analysed the development of communities on the edge of Chennai, in South India, where urban and rural areas meet – known as the ‘peri-urban’ – to develop an approach that is tailored to the needs of India and other countries in the Global South.

Despite a trend towards urbanisation, 69% of India’s population is still classified as rural. Whilst Western planning efforts have been directed towards maintaining a distinct urban-rural divide, up to 140 million people live in India’s ‘grey zone’ settlements which display both urban and rural characteristics.

Peri-urbanisation can provide a way of better understanding the dynamics between urban and rural areas in India and the wider Global South. By examining peri-urbanisation, we can gain a contextual understanding of the socio-spatial processes that shape urban and rural futures. Rahib Akhtar - University of Birmingham

An international group of researchers has published its findings in Habitat International , after examining the rise of peri-urban regions within St Thomas Mount Panchayat Union - 15 villages on the fringes of Chennai.

The researchers have developed a process that redefines the dynamics of such areas as the ‘peri-urban turn’ using Causal Loop Diagrams to map the connexions between health, place, demographics, governance, and economy

Researchers have identified a number of elements which make up the ‘peri-urban turn’, including:

• Speculative Development - Government targets peri-urban regions for projects requiring large land acquisitions, such as sewage treatment and slum resettlement.
• Sense of Place - Peri-urban areas are perceived more as a ‘place’ with rich sensorial and lived experiences, with everyday strongly linked to sights, sounds and smells.
• Ecosystem Services - Such regions are primarily recognised for unfavourable environmental conditions, as well as inadequate hygiene and sanitation provisions.
• Mobility/Access - Access to amenities and services significantly influences the overall quality of life for people in peri-urban areas
• Urban-Rural Coexistence - Instead of viewing rural and urban areas as separate spaces, there is a need to perceive them as a continuum.

Co-author Rahib Akhtar, from the University of Birmingham, commented: “With the rapid pace of urbanisation, urban sprawl has become a prevalent phenomenon in the global South. This has created peri-urban spaces where city meets country – offering interactions between social, economic, and environmental systems that give valuable insight into how we can create better and more sustainable futures for the people living in these communities.

“Peri-urbanisation can provide a way of better understanding the dynamics between urban and rural areas in India and the wider Global South. By examining peri-urbanisation, we can gain a contextual understanding of the socio-spatial processes that shape urban and rural futures.”

Apart from a lack of clarity in urban-rural classification in India, there is also ambiguity around the transformation and development of urban and rural areas. Confusion exists around the definition of such areas with terms including ‘urban village’, ‘desakota’ (village-town), Predominantly Urban, Semi-Urban, and Potential Urban areas.

The ambiguity surrounding the demarcation of urban and rural areas, combined with the complexities of local governance structures, creates challenges in understanding trends and patterns in India, with implications for people’s aspirations, opportunities, challenges, and the need to migrate.

Featured staff

Dr Rakib Akhtar

Lecturer in Urban Planning

Air pollution significantly reduces pollination by confusing butterflies and bees

Common air pollutants from both urban and rural environments may be reducing the pollinating abilities of insects by preventing them sniffing out the crops a...

21 January 2022