Geographers have long pondered the role of tourism in producing and shaping space. The description of resort geographies popular in the 1980s and 1990s has gradually given way to the current vogue for place-making and place marketing, re-centering geography in the tourism field. More recently, however, the rise of the sharing economy and “relational tourism” has caused researchers to look beyond the construction and consumption of place and to delve into the co-creation of localities between tourists and residents. These shorter and longer-term “locals” increasingly find each other without the intervention of the traditional tourism industry, giving rise to whole new fields of economic, cultural and social exchange. The growth of companies such as Couchsurfing, Airbnb and Uber not only represents a challenge to traditional views of tourism, but is also reshaping the localities inhabited by tourists. This analysis examines the consequences of the new localities of tourism and they ways in which this might affect the future of tourism itself.
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This book investigates the way localities are shaped and negotiated through tourism, and explores the emerging success of local peer-produced hospitality and tourism services which are transforming the tourist experience. Tourists are now being brought into much closer contact with locals and have new opportunities to experience the community at their destination. This book examines these place experiences and travel-sharing arrangements that have now spread globally due to the use of social communication platforms such as Airbnb. It analyses the existence of global communities of ‘place experts’ that are redefining the organisational structures, value systems, market opportunities, affordabilities and geographies in travel and tourism. This volume brings together the work of established tourism scholars as well as early career researchers and is one of the first books to examine the global-local relationship at tourism destinations and the way that the rapidly developing field of peer-to-peer tourism is transforming tourist destinations.
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The concept of the Daily Urban System (DUS) has gained relevance over the past decades as the entity to examine and explain the functionality of the urban landscape. Daily Urban Systems are usually defined and measured by the strength of commuter or shopper flows between the nodes of the system. It is important to realize that these Daily Urban Systems are the accumulated pattern of individuals making frequent, recurring trips to other localities than their own. Understanding the microeconomic decisions behind these spatial interactions will help in assessing the functional and spatial structure of DUS. In this paper is explored how, based on Dutch empirical data, the individual household’s spatial interactions shape the daily urban system and how the destination of these interactions correlates with personal and spatial variables and motives for interaction. The results show that the occurrence of non-local spatial interactions can be explained by the size-based Christallerian hierarchy of the localities of residence, but that it is the regional population – or market potential – that explains and moderates the sorting of households and the intensity and direction of their spatial interactions in the DUS, matching agglomeration theory.
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