Author Description

For human geographers, a central theme within the discipline is interpreting and understanding our changing world – a world in which geographic patterns are constantly being reworked by powerful forces of change. These forces include population shifts, new patterns of economic production and consumption, evolving social and political structures, new forms of urbanism, and globalisation and the compressions of time and space that are the product of the ongoing revolutions in information technology and telecommunications. This book attempts to show how tourism has also come to be a major force for change as an integral and indispensable part of the places in which we live, their economies and their societies. When scarcely a corner of the globe remains untouched by the influence of tourism, this is a phenomenon that we can no longer ignore. Tourism is also an intensely geographic phenomenon. It exists through the desire of people to move in search of embodied experience of other places as individuals and en mass and at scales from the local to the increasingly global. Tourism creates distinctive relationships between people (as tourists) and the host spaces, places and people they visit, which has significant implications for destination development and resource use and exploitation, which are exhibited through a range of economic, social, cultural and environmental impacts that have important implications for local geographies. This third edition of Tourism Geography: critical understandings of place, space and experience presents an essential understanding of critical perspectives on how tourism places and spaces are created and maintained. Drawing on the holistic nature of geography, a range of social science disciplinary views are presented, including both historical and contemporary perspectives. Fundamentally, however, the book strives to connect tourism to key geographical concepts of globalisation, mobility, production and consumption, physical landscapes, an