China has witnessed a dramatic development of tourism in urban context in the past thirty years, especially with its success in hosting the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 and the Shanghai World Exposition in 2010. Urban areas as tourism destination are receiving increasingly more popularity than traditional destinations such as national parks, natural reserves, and historical relics. Deriving largely from a special issue on "Urban Tourism Development and City Destination Marketing" (Journal of China Tourism Research), Urban Tourism in China presents the readers with a collection of nine independent research reports examining issues such as consumer behaviour in urban destinations, the social impact of tourism, destination image, leisure, regional collaboration, and heritage tourism in ancient towns. The investigations covered urban areas of different scales and diversified nature from major metropolises such as Beijing, and Guangzhou, to ancient towns like Lijiang and Pingyao. Readers who have interests of tourism research, business development, and in-depth understanding of urban life in China may find the book informative and interesting. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of China Tourism Research.

Covering a wide range of current issues, this comprehensive Handbook explores the links between tourism as a dynamic tertiary industry and China as the world’s most influential tourism market and destination.

The Power of New Urban Tourism explores new forms of tourism in urban areas with their social, political, cultural, architectural and economic implications. By investigating various showcases of New Urban Tourism within its social and spatial frames, the book offers insights into power relations and connections between tourism and cityscapes in various socio-spatial settings around the world. Contributors to the volume show how urban space has become a battleground between local residents and visitors, with changing perceptions of tourists as co-users of public and private urban spaces and as influencers of the local economies. This includes different roles of digital platforms as resources for access to the city and touristic opportunities as well as ways to organise and express protest or shifting representations of urban space. With contemporary cases from a wide disciplinary spectrum, the contributors investigate the power of New Urban Tourism in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania. This focus allows a cross-cultural evaluation of New Urban Tourism and its dynamic, and changing conception transforming and subverting cities and tourism alike. The Power of New Urban Tourism will be of great interest to academics, researchers and students in the fields of cultural studies, sociology, the political sciences, economics, history, human geography, urban design and planning, architecture, ethnology and anthropology.

This timely Research Agenda explores and proposes critical lines of research to support understanding of the conditions under which urban tourism contributes to the development of urban systems, and what can be done to create and conserve these conditions. Chapters highlight conceptual discussions, concrete case studies and policy reviews to address the issues surrounding the economic, environmental and social impacts of tourism on cities.

This book examines and addresses the particular character of urban tourism occurring in the global South. It presents research essays on tourism in urban areas of South Africa, a country which is associated with big 5 nature tourism but where urban areas are also major tourism destinations. The book contextualizes urban tourism in South Africa as part of ‘the other half of urban tourism’, an overlooked but energetic scholarship which is emerging on urban places in the global South. The volume moves to present a collection of original material variously on national perspectives on urban tourism following by a cluster of city level perspectives. The last three contributions turn to the role of tourism in small towns, the bottom rung in the urban settlement system. Issues of concern include gastronomic tourism, VFR travel, airportscapes, climate change, AirBnb and creative tourism. Finally, as COVID-19 is potentially a defining historical moment for urban tourism, the volume incorporates historical research perspectives in order to address the overwhelming ‘present-mindedness’ of mainstream urban tourism writings. The book highlights the challenges and opportunities for tourism development in the environment of the urban global South and is relevant to scholars of both tourism and urban studies as well as researchers in development studies.

This book offers a comprehensive understanding of China’s tourism development from 1992 onwards, focusing on the social-cultural change that accompanied the rise of tourism. It examines both the economic benefits and sociocultural impacts of tourism and argues that tourism sustainability depends on a delicate balance between economic and social-cultural interests which could manifest differently among the stakeholders of various interests. It also explores, through both theoretical and empirical analysis, how travel connects people and places through the processes of tourist imagination and consumption. The volume portrays how contemporary discourses fuse with individual histories to formulate the ways in which tourists understand China. It will be a useful resource for students and scholars in human geography, tourism management, leisure and recreation, and social sciences.

Over the past decade, the field of urban tourism has consolidated with the appearance of several books that concentrate upon the Western European and North American experience. Recently, the scope and range of urban research has widened considerably, including the welcome appearance of studies that examine the tourism phenomenon in cities outside the Euro-American heartland.Despite this growing international body of debate and scholarship on tourism and cities, particularly in the developed North, literature that relates to the developing world as a whole, and to Africa in particular, remains sparse. The task of Urban Tourism in the Developing World: The South African Experience is to augment the current international scholarship concerning urban tourism in the developing world. More especially, the contributors draw attention to a range of case studies from South Africa that provide some starting points to address the uneven scholarly coverage of urban tourism the African context has received to date. In addition, the research material presented here seeks to contribute toward raising the South African, and indeed the African profile, within growing international scholarship concerning issues of urban tourism and development.This collection aims to expand an emerging South African and African tourism research "voice" concerning the tourism and development nexus, as well as to stem critiques that this body of research appears to have developed in a theoretical vacuum, divorced from broader international tourism research discourses. This collection of essays not only further develops an independent South African tourism perspective, but also presents research that is closely tied to international urban tourism research debates. In addition, this analysis of urban tourism in the South African context enriches the rather Western-oriented theories of urban tourism discourse through its emphasis on how urban tourism is evolving in urban Africa.

Presents the personal histories of some of the world's leading tourism geographers, many of whom pioneered the field. This book includes stories that reveal the diverse personalities, passions, and peculiarities behind the authors' choice of tourism as a specialization. It is also of interest to scholars outside the field of tourism geography.

In this multidisciplinary and multi-jurisdictional account of sustainability in urban tourist destinations, the Handbook on Sustainable Urban Tourism draws together the latest academic research and provides key practical insights on this developing area of study. It not only considers the importance of cities as ideal tourist destinations due to their complex characteristics and the variety of attractions they offer, but also the challenges they are confronted with, most notably sustainability.