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Vol. 3 No. 2

Vol. 3 No. 2

Portada de la revista Ara

La revista ARA Journal of Tourism Research / Revista de Investigación en Turismo, que el lector tiene en sus manos, es el fruto de la colaboración entre la Fundación Global Democracia y Desarrollo (FUNGLODE) y la Escuela Universitaria de Hotelería y Turismo CETT, adscrita a la Universidad de Barcelona.

 

Su objetivo es convertirse en una herramienta de investigación y divulgación del fenómeno  turístico, en todas sus vertientes y dimensiones. Aspira a intercambiar experiencias en el ámbito nacional e internacional que contribuyan a elevar el nivel de investigación sobre el sector, a mejorar los mecanismos de toma de decisión, la calidad de su oferta, y en definitiva, a fomentar un turismo que sea sustentable.

 

Al ser una publicación que se realiza desde la República Dominicana tomará en cuenta, en primer lugar, el desarrollo turístico del país, pero extenderá su mirada más allá, hacia el resto de la zona del Caribe, de América Latina, de Norteamérica, de Europa, y en fin, del mundo, con lo cual, en lugar de una visión estrictamente local, tendrá un enfoque de alcance global.

 

En los actuales escenarios turísticos resulta necesario identificar los actores y participantes fundamentales para promover la cooperación. Es necesario unificar dentro de un marco armonizado y coordinado todos los esfuerzos para manejar y conservar la biodiversidad y el hábitat, así como para solucionar los problemas más graves que afectan a las comunidades.

 

La importancia social y económica de la actividad turística en la República Dominicana es evidente. Cada año nos visitan cuatro millones y medio de turistas y se genera unos ingresos de cerca de cuatro mil millones de dólares.

 

La industria turística empezó a desarrollarse en el país a partir de los años 70, incentivada, fundamentalmente, por iniciativas gubernamentales. No obstante, a partir de los años 80, el sector turístico empezó a incluir una mayor participación privada, convirtiéndose en uno de los pilares fundamentales de la economía nacional.

 

En cerca de un 55 por ciento, la infraestructura turística pertenece a capital nacional y un 45 por ciento a capital extranjero. Se cuenta con más de 60 mil habitaciones para alojar turistas que proceden mayoritariamente de Europa y los Estados Unidos.

 

La República Dominicana posee unas características excepcionales y únicas para el desarrollo del turismo. Posee un clima incomparable, un interés histórico y cultural en cada uno de nuestros pueblos y ciudades, competitividad en sus precios y seguridad, tanto jurídica como física.

 

En lo que respecta al Caribe, el reconocimiento internacional al desarrollo del sector turístico se expresa en organismos y foros internacionales, como ocurrió recientemente, en el Foro Económico Mundial de Davos (Suiza), el cual reveló en uno de sus estudios, el cual incluía a 124 países, que la República Dominicana, Barbados y Jamaica se encuentran entre los 50 países de mayores tasas de competitividad turística.

 

El elevado número de personas que prestan sus servicios en los diferentes segmentos de la actividad turística, el volumen de ingresos que genera y el significativo papel que tiene en la creación de la imagen exterior de nuestro país, son algunos de los factores que determinan que nuestros gobiernos dediquen una parte importante de sus esfuerzos a la configuración de un sector turístico de calidad e internacionalmente reconocido.

 

ARA Journal of Tourism Research / Revista de Investigación en Turismo es una publicación abierta a la participación de todos aquellos que desde las universidades, las administraciones públicas y las instituciones privadas vinculadas a la gestión  turística deseen colaborar en la investigacióny difusión de las diversas facetas del complejo pero siempre fascinante mundo del turismo.

 

¡Bienvenidos a bordo!

 

Dr. Leonel Fernández

Presidente de la República Dominicana

Presidente Honorífico de la Fundación

Global Democracia y Desarrollo

 

Contenido
 
The Tourist Project of the Setap Group for the International Bid of Ideas for Maspalomas Costa Canaria

The city of Maspalomas began building in 1961 , year of the celebration of the International Bid of ideas for Maspalomas Costa Canaria. This event was sponsored by the owner of the lands Mr. Alejandro de Castillo y Bravo de Laguna, the Count of Vega Grande. The group of French architects and city planners ATEA and SETAP where awarded first place in the bid. The project stood out due to its high quality details, the respectful distribution with the landscape and the majesty of its urban forms in the different enclaves that comprised the project. The analysis of the professional work of ATEA and SETAP, the city models that were developed in the atelier, the academic experience of working with the ateliers of the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in France by some of the members of SETAP, and the bid, are some of the ideas developed in this investigation.

New Holiday Towns as Non-Places. The Case of Marina d’Or

Since the start of tourism as rewarding and massive activity in the mid-nineteenth century, new tourist destinations have appeared to satisfy mass tourism. Among the different urban developments that have taken place so far, the objective of this paper is to reflect on a model of tourist development that is spreading internationally, the New holiday towns. These urban settlements can reach large dimensions in size and population, so producing appreciable economic, political and environmental impacts in their environment. But, what about the social impact that these NHTs involve? Tthrough the analysis of a specific case, Marina d’Or, social aspects were investigated with the help of a quantitative method, the Survey: prototype users; frequency by residents in town; relations with its neighbors; intensity of use that they make of public space and their satisfaction and valuation of urban space. And finally with a qualitative methodology, the Participant Observation, the diversity of its urban space and the ways of inhabiting it were analyzed.

Cultural Tourism in Fragile Institutional Contexts. Project for Cultural Routes in Tierra Del Fuego

The following paper presents a project of Cultural Routes designed for the Chilean Tierra del Fuego, linked to promoting tourism and boosting the economy, through the development of a specific high standard tourism offer, linked to its natural and cultural heritage, with the purpose of capturing the potential income generation for Chile. The project had as main goal to enhance the competitiveness of the tourism sector of special interests in Tierra del Fuego, a key sector of Southern Patagonia, through the dissemination and transfer of technologies and knowledge, acquired in over 10 years of research and projects, onto the territory and local agents. These Cultural Routes build an innovative offer, capable of structuring the diverse touristic resources and strengthening the basis for the development of a new stage of national and international tourism market, located on the southern extreme of Chile and America.

 
Tour-Scapes or How to Convert Mature Tourism Destinations to Complex Sustainable Landscapes; the Strategy of the Second Coast

The paper discusses the innovation potential of landscape design to mature tourism destinations in the Mediterranean, especially in relation to its contribution to generate new imagery as well as to configure sustainability criteria in order to improve tourist consolidated environments. It is structured in two parts: The first deals with the intense relationship between Landscape and Tourism. The second focuses on a review of the research results developed within the frame of the Master’s in Landscape Architecture, UPC, in the territories of Costa Brava, Catalonia, Spain and Languedoc, France. The works presented explore protocols of developing a sustainable tourist imagery based on the identity and natural potential of these landscapes in relation to the development of a holistic tourist project that involves landscape not as a background but as a tourist product in itself. The experiences include approaches that relate the existing coastal developments to its agricultural “hinterland”, specifically denominated as “second coast”.

A Long-Term Tourism Strategy within a Networked Urban Regeneration Process for Historical Quarters

During 1970s, the de-industrialization in many western countries caused large unemployment and decay of industrial cities. Accordingly, as an urban revitalization strategy, tourism was initiated in many urban historical quarters to revitalize the economy and to improve the decaying city image. Many de-industrialized cities witnessed the rise of place marketing-led tourism in historical quarters. Many quarters have removed and replaced the existing residents and original functions which were thought to convey negative images. Meanwhile, new images and attractions, including museums, crafts, arts, cultural heritage, and festivals have been introduced in these empty physical fabrics to attract investors and tourists. More recently, the strategy of tourism development tends to be closely related with other urban planning strategies, especially in historical quarters’ revitalization process, which usually link tourism with other evelopment strategies such as cultural industry and creative industry (Tiesdell et al., 1996, Cunningham, 2002) to transform these quarters into cultural hubs or creative dismissions (Roodhouse, 2010), aiming to attract not only tourists but also local people, enhance the quarters’ cultural ambience, and promote local cultural production consumption without emptying all the residents and functions. In recent decades, many Chinese cities have experienced huge urban changes. With many urban historical quarters being demolished to gain development profits and new city image, many old neighbourhoods collapsed with their residents relocated to frontier areas. This paper conducts a comparative study on recent creative hub initiated by Shanghai government—Tianzi Fang and the Xi’an Muslim Quarter. It analyzes the recycling mode, the everyday life , the experience of uniqueness, and social network based on the two case. It also explore the tensions, conflicts, and cooperation within the network of disciplines, governmental agencies, institutions, stake holders, and local residents. This paper highlights that for urban historical quarters, instead of replacing all the community and functions, a long-term tourism should adapt into an integrated and participatory network of urban regeneration process, which is largely beyond its physical aspects and would provide a new perspective for urban tourism.

Diversity, Flexibility and Identity. Mechanisms for Recycling Mature Tourist Destinations

Globalizing dynamic sources are making of tourist destinations, spaces each time more homogeneous, unable to respond to the tourist’s new motivation and to the specific characteristics of the territory and the local landscape. Tourist space has gone through changes, resulting in conurbations without urban structure that require new planning patterns. Despite predictions, which determine a declining process or a post-stagnation, there is a high potential of reconversion of obsolete tourist destinations based on its typological characteristics and its interaction with the territory. The new challenges faced by tourist activity: diversity of tourist resources, travel flexibility and the differentiation of the destination from the rest by enhancing its identity, are methodologically tackled by testing regional tourist dynamics experimented in one of the most paradigmatic cases of tourist coastline development, Majorca island.

 
Selling Global Seoul: Competitive Urban Policy and Symbolic Reconstruction of Cities

The paper focuses on a process of symbolic reconstruction of cities, where existing image or meaning of places is purposely changed with an aim to attract new investments, events or tourists to a particular city. We try to situate the process within the context of growing competition of cities. Symbolic reconstruction also affects tourism development in cities as it provides an easily marketed and consumable image and meaning of places. The case of Cheonggyecheon restoration in Seoul helps us to study how symbolic reconstruction of cities is related to and affected by competitive urban policy of cities, urban renewal and city marketing. Observing local consequences we conclude that while the Cheonggyecheon restoration and resulting symbolic reconstruction helped Cheonggyecheon to become the major tourist attraction and icon of global Seoul, it also results in decline of local places and cultures, contradicting in this way its initial goals.

Tourism Reclaiming Urban Case Study: City Of Macau In The Pearl River Delta Region, China

The main subject of this paper is to study the use of land reclamation development in the contexts of tourism spaces construction in its relation to consolidate urban and growing regions. Referring to the processes involved, it is relevant to analyze the interaction of massive tourism developments using urbanization based on rapid construction enhanced by land reclaimed to water. The “urbanization of water” for tourism purposes creates diverse asymmetries, raising problematic issues namely in the urban context. Among others one can find conflicts - in the limits and borders, contaminating and spreading phenomenon that formulates new in the existing, causing controversial dichotomies leading to the construction of history in detriment of consolidating past testimonials - that includes heritage and cultural aspects now replaced, reinvented and recreated in thematized urban contexts.

Venice as Pedestrian City and Tourist Magnet Mass Events and Ordinary Life

In Venice the famous network of pedestrian foot-ways deserves attention and research since has to face very
often mass events. Even the ordinary mobility has peculiar needs. The efficiency of main road and rail transportation infrastructures and of the principal hub of modal interchange, relays on the service quality of the pedestrian infrastructure in the old city. This is matter for an original investigation.

 
Tourscapes

Harvey’s assessment of the Lefebvrian concept of the Right to the City is that it is a communal right, shared by association with the community around the urban project. How might this idea translate to a small island nation, recently transformed from being a rural society, headlong into a post-urban, spatially chaotic coagulation of small cities, suburbs, and landscapes of tourism consumption, or ‘Tourscapes’ ? Existing and emerging Tourscapes can be mapped and analysed, at different but simultaneous scales, related to their local, city or regional importance, and the meanings of these in the visual and spatial order can be reviewed. This work will propose exploratory scenarios for addressing tourism related spatial practice, using Irish Case Study examples, and also will investigate how communal rights to Tourscapes could be claimed or exercised, for use by the broad community around the analysis, management, control and proposition of spatial form.

A century of tourism in Europe. New challenges to the discipline of Urbanism

Tourism is one of the most important modern phenomena of the last hundred years. Not only for its economic significance, but also by the changes it has produced in the city and the territory. Unfortunately, in many cases its economic success has exceeded the growth forecast, destroying what had been its raison d’être: the city. Urban planning and architecture have participated in this process by showing their contempt with the physical consequences of this slackness. The discipline seems not to have understood that we are in front of a major phenomenon that needs its own tools to face these transformations. Nowadays, in the early twenty-first century, there are two different challenges: how to turn the tourist conglomeration in Southern European coast into a city, and how to include the matter of leisure in the postindustrial city debate.

Fissures on the Landscape. The Sandstone Quarries, Traces of the Heritage Landscape of Mallorca

The sandstone quarries are the commonest quarries in Mallorca. However, they have been always unknown landscapes. This paper tries to offer a panoramic view of the sandstone quarries, tracking between different scales. First of all, the understanding of their territorial dimension on the island, proposing a new concept: the Quarries Territory, a landscape that allows the discovery of the quarries, only possible through the path that they offered, the differentiating aspect of each one. Afterwards, the memory and tradition that they have generated relate the elements of heritage which have emerged from them, so they are also part of cultural heritage and landscape of the island. They have become immobile transcribers of the landscape history that have generated, becoming true heritage archives of Mallorca. Finally, thinking in sandstone quarries as cultural landscapes will be obvious when the culture that generated them get back to appreciate the values described here. If this not happens, their future is predestined to disappear.

 
Satellite Leisure in Linear Natural Reserves; A Planning Model for Tourism Resorts. Learnings from the GATCPAC Resting City

In this article we explain the landscape and legal resources that characterized the GATCPAC Resting and Vacation City (1931-38) of Barcelona – a never built project – with the aim of depicting a suitable model for other areas. This model, named as “satellite leisure on linear natural reserves”, departs from the premise of placing those settlements that are potentially aggressive to the landscape, such as tourist resorts, in protected zones. The model is specially thought for interior and natural tourism. In the article we will explain the objectives of the GATCPAC project, its characteristics and the relation between those characteristics and other contemporary urban models. After that, we will find out which parameters are still useful for the actual landscape paradigm, drawing up an extrapolation to the Catalan region.

Urban Panorama Tourism Planning. A View from River Tour Course in Post-Three Gorges Era

The upstream cities of Yangtze River have been witnessing significant transforming since the beginning of the construction of the Three Gorges hydroelectric planet project. Chongqing Port Authority had its opportunity to alternate the river tourism strategy from being the upstream terminal of the golden route into creating a particular cruise course towards perceiving the panorama of continuous elevation of mountainous city, at the same time, promoting the renovation of the urban design so as to revival the typical mountain-river vista. This paper bases on the panoramic research of Chongqing peninsula; discusses the characteristic aspects of the three-dimension sightseeing of the mountainous city on the cruise route, which widely exists in the Three Gorges region as well. And this method is different from the two dimensional approach of skyline analysis which is more suitable for the topographic area. The achieved work can offer the tourism-related sectors a sustainable assistance to deal with “tourbanism” topics in the urban regeneration process in the Three Gorges regions.

Emerging Cross Border Tourism Region Macau-Zhuhai: Place in Play/Place to Play

This paper explores the new tourism region Macau-Zhuhai which is emerging in the south-western part of the Pearl River Delta (PRD). Since Macau’s handover to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, the former Portuguese enclave is becoming increasingly integrated into the PRD. Together with its mainland neighbor Zhuhai it is creating a bi-city region; although without coordinated planning. Currently, both cities embark on a first joint project encouraged by the Chinese Central Government on the island Hengqin. The paper is investigating the attempts of both cities to reinvent themselves as places to play and how they find themselves on the playing field of global and national forces. The paper ends with the suggestion of an alternative understanding of tourism and destinations which learns from spatial practices of a new generation of tourists in Asia.

 
An Implicit Plan. Landscape, Art and Lanzarote’s Tourism Development (1960-1974)

Despite the inexistence of a formal plan, a series of underlying factors generated a project that hoped to hybridize tourism and landscape by safeguarding and protecting Lanzarote´s environment as well as adapting the region to this economic activity. So as to remain faithful to the Island´s nature, solutions were not adopted as isolated fragments but as part of a comprehensive system. This resulted in an outstanding model of human interaction with the environment while creating a different and competitive image within the tourism market.

Foresight as an Innovative Tool for Designing Tourist Destinations

Foresight is a relatively new field of study which initially arose to make provisions for the future in science and technology, but nowadays it is increasingly being used in territorial issues. Although the use of foresight tools in the tourism realm has been limited, there is a growing need to manage the increasing uncertainty that surrounds tourism development. Based on these premises, this paper tries to prove the capability of foresight tools to anticipate the impacts of complex global challenges on the tourism field. This assumption is tested through a future vision exercise which explores the evolution of tourism demand segments and its implications in planning tourism destinations. Two major demand segments are visualised for the year 2020 horizon: “Niche and Innovative Demand” and “Massive and Predictable Demand”. For both segments, the tourism consumption chain value is displayed and spatial design guidelines are recommended for sun and beach destinations.

 
Vol. 2 No. 2
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Vol. 2 No. 1
Vol. 1 No. 1
Vol. 3 No. 1