An essay on redefining tourism. An epistemological approach and town and country planning for tourism

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Goal and objectives of the dissertationThe doctoral dissertation aims to identify the origins of tourism in order to shed light on its present state and redefine tourism both as a subject and a tool. The first objective is to understand the position of tourism in the scientific development process. The second objective that derives from the first is to apply the epistemological reading to the study of French town and country planning developments stemming from the changes in the tourist industry.MethodologyThe first theoretical part of our research mobilised some 600 bibliographic references including significant books, articles and doctoral dissertations worldwide in order to retrace knowledge development in the core areas of tourism research - economics, history, geography, and sociology. In each of these fields, the main lines of research along with the initial comments, theorisations, and conceptual basis, were identified, listed, prioritized and analysed. The second part of our work had only one source of factual information: the daily national press. Two daily French papers - Le Monde and Les Echos - were read over a couple of years (2014/2015), in addition to occasional reading of Marianne, Challenges, Le Figaro Economie, Liberation, and some fifty articles relating to tourism news were analysed with principal component and factor analysis methods.Theoretical conclusionsOur research has shown that the 18th century tourism revolution - alongside the industrial revolution - resonated in that of the 21st century born with the digital changeover because the analysis of the economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) can be transferred there. Indeed the current digital upheaval corresponds to a new creative destruction with the introduction of innovative clusters. This forward momentum is quantitative - the number of international tourists quadrupled between 1980 and 2014, and increased by 44 since 1950 - and qualitative. In the 18th century, Northern Europe, and more specifically Great Britain, introduced the tourist flow. Nowadays, the South does. The first tourist revolution matrix was the British aristocracy. The second tourist revolution is based on the rise in power of the upper middle class linked to international tourism assessed between 700 million and 1 billion people. Related to the development of a global upper middle class, the main source of tourists, now representing over 15% of the world's population, the land use plan mainly based on traditional domestic clientele, hence a rather steady stream of income segment, has to switch to upmarket urban tourism.So, the evolution of tourism is marked by an innovative trend of the destinations, not following a development planning coming out of political bodies. The future is turning towards urban units. Tourism planning is no longer conditioned by secondary resorts in competition with each other, but by large urban units able to polarise distinct areas, that is to say to form ultimately new tourist development lines from a cutting-edge industry and a high class clientele.Practical application of the dissertationThis report is aimed at French tourism-planning decision-makers. Two lines of thought are suggested relating to the impetus and the role of tourist resorts on the one hand and the impact of the hotel and interrelated catering sector on the other. Tourism development based on digital technology has extended the scope of the tourist industry. These changes, together with the move upmarket and the widening of the range of accommodation - whether in hotels or not - has played a part in the diversification of the sector, confirming the necessity of redefining tourism. Tourism globalisation set up on upmarket structures does not challenge the trend known as 'mass tourism' but deprives it of any future prospects. Planning choices, even if they certainly depend on formal (such as the size of the towns concerned, the nature of the territory) and cyclical elements (the type of tourism developed, often inherited from a previous era), cannot ignore these new data. …