Coordinative relationship between tourism and urban development in Beijing during 1995-2011

Abstract

Today, tourism and urban development, both promoting and affecting the urban economic and social development, have become the two focuses of the economic social development studies. At the same time, there is an obvious relationship between tourism and urban development. Beijing is one of the most representative city of tourism and urban development. This paper, taking the capital Beijing as a case, and drawing on the coupling theory in physics, constructs evaluation index system of tourism and urban development. The results show that:(1) Both the level of tourism and urban development in Beijing have increased greatly from 1995 to 2011, and there is a coordinative relationship between them.(2) The coordinative degree is increasing continuously, progresses gradually from imbalance stage to high coordination stage from 1995 to 2011. The period from 1995 to 1997 was the imbalance stage, the period from 1998 to 2004 was the coordination stage, and the period from 2007 to 2011 was the high coordination stage. According to types of the coordinative degree, it was urban development lagged behind before 2001 and was tourism lagged behind after 2001. Particularly, although the general trend of tourism development is positive, there still are some great fluctuations in the year of 2003 and 2008, caused by SARS, Beijing Olympic Games and international financial crisis, suggesting that some accidental events, with direct or indirect effects on the tourism industry, are inevitable during the process of tourism industry development. The coordinative relationship between tourism and urban development linked with urban scale, geographic location, economic development, national policy, etc. The mechanism needs more in-depth studies in the future. In order to make tourism and urban development more coordinative, three advices are given in this paper, including improving infrastructure construction, promoting the development of suburban tourism and urban redevelopment, and exerting the effect of tourism industry chain. Besides, in this paper we just discuss the relationship between the tourism and urban development through macro perspective. In the meantime, tourism has become one of the driving forces of new urbanization, and a number of new tourist cities are emarging along the water and land transportation arteries. In addition, a lot of historical urban districts have been revitalized and have become tourism business districts. The researches that explore how the tourism industry affects urbanization in the cities at different levels with the progress of social economies, from a microcosmic perspective, need to be strengthened in the future.