Abstract
Previous studies of service-oriented tourist city networks have often focused on the analysis of the geographical distributions and service roles of important cities instead of the connections and hierarchical tendencies between different types of cities within a whole region. The current study uses big data approaches for the regional connections of 38 tourism organizations, including famous hotels, air passenger transport services, and tourism service agencies, across 63 of the most important tourist cities in China. Fuzzy c-means clustering analysis is used to define eight city arena clusters. According to the distributions of connectivity between the 63 cities, these eight clusters play different functional service roles in the urban tourism network in four hierarchies. With their “center–edge” memberships, these arena clusters are formed by the interweaved process of regional and hierarchical tourism service connections. The results here include analysis of the various service-oriented tourist cities in China and point out the geographical “gap” faced by networks. Service-oriented tourist cities need to find their hierarchies and positioning in the network, scientifically speaking, to avoid blind development and to support sustainable regional tourism development in urban areas.
Highlights
One of most important academic viewpoints in Manuel Castells’ theory points out that “the deep combination between the information technology revolution and capitalist reorganization constructs the flow network social space
Hierarchical tendencies were found in the eight clusters, and the regional patterns of the service-oriented tourist city network featured broad diversity
In the fuzzy c-means clustering analysis, we find that there are hybrid tourist cities, and the analysis found that different “center–edge” clusters or arenas have the possibility of cross-group interaction, which is closer to the reality of tourism services
Summary
One of most important academic viewpoints in Manuel Castells’ theory points out that “the deep combination between the information technology revolution and capitalist reorganization constructs the flow network social space. The city is a spatial unit of labor reproduction or a space fragment in the network society, and the network society is composed of multiple cities” [1]. He thinks that network society relates to such practice phenomena where important tourist cities across some specific large regions are used by different capitals as “basing points” in the connection networks of service and production [2]. The lack of theoretical agreement on the defining characteristics of tourist cities in Manuel Castells’ theory has resulted in scientific taxonomies, which are usually limited to focusing on the highest cities in the hierarchies [3]. One of the main consequences of this problem is associated with Friedman’s description of complex spatial hierarchies, i.e., cities that are lower in rank or appear less important are still not evaluated in this transnational or regional hierarchy [5]
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