Abstract
This paper studies the cultural landscape in the prefecture of Attica, Greece, within the context of network science. Tourism is a global and complex phenomenon with a considerable effect on space. Among its diverse forms, cultural tourism stands out, since people often travel to explore different cultures and civilizations. The engagement of different stakeholders in the establishment of policies in regard to tourism development and its relation to cultural heritage demonstrates the need for sustainable spatial planning in cultural tourism areas. According to network science, a modern discipline already contributing to the research in tourism geography, tourism destinations can configure complex spatial networks and be studied in terms of network analysis and statistical mechanics. This paper models the accessibility network of cultural destinations in Attica (ACDN), the capital region of Greece, into a graph, which provides an excellent case study of multilayer network modeling, as is equipped with high quality transportation, accommodation, and cultural infrastructures. The ACDN nodes represent museums and archaeological sites and its edges express possible connections between nodes by different means of transport (car, pedestrian, and public transport). The analysis aims to evaluate the layer’s capacity in the service of the accessibility of the cultural destination tourism market in Greece and reveals two major communities in the structure of ACDN, an urban core and a peripheral, configured by spatial constraints and distinct transportation mode functionality, along with uncovering deficiencies in the public transportation setting of the cultural tourism market of Attica. Overall, this study highlights the requirement for spatial planning and tourism management to be aware of geographical, topological, and functional features of a cultural tourism market and promotes the symbiotic relationship of sustainable tourism development and network science.
Highlights
Tourism is a global, social, cultural, and economic phenomenon, with a high impact on space mainly due to the development of supporting activities, such as accommodation and leisure, and tourist movements and flows [1,2,3,4,5]
This paper models the cultural landscape of Attica into a complex network, aiming to provide insights into the level at which the geography of tourism destinations is related with the attractiveness of this cultural tourism market, within the context of optimally managing the accessibility of destinations, as a major drive towards sustainability in tourism and regional development
Attica’s cultural destinations network (ACDN); the second step includes network analysis [32,33], which is applied between the network layers and the aggregate network aiming to detect topological similarities and differences and to compare the accessibility potential of ACDN between its transportation modes; the third step deals with community detection [34], aiming to separate the multilayer ACDN into communities with the best possible interior connectivity and, to detect areas of relevance based on accessibility in Attica’s cultural tourism market; the fourth step regards an empirical analysis examining the topology and some major tourism attributes of the communities emerged by the modularity optimization algorithm; in the fourth step, conclusions are formulated within the context of tourism management and geography
Summary
Social, cultural, and economic phenomenon, with a high impact on space mainly due to the development of supporting activities, such as accommodation and leisure, and tourist movements and flows [1,2,3,4,5]. When it involves culture, tourism specializes to a form of cultural tourism, which suggests a sustainable drive of development, resulting in economic growth for local communities while contributing to cultural preservation and environmental protection [1,6].
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