The Tourism–Landscape Nexus: Assessment and Insights from a Bibliographic Analysis

Sabrina Meneghello

doi:10.3390/land10040417

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the awareness about landscape as a common good and the definition of tourism as a relevant driver of territorial development have both increased contributions to contemporary reflections on places and mobilities. From a scientific point of view, the need for structured contributions on the “landscape–tourism” nexus has been stressed. In fact, tourism and landscape studies are fed by many disciplines, often returning sectorial articles, sometimes lacking in organicity. Considering recent literary reviews carried out through bibliometric and content analyses, the present paper intends to map different ways of defining and understanding this complex interrelation as it emerges from the main research areas. From geographical contributions to managerial perspectives addressing destination planning and development, and from sociological non-representational to actor network theories applied to tourism, among others, the nexus is faced by approaches and concepts that are both specific and recurrent. Expressions such as “tourist landscape”, “tourism landscape”, “touristscape” with their different meanings orient this literary investigation informing a tentative conceptual framework where interrelated spatial, social, and symbolic dimensions emerge with a key definitional role. The general aim was to possibly enrich the reflection on this relationship, providing new definitional contributions and conceptual frameworks able to coherently influence both theory and practice.

Highlights

Landscape studies and tourism studies are two central fields of investigation defining and understanding contemporary places and mobilities
One third of publications are included in the broad research category named “Hospitality, Leisure, Sport, Tourism” (32%); 21% represents, together, Environmental Studies and Environmental Sciences; 16.7% are under “Geography”; Social Sciences Interdisciplinary and Sociology areas account for the 12.8% of the corpus; Economics and Management accounts for 10.8%
Percentages under 5% represent documents broadly distributed among a variety of other specific fields (Figure 1)

Summary

Introduction

Landscape studies and tourism studies are two central fields of investigation defining and understanding contemporary places and mobilities. In the perspective of sustainable development, the European Landscape Convention [4] has strongly contributed in underlying the complexity of landscape as a concept, focusing on economic and ecological components and values in landscape as well as cultural and social ones. Landscapes are increasingly understood as a common resource, constantly changing and in need of continuous assessments on protection, management, and planning [5,6]. The same attention has been parallelly dedicated to the tourism phenomenon [7,8,9,10], assessed both as a relevant territorial development driver [11,12] and a potential negative transformative engine [13]. It is precisely for this reason that there is a need to take a closer look at this complex relationship

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