Urban Tourism Research Research Articles

Good news urban tourism researchers! 19 ways to enhance the usefulness of your observational video analysis research

PurposeThe present article encourages urban tourism researchers use pre-recorded (like YouTube, TikTok and security camera footage) and self-recorded video data in research. The author highlighted the benefits of doing so for urban tourism scholars, as well as ways in which these investigators can use the observational video analysis technique to produce convincing findings and advance their field.Design/methodology/approachTo accomplish the purpose, the author reviewed 25 scholarly articles on the topic from several fields.FindingsOne benefit of observational video analysis research (OVAR), the author highlighted, was the ability of scholars in different locations to simultaneously observe interactions, the focus of the study, in their natural setting and discuss them. This practice is not possible with traditional ethnographic research. Also, one way the author mentioned researchers can accomplish rigor in their OVAR project is through multimodal transcription. With multimodal transcription, verbal and non-verbal happenings in videos are transliterated and later analyzed.Research limitations/implicationsIt is hoped because of the present article, increased use of the technique in urban tourism research will be seen.Originality/valueThe present article is the first, to the best of the author’s knowledge, to detail how rigor can be accomplished in OVAR in urban tourism.

Arts promotion and Black urban displacement: Exploring the paradox of the positive in government public relations and urban renewal discourse

For decades, scholars in the United States have lamented public policies and government actions that seem to affect, intentionally or unintentionally, already marginalized Black populations. Urban renewal policies and initiatives are examples of government actions that receive such criticism. Arts promotion as a strategic public relations tactic, used to attract middle- to -upper class residents and visitors to cities, is one communicative approach cities take to sell their attractiveness and viability. Yet, cities, urban renewal, and urban tourism research has not received much attention from Public Relations researchers. Critical public relations scholars, however, can help to expose key issues such as displacement and marginalization of Black citizens that are associated with city public relations activities such as promotional culture, arts/city marketing, and urban tourism. Using racial neoliberalism as a theoretical, analytical framework, we examine urban renewal in Cincinnati, Ohio USA, to demonstrate the power of boosterish, government-sponsored urban renewal efforts and the ways such paradoxically positive discourse makes it difficult for the often Black, inner-city communities to challenge advancement that might marginalize them further.

Paradigm Shift for Green Space Planning in Tourism Towns: The Design of Interactive Sculpture

The planning of green spaces in tourism small towns emerges as a critical pathway to promote positive experiences of tourists and residents. This study proposes empirical research to explore the unique characteristics and methodologies of green space planning within such contexts, recognizing the importance of the design of interactive sculptures. The paper introduces a conceptual framework for urban tourism research that integrates a spatial scale with various thematic areas, suggesting a holistic ecological planning approach. This approach advocates for the coordinated development between human and natural systems to optimize overall benefits. Interactive sculptures enhance biodiversity conservation and ecological sustainability in tourism towns by raising environmental awareness, promoting sustainable practices, providing wildlife habitats, and boosting ecotourism. They integrate art with nature to celebrate local ecosystems and foster community involvement in conservation efforts.

Mapping the landscape of tourism cities research: a bibliometric analysis of the International Journal of Tourism Cities

PurposeThis research addresses the pressing need for comprehensive studies in the rapidly evolving field of city tourism. This study aims to understand the overall performance of the International Journal of Tourism Cities (IJTC), the structure of knowledge in city tourism research and the prevalent themes and trends arising from IJTC.Design/methodology/approachA bibliometric analysis was conducted to scrutinize the publication patterns in IJTC. This involved examining parameters such as the annual count of published articles, the keywords used in them and their respective authors.FindingsThe findings reveal that IJTC has a growing and diverse publication output, establishing itself as a reputable and influential publication within urban tourism research. The results reflect various aspects and themes in city tourism research.Research limitations/implicationsThe study has certain limitations. The data used for analysis was obtained exclusively from the Scopus database. The analysis was conducted using only one software package, Bibliometrix. Other software packages may offer different features for bibliometric analysis. The study relied exclusively on quantitative methods for data analysis. Qualitative methods could have provided more nuanced interpretations of the data.Practical implicationsComparative analyses could be conducted between IJTC and other journals within urban tourism or related disciplines. Such research would yield valuable insights into the current state of the field and aid in identifying areas warranting further investigation.Social implicationsThe findings from this study can inform the decisions and actions of various stakeholders involved in urban tourism. Practitioners and policymakers can draw from this research to make informed decisions. Existing and emerging authors can identify relevant topics for their research. Readers can access pertinent information for their needs.Originality/valueThis study offers a unique contribution by thoroughly comprehending the performance of IJTC between 2015 and 2023. It progresses the existing body of knowledge on city tourism research by examining its current status and future trends.

From text to insights: understanding museum consumer behavior through text mining TripAdvisor reviews

PurposeThis study aims to determine consumer satisfaction dimensions that lead to a willingness to share positive emotions through the study of TripAdvisor users’ reviews on St. Petersburg museums. The explorative study reveals the most significant factors that could predict museum visitors’ behavioral intentions.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on the theory of planned behavior and the “cognitive-affective-conative” model to analyze TripAdvisor reviews (n = 23020) and understand the relationship between the affective and the conative components of consumer behavior. Quantitative text-mining analysis allowed us to view every lemma of every review as a single factor for a deeper understanding of the phenomenon.FindingsThe research has enlarged the literature on museum consumer behavior. Behavioral intentions of museum visitors are affected by satisfaction dimensions, especially emotions felt; the esthetic dimension and museums’ surroundings affect consumers’ overall willingness to share positive emotions, while bad service quality and pricing policy make a visit to the museums less satisfying.Practical implicationsManagers can enhance their offerings and attract new consumers by identifying the satisfaction dimensions that influence their intentions to share positive emotions. The research findings can aid museums, tour agencies and government officials in developing targeted products and strategies to meet consumers’ expectations and promote urban tourism.Originality/valueThe research identified the dimensions that influence visitors’ willingness to share positive emotions through user-generated content in the context of museums. The study applies quantitative text analysis based on logit regression, which is a novel approach in the field of urban tourism research.

Spatiotemporal cluster analysis of reputable tourist accommodation in Greater Amman Municipality, Jordan

研究目的为了测试社交旅游网站 (STNS) 的用户生成内容 (UGC) 对在线声誉管理 (ORM) 的适用性, 本研究分析了知名酒店的空间聚类（基于 TripAdvisor 最佳价值指标) 和信誉良好的户外座位 (ODS) 餐厅(基于排名指标)。研究设计/方法/途径该研究使用数据挖掘技术从 TripAdvisor 获取 UGC。 基于（HDBSCAN）算法的分层基于密度的空间聚类方法用于鲁棒聚类分析。研究发现调查结果显示, 最具价值 (BV) 酒店和信誉良好的 ODS 餐厅最有可能位于人口和经济活动较为密集的城市旅游目的地的中心区及其周边地区。 BV 酒店的时空聚类分析形成了不同大小、密度和形状模式的聚类。研究原创性目前的文献扔缺乏专注于分析利用 UGC 的酒店和餐厅 (H&R) 空间聚类的研究。 因此, 本研究首次绘制并分析了知名酒店（TripAdvisor BV 指标）和餐厅（排名指标）的时空聚类模式。 因此, 本研究通过利用数据挖掘和 HDBSCAN 算法显示 H&Rs 聚类的模式变化, 为城市旅游研究做出了重要的方法论贡献。理论意义这项研究表明, 著名的 H&R 集中在历史悠久的市中心附近的地区。 这应该是对城市投资环境的应用研究的推动力。实践意义研究结果将为企业家和潜在投资者提供最具吸引力的旅游投资环境的理性指导。

Tourist intensity in medium and small Spanish cities. Urban tourism research using a quantitative indicator: Tourism Intensity Index (TII)

Urban tourism has experienced significant growth in recent decades, generating situations of overtourism and tourismophobia. In Spain, cities such as Barcelona, Sevilla, Valencia, and Madrid face the effects of excess tourism on a daily basis, even in times of the pandemic. The objective of this study is to determine whether an increase in tourism intensity has also occurred in small and medium-sized Spanish cities and, if so, to develop an assessment of the phenomenon. To this end, a Tourism Intensity Index (TII) has been designed and applied to international tourist flows and statistically tested (through cluster analysis and Student’s ‘t’ test), permitting not only a confirmation of the phenomenon but its characterization during the period 2003-2020 and its interpretation from a geographical perspective. This research shows that tourist intensity is a phenomenon that extends also to medium and small Spanish cities.

Why are Unfavorable Signs of Overtourism Ignored by Urban Politics? An Attention-based Explanation of No Intervention

ABSTRACT As the return of overtourism can be predicted with the dying down of the COVID-19 pandemic, the purpose of this study to explore the factors of its emergence. To achieve the research objective, we draw on the attention-based view for the first time in urban tourism research. This paper argues that the attention of city decision-makers can be severely diverted from problems such as overtourism by strong organizational players. Using a comprehensive research model we show how central governmental economic policy prioritized and sustained city hall’s attention to the growth of the tourism sector to the detriment of handling overtourism in Budapest. The outcomes imply that some governmental players, using a toolkit of rhetoric and discourse, managed to influence the attentional focus of city decision makers. This article describes a means by which urban tourism scholars can model the social interactions that may affect decision-making in a city.

Africa’s Capital Cities: Tourism Research in Search of Capitalness

Although African cities are significant tourism destinations scholarship on African tourism is rural biased. This paper centres on one aspect of the neglected urban tourism research agenda of Africa, namely the state of tourism research in Africa’s national capital cities. A review of extant research is conducted on tourism in Africa’s capital cities. It pinpoints an upturn of research over the past decade with a concentration of scholarly contributions on a small group of cities and with many capitals lacking any research on aspects of the local tourism industry. Prominent thematic foci in research on capital cities are tourism and planning related issues and the development and impacts of various forms of niche tourism, most commonly of heritage and culture. Only minimally represented in Africa literature is investigations of the role of ‘capitalness’ in defining and impacting the character of capital city tourism. Arguably, therefore, Africa’s capital cities provide the setting for examining a variety of issues in tourism and hospitality research albeit that ‘capital city tourism’ is scarcely evident in contemporary scholarship about urban Africa.

Urban and Rural Event Tourism and Sustainability: Exploring Economic, Social and Environmental Impacts

This Special Issue on “Urban and Rural Event Tourism and Sustainability: Exploring Economic, Social and Environmental Impacts” brings together eight papers. The papers focus specifically on either economic, social or environmental impacts or consider practical and conceptual overlaps across different impacts. In this collection, authors offer perspective on pressing issues concerning urban and rural tourism planning, policy and development aligned with economic, social and/or environmental impacts. The papers also outline how different approaches and contexts of urban and rural event tourism regeneration, planning and development are considered in relation to the triple bottom line as well as assess how the triple bottom line is considered when planning for sustainable event tourism futures and legacies in cities. This collection of papers aims to present new theoretical insight, perspective and/or recommendations that address further considerations and directions for urban event tourism research, concerning sustainability, policy, development and regeneration. This editorial introduces some directions and references to direct readers interested in this topical area of research going forward.

Future agendas in urban tourism research: special editorial

Academic researchers were provided with an additional forum to exchange knowledge, research and agendas on the critical study of urban tourism and tourism cities with the emergence of the International Journal of Tourism Cities in 2015. Since then, the Journal has been recognized for its outstanding contribution to the urban tourism research by numerous scholars. This recognition was embodied in prestigious academic abstracting and indexing, such as achieving the Emerging Sources Citation Index, and Scopus and SJR indices of above 0.5. International Journal of Tourism Cities also welcomed numerous international scholars to its editorial board, of which some also serve as the theme editors. Theme editors were invited to provide their insights on future research agendas in urban tourism research. With this gesture, the Journal wishes to mark the celebration of the fifth volume in the fifth year of publishing and many above mentioned recognitions, as well as acknowledging the valuable time and effort of many scholars dedicated to its recent success. Therefore, this Special Editorial serves as the roadmap for future research on the opportunities and challenges for urban tourism. It initially touches upon more recent technological advancements and their impact on tourism in cities, calling for better understanding on the concept of smartness and highlighting the importance of social media. Furthermore, sustainability, quality of life, and tourism planning and development have been heavily challenged by sharing economy and tourists' quest for unique experiences enabled by new technologies. Several important questions and perspectives have been outlined – from responsible tourism, to ethnoscapes, to acknowledgement that urban tourism not only impacts the quality of life of local residents but also its visitors. Lessons learnt from crises may bring new opportunities to managing urban tourism, just as in the case of Post-Communist countries. However, with the potential of terrorism at every corner of the world, new research on crisis management is anticipated. Looking further down the line of challenges for urban tourism, tourists’ behaviour has dynamically changed with the help of new technologies. So, has the behaviour of business travellers, for whom we need better understanding of their experiences of being invited, to attending, to post-travel behaviour in relation to business events. Moreover, the need for better understanding of special interest tourism and its impact on tourism management, supply and demand business perspectives, and host community. Similarly, new research agendas should also focus on the conservation of nature and its importance for city tourism. In conclusion, the Special Editorial brings a fresh perspective on new visual research methodology that offers numerous possibilities for research by elicitation techniques and researcher- or research participant-produced visuals.

Historical urban tourism: Developmental challenges in Johannesburg 1920-1950

Over the past decade there has been considerable growth and maturation of research concerning contemporary urban tourism. Tourism in major cities is not a new phenomenon rather it has existed from the earliest times of civilization following the birth of cities. The historical development of cities as tourist destinations has remained little investigated as urban tourism research is overwhelmingly ‘present-minded’. This paper addresses the neglect of historical studies in urban tourism. Using archival sources an investigation is undertaken of the early development of tourism in Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city, which evolved from a gold mining camp established in 1886. The analysis focuses on the period from 1920 when the first tourism promotional activities were initiated to 1950 when national government enacted the Group Areas Act which began the radical reshaping of tourism in South Africa under the influence of apartheid legislation. In the formative years of urban tourism in Johannesburg between 1920 and 1950 two key overarching challenges are identified. These are the challenges of identifying and promoting the city’s tourism assets and of the building of a competitive infrastructure for tourism development, most notably in terms of the hotel accommodation sector.

Where to go and what to do: Extracting leisure activity potentials from Web data on urban space

Web data is the most prominent source of information for deciding where to go and what to do. Exploiting this source for geographic analysis, however, does not come without difficulties. First, in recent years, the amount and diversity of available Web information about urban space have exploded, and it is therefore increasingly difficult to overview and exploit. Second, the bulk of information is in an unstructured form which is difficult to process and interpret by computers. Third, semi-structured sources, such as Web rankings, geolocated tags, check-ins, or mobile sensor data, do not fully reflect the more subtle qualities of a place, including the particular functions that make it attractive. In this article, we explore a method to capture leisure activity potentials from Web data on urban space using semantic topic models. We test three supervised multi-label machine learning strategies exploiting geolocated webtexts and place tags to estimate whether a given type of leisure activity is afforded or not. We train and validate these models on a manually curated dataset labeled with leisure ontology classes for the city of Zwolle, and discuss their potential for urban leisure and tourism research and related city policies and planning. We found that multi-label affordance estimation is not straightforward but can be made to work using both official webtexts and user-generated content on a medium semantic level. This opens up new opportunities for data-driven approaches to urban leisure and tourism studies.

Analyzing and visualizing the spatial interactions between tourists and locals: A Flickr study in ten US cities

As urban tourism becomes an indispensable part of urban dynamics, tourist attractions are increasingly woven into residents' everyday living spaces. However, the spatial patterns of, and level of mix between tourist and local attractions have remained largely unknown. Taking advantage of the recent development in volunteered geographic information, we used Flickr data to examine how tourists and locals' destinations overlap spatially. We combined a density-based spatial clustering algorithm, a dissimilarity index, spatial scan statistics, and location-based tag clouds to explore the potential spatial and social interactions between tourists and local residents in ten US cities: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Orlando, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.. At the city-level, we report the spatial distributions of visitors' and locals' destinations and compare the overall level of segregation between the two groups. Within each city, we identify the hotspots for visitors and locals and investigate the semantic content for reasons behind visiting specific places. Finally, we discuss our findings and provide implications for urban planning and tourism research.

New urban tourism and new urban citizenship: researching the creation and management of postmodern urban public space

Purpose In recent decades western cities have slowly evolved to extend their cultural offer to “the postmodern mixing of public and commercial culture” (Richards, 2014, p. 120) as a major plank of urban regeneration and development strategies. Urban tourism has been central to this and tourists are now an ever present temporary population of cultural consumers in so many of our towns and cities, even in those industrial cities that until recently would not have been imagined as tourist places. Tourism is thus a part of everyday urban life (Urry, 2002) whether we gaze on tourists going from one cultural space to another in our home towns or whether we ourselves are transformed into tourists as we conduct our cultural consumption in places distant to our usual workaday lives. This research note considers the impact such consumption is having on our urban centres. The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect on the way our urban centres are managed, who the urban citizen now is, and in what direction could tourism research take to shed further light on the way we manage, create and reproduce urban life in the increasingly diverse postmodern city. Design/methodology/approach The paper is a critical reflection on urban tourism and offers a future research orientation. Findings The argument is that in light of new mobilities urban tourism research needs to be more politically reflexive than it often is. Research limitations/implications There is no empirical research content so this does not apply. Practical implications The practical implications are that urban tourism research should be about making cities better places and not simply about being policy performing vehicles in a politically light sense. Originality/value The originality of this piece is in the way it mixes urban studies, social theory and tourism studies together to come out with a view and argument on a way forward in researching tourism and cities.

New interests of urban heritage and tourism research in Chinese cities

ABSTRACTTowns and cities have been one of the key areas where Chinese civilization is embodied. China has a history of urban development reaching back over 5000 years. However, cities in China in the past century are also places which have experienced modernization and rapid progress. As a result, the conservation and reuse of the built heritage in China’s cities confronts great challenges. This paper stresses these challenges as well as a few other institutional, cultural, social and economic issues related to urban heritage conservation and utilization. It raises some new interests of urban heritage and tourism research in Chinese cities, and calls for more research on this topic, especially in less researched areas such as industrial heritage in medium-sized cities and cities in peripheral areas.

Exploring urban tourism crowding in Shanghai via crowdsourcing geospatial data

Urban tourism is booming and, as a result, crowding is now recognized as a social constraint in many tourist cities. When related to sustainability, tourism crowding must be considered. However, the way tourists experience crowding is still a neglected topic in urban tourism research. In this study, we proposed a new approach to exploit tourism crowding from crowdsourcing geospatial data which goes beyond the scale, timeliness, and cost of traditional on-site questionnaire surveys. The new approach is based on analysis of 446,273 ‘check-in’ geotagged data from Weibo in Shanghai. The data provided a hotspot distribution of popular urban tourist attractions and a range of factors related to tourism crowding. These data provided deep insights into the relationship between crowdedness and popularity of tourist attractions. This empirical work can be extended to urban tourism crowding management environments for sustainable development of tourist attractions.

Outlining triple bottom line contexts in urban tourism regeneration

This viewpoint offers perspective on pressing issues concerning urban tourism planning, policy and development. This paper outlines how different approaches and contexts of urban tourism regeneration, planning and development are considered in relation to the triple bottom line. Triple bottom line approaches are widely recognized by scholars, teachers, planners and businesses in the area of tourism when planning for sustainable tourism futures. While notions of people, profit and planet are important to conceptually outline, it is important to reflect on the recent literature and examples that emphasise contexts of sustainability. It must be noted that sustainability is often regarded as a term that looks at the environment and financial growth. Increasingly, researchers are focusing on social impacts seeking to address opportunities such as new enterprises, volunteering, education and training, in addition to restored place and community pride. This viewpoint attempts to present perspectives and encourage directions to further consider in urban tourism research, with an emphasis on sustainability and regeneration.

Urban Tourism(s): Is There a Case for a Paradigm Shift?

This paper reviews the international literature on urban tourism, the purpose being to highlight emerging analytical perspectives on the role, meaning, and importance of global travel for cities. It discusses a shift of perspective (and the extent to which we can speak of a paradigm shift, as recently suggested), in order to contribute to compiling an urban tourism research agenda. The ‘shift of perspective’ is discussed according to four distinct - yet closely interrelated - domains emerging from the literature review: Travellers’ Needs, Preferences and Tastes, City Tourism and the Urban Fabric, the Political Economy of Urban Tourism(s), Tourism Management and Planning, and City Images.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF URBAN HISTORY FOR URBAN TOURISM RESEARCH AND PRACTICES: THE CASE OF BURSA

Heritage is the historical result of past interactions. Urban history reveals components of that heritage in the context of a city and helps us to perceive cultural values in their unique connections. Historians have several kinds of references that are used to study urban history. Travelbooks and yearbooks, two of those historical sources, are deliberately emphasised in this study. They introduce not only tangible and intangible cultural heritage of a city as possible tools for sustainability and diversity, but also are essential references in tourism research for particularly historical academic views. Cultural heritage of today together with those lost or almost forgotten can be interpreted through urban history sources within its own methodology but in favour of urban tourism. The outcome is incomparable data for related territory. Besides, it can generate possibilities to enhance not only cliché methods for urban management but also understandings of business leaders. This paper,therefore, underlines distinctive studies of Ottoman Urban History as interdisciplinary input within tourism literature and for possible contributions in improvement of city tourism practices.Urban history studies are considered along with theperception of cultural heritage. The city Bursa is used as a case study in order to exemplify aims of this paper in wider conceptions for urban tourism research and practices. Introduced and evaluatedtravelbooksand yearbooks are hence written about Bursa. Travelbooksare especially chosen from those written by European travellers within nineteenth century. As a result, evaluation also captures perceptions of travellers in mentioned period. Yearbooks of the same era, on the other hand, are also introduced within the concept of urban tourism and cultural heritage.