Learning Cities: a need for learning to develop mutually beneficial tourist-resident relations
This article concerned with Learning Cities is from PIMA Bulletin 18, the whole of which can be found at this link.
Tourism is among the fastest-growing industries in all corners of the world. It brings substantial economic benefit but at the same time could become an issue of political and civic concern to many world-famous cities, heritage sites and even to whole nations. In the recent PASCAL seminar “Making Learning Happen,” held at UCL, London on the 4th of May 2018, I raised a discussion topic pertaining to the scope of mutual learning among tourists and residents of cities, which connected for some in the room. I thought I should write a bit more to get the discussion going beyond this PASCAL event.
Before indulging myself on the subject of learning and tourism, I would like to extend my gratitude to the organisers of PASCAL seminar. It was very well organised with some enlightening presentations and thought-provoking discussions. Over the past decade, the technological enabled “smart cities” concept is fashionable and very high on the agenda of many city administrators and researchers. It was an honour to be invited and very refreshing to be in a room with experts and researchers who are concerned with the human dimension of smart and learning cities.
The dynamic of tourists and the residents of cities has attracted some attention. Over past decades, we have witnessed rapid development in tourism and the rise in tourist arrivals across many cities, as well as in smaller town and rural settings. Without counting the domestic tourism sector, the United Nations World Tourist Organisation reported another year of record growth in international tourist arrivals in 2017, at 1,323 million, which is 84 million more than 2016. The year of 2017 is the eighth consecutive year of uninterrupted growth unseen since the 1960s. The growth is a worldwide phenomenon. It needs no further deliberation on the usual benefits tourism bring to a city, i.e. economy and employment (Boley & McGehee, 2014; Ko & Stewart, 2002; Chan et al., 2016). Tourism has also helped in developing many supporting industries and cultural activities such as in creative sector, tangible and intangible heritage preservation, and local gastronomy.
Even though an individual tourist usually does not stay long in a city, the coming and going of tourists is a transient phenomenon that could give an impression, to long-term residents, of an ever- present group of people, in their neighbourhood or city. This can raise concerns and may disrupt the life of local residents. The resentment of city residents toward tourists has gained more media attention recently, for instance, Coldwell (2017) reported on outcries of residents in Barcelona and Venice, and Barron (2017) wrote about the similar in George Town, a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage town in Malaysia.
For the past half a century, tourism scholars have investigated residents’ perception and attitudes towards tourism (Gursoy et al., 2010; Nunkoo & So, 2015), and advocated that residents of all kinds ought to be the main consideration in tourism development planning (Sharpley, 2014). Nonetheless, city planners are also in a dilemma as the residents have the political vote, but the tourists have a financial vote, which is not easy to reconcile. Despite a substantial volume of research in this respect (Vargas-Sánchez & Porras-Bueno, 2011), there is neither a clear consensus on the theoretical foundations nor the variables affecting residents’ perceptions and attitudes (Nunkoo & Ramkissoon, 2011).
Learning is another perspective which is not well discussed in the current body of literature. Even though tourist learning is relatively well-researched (Gössling, 2018), residents’ learning is largely under-studied (Saxena, 2005). There are some articles investigating organisational levels of learning (Schianetz et al., 2007) and some isolated cases of learning by individuals and indigenous entrepreneurs (Chan et al., 2016) as well as communities (Chen et al., 2018), who aim to improve their knowledge, skills, ideas, networks and socio-economic status in general, a process of self- gentrification. Nonetheless, learning between tourists and residents, at an individual and community or city level, requires further conceptualisation and understanding. I believe that the knowledge and experience of our community in PASCAL could make substantial contributions in this respect.
References
Chan, J.H., Iankova, K., Zhang, Y., McDonald, T., & Qi, X. (2016). The role of self-gentrification in sustainable tourism: Indigenous entrepreneurship at Honghe Hani Rice Terraces World Heritage Site, China. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 24(8-9), 1262-1279.
Chen, S-Y, Piterou, A., Khoo, S.L., & Chan, J.H. (2018). Hin Bus Depot: A case study of creative sector entrepreneurship in the context of gentrification. International Conference on Knowledge, Innovation and Enterprise, 2018.
Coldwell, W. (2017). First Venice and Barcelona: now anti-tourism marches spread across Europe.The Guardian (10 August 2017).
Barron, L. (2017). 'Unesco-cide'- does world heritage status do cities more harm than good? The Guardian (30 August 2017).
Boley, B.B., & McGehee, N.G. (2014). Measuring empowerment: developing and validating the resident empowerment through tourism scale (rets). Tourism Management, 45(1), 85-94.
Gössling, S. (2018). Tourism, tourist learning and sustainability: an exploratory discussion of complexities, problems and opportunities. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 26(2), 292-306.
Gursoy, D., Chi, C.G., & Dyer, P. (2010). Locals’ attitudes toward mass and alternative tourism: The case of Sunshine Coast, Australia. Journal of Travel Research, 49(3), 381-394.
Homsud, N. (2017). The Effect of Residents’ Attitude toward Tourism on their Pro-Tourism Behaviour: A Case Study of Hua-Hin Prachubkirikhan. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 8(6), 135-142.
Martín, H.S., de los Salmones Sánchez, M.M.G., & Herrero, Á. (2018). Residents’ attitudes and behavioural support for tourism in host communities. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 35(2), 231-243.
Nunkoo, R., & Ramkissoon, H. (2011). Developing a community support model for tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 38(3), 964-988.
Ko, D., & Stewart, W.P. (2002). A structural equation model of residents' attitudes for tourism development. Tourism Management, 23(5), 521-530.
Ribeiro, M.A., Pinto, P., Silva, J.A., & Woosnam, K.M. (2017). Residents’ attitudes and the adoption of pro-tourism behaviours: The case of developing island countries. Tourism Management, 61, 523-537.
Saxena, G. (2005). Relationships, networks and the learning regions: case evidence from the Peak District National Park. Tourism Management, 26(2), 277-289.
Schianetz, K., Kavanagh, L., & Lockington, D. (2007). The learning tourism destination: The potential of a learning organisation approach for improving the sustainability of tourism destinations. Tourism Management, 28(6), 1485-1496.
Sharpley, R. (2014). Host perceptions of tourism: a review of the research. Tourism Management, 42(2), 37-49.
Vargas-Sánchez, A., & Porras-Bueno, N. (2011). Explaining residents’ attitudes to tourism: is a universal model possible? Annals of Tourism Research, 38(2), 460
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