Open sessions > S.5 – Landscapes of Tourism Destinations: What Quality of Life?

S.5 – Landscapes of Tourism Destinations: What Quality of Life?

Chair – Terkenli Theano  S., Professor, Department of Geography, University of the Aegean, Greece

Abstract: Tourism is a major and ever-evolving force of change at all geographical levels, though, perhaps most poignantly at the landscape scale. The landscape of a tourist destination becomes a social interface where local and global factors, parties and perspectives—indeed, all aspects—of tourism come together in the production, reproduction and consumption of landscape and quality of life for all those involved. Tourism represents an important driver of, and target for, cultural and environmental change—both positive and negative—for the destination landscapes. Well-being, gastronomy, and various other special visitor interests, highly related to and dependent on landscape resources, are currently instigating exponential tourism growth in Europe and elsewhere. As visitors’ priorities and consumption patterns evolve we can wonder how the impacts of tourism and the interplay with the destination landscapes affect quality of life in/ through/ for the landscape (new challenges, potential, threats and constraints)? Increasingly, Europeans opt for ‘green’ tourism and ‘slow’ travelling (in 2016, almost one in five adults in Europe took into account environmentally-friendly practices when choosing their holiday destination)— how do these trends affect destination landscape quality? At the same time, certain European destinations suffer from uncontrollable tourism growth and new flexible forms of accommodation which are increasingly displacing locals from their homes and places of residence (Barcelona, Venice, Mykonos etc) and eliciting what has been termed ‘overtourism’ and ‘antitourism’ or ‘tourismphobia’. This session thus aims to explore the questions “What quality of life is to be found in the destination landscapes? How and for whom?

Program

Chair: Theano S. Terkenli, University of the Aegean

• Growth of nature tourism in the Loire valley: transforming the landscapes, promoting the local development? A. Robert [et al.]
• Tourism in terraced landscapes: scenarios and case studies analysis of assets and challenges, T. S. Terkenli [et al.]
• Sport tourism: a local development factor? The case of “Raid in France” in Reunion: which quality of life at the destination landscapes, how and for whom? N. Ajasse [et al.]
• Slow tourism as a new stake for sustainable development of territories and landscape preservation, L. Mazuel, 

Chair: Theano S. Terkenli, University of the Aegean

• Change, resilience and quality of life: The case of tourism in a small island, A. Noussia
• Non-institutionalized forms of tourism accommodation and overtourism impacts on the landscape: the case of Santorini, Greece, E. Saradakou & T. S. Terkenli
• Integrating wilderness qualities into landscape monitoring, B. Zoderer
• How does tourism affect the landscape identity and quality of life? Towards a typology of touristic landscapes based on cases from Belgium and Portugal, V. Vaneetvelde [et al.]