Tourism, Territory and Sustainable Development Theoretical Foundations and Empirical Applications in Japan and Europe

Welfare rise, spatial mobility, and global information and communication channels (in particular, social media) have prompted the emergence of a specific booming and rapidly growing mobility industry all over the world, namely tourism. The tourist sector (including recreation and leisure activities) has turned into a complex contemporaneous socio-economic and geographic phenomenon, with a multiplicity of travel motives (e.g., entertainment, culture, relaxed life style, wellness, nature, etc.) and with a wide variety of impacts (e.g., urban- and regional-economic effects, crowding phenomena, environmental decay, etc.).

Time has now come to offer a synthesis of the analytical apparatus in tourism research, with particular attention for system-wide, socio-economic and environmental dimensions of this important global industry. Tourism has in the past been a largely neglected field in regional science research. And therefore, it is laudable that João Romão has taken the decision to compose a systematically designed and well crafted monograph on the socio-economic, environmental and spatial dimensions of modern tourism. It offers a wealth of analytical insights and quantitative research tools for advanced tourism studies. It also fills an important gap in the current regional science literature.

Peter Nijkamp, Tinbergen Institute, Amsterdam