Tourism Geographies Podcast

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2594716AbstractThe niche field of critical surf studies examines localism as a ubiquitous phenomenon wherein experiences of place and belonging are negotiated through surfers’ differentiated positioning relative to surfing’s cultural imaginaries and geographical territories, or ‘surfscapes’. Beyond conventional explorations of localism as a response to common pool resource dilemmas provoked by overcrowding of wave resources, critical perspectives account for power dynamics related to race, class, and gender in contested surfing space produced through Global North/South relationships within the colonial-patriarchal foundations of global surf tourism. This body of critical surf tourism literature acknowledges diverse localisms as enacting entitlement and/or resistance in occupied surfscapes built on historical legacies of structural violence and settler colonialism. Engaging with novel frameworks of communal governmentality, commoning and translocalism in Global South surf tourism communities, critical surf tourism scholarship suggests that certain localisms represent subversive modes of commons governance and/or emancipatory politics in occupied surfscapes. The state-of-the-art narrative review of critical surf studies concepts offered here centers localism in surf tourism contexts as a lens for recognizing critical surf tourism studies as its own nascent subfield of inquiry in sport tourism geographies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2582648AbstractMass-tourism destinations are under criticism for intensifying climate risk, biodiversity loss, and social inequities, yet practical alternatives remain scarce. Hawai’i typifies this problem: since the 1970s, the archipelago has relied on a high-volume model that drew 10.4 million visitors in 2019 and continues to generate more than one-fifth of the state’s GDP, while concurrently eroding beaches, exhausting freshwater supplies, and commodifying Native Hawaiian culture. Recognizing these pressures, Hawai’i adopted regenerative tourism as a strategic objective in 2019 to pursue net-positive outcomes, including ecological restoration, cultural revival, and community wealth. However, the application and feasibility of regenerative tourism in mature, mass-market settings remain unclear. To address this gap, this research is a qualitative case study of the Waikīkī beachfront hotel corridor. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2023 with hotel sector stakeholders, state planners, not-for-profit leaders, cultural practitioners, and consultants. Interviews were analyzed with reflexive thematic coding and interpreted through an adapted regenerative tourism analytical framework. Findings reveal uneven but significant movement toward regenerative approaches. Public-sector actors and Kānaka Maoli practitioners articulate multi-capital definitions of wealth and pilot participatory supply-driven innovations. Conversely, for-profit operators retain a demand-driven approach, rebranding experiential add-ons as ‘regenerative’ while maintaining extractive infrastructures. The study thus demonstrates both the promise and the limits of implementing regenerative principles in high-volume contexts, recommending Indigenous co-governance and transdisciplinary learning loops to move beyond branding. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2578620AbstractOkinawa prefecture is an archipelago in southwestern Japan. This article examines the urban musical soundscape of Kokusai Street in Naha City, Okinawa’s capital, where tourism, identity and sonic performance intersect to create a dynamic acoustic space of local cultural representation. Drawing on the fields of sound studies, tourism, cultural geography, and ethnomusicology, this article investigates acoustic design through three representative musical sound worlds within Kokusai Street’s sonic touristic milieu. The first explores sound in motion, examining how the city’s various monorail’s chimes serve as auditory markers of Okinawa’s identity; the second considers the mediated and performed sounds of the commercial streetscape, where traditional music, contemporary consumer culture and urban sound converge for tourism consumption; and the third focuses on the vibrant live house entertainment scene, where performances of traditional and neo-traditional Okinawan music engage audiences in an interactive sonic experience that firmly positions Okinawa within the touristic gaze. The article highlights how this particular micro sound world in Okinawa’s urban soundscape functions as a performative space that constructs and communicates local musical identity within the broader framework of island tourism. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2582669AbstractIn tourism literature and practice, pro-growth tourism management discourses argue that tourism growth can decouple from its negative impacts through improved management, whereas heterodox approaches reject tourism’s growth ethic and argue decoupling is infeasible and unlikely. Heterodox tourism scholarship increasingly seeks to imagine what a ‘beyond growth’ transition may entail, through concepts such as regenerative tourism, degrowth, and buen vivir. Among the first UNESCO World Heritage Sites and most iconic Biosphere Reserves, the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador present a critical case study, having experienced a 260% increase in tourism arrivals over the past two decades while attempting to enact a heterodox transition. The purpose of this paper is to examine how diverse stakeholders in these islands construct and contest discourses of tourism growth, with implications for transitions towards ‘post-growth’ or heterodox tourism paradigms. Building upon decades of combined research in Galápagos among our author team, this paper draws most specifically on data gathered from a three-day participatory workshop in August 2023 involving sixty key Galápagos tourism stakeholders. Findings identified two primary discourse coalitions—those critiquing and those defending land-based tourism growth—and compares how pro-growth and heterodox management discourses manifest among them. Findings reveal that although these coalitions adopt different discursive strategies where growth is most contentious, there is shared consensus around strategies for managing growth that align with heterodox paradigms. A key contribution of this paper is to highlight how managing tourism growth in Biosphere Reserves—of increasing concern as overtourism challenges proliferate globally—cannot rely solely on technical interventions. Our findings show how divergent discourse coalitions construct prosperity in competing ways, revealing why inclusive engagement with plural values, contested meanings, and local power dynamics is indispensable for navigating overtourism challenges in fragile island settings. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2325932AbstractThe tourist area life cycle has been in existence for over four decades since its publication in The Canadian Geographer and was described as ‘one of the most cited and contentious areas of tourism knowledge….(and) has gone on to become one of the best known theories of destination growth and change within the field of tourism studies’ It was noted as one ‘Of the most influential conceptual models for explaining tourist, development’. The model was developed primarily from the Product Life Cycle model used in business and management studies and modified to explain the process of development and change that took place in tourist destinations throughout the world. The model has received considerable attention over its life span, but has often been cited from second hand sources or misquoted on many occasions. Its appearance in a non-tourist journal has resulted in it often not appearing in various early literature surveys based on tourism-focused sources and for its first decade access to the original article was limited and difficult, as demonstrated by many requests to the author for copies of the article. Electronic access to journals and libraries have resolved this problem, but its considerable visibility (in excess of 56,000 reads on Research Gate) and use (close to 5000 citations) means that it has possibly entered the realm of tourism myths and become part of accepted dogma in the field of tourism development. This could present problems to those challenging the original concept and introducing alternative or contradictory ideas and propositions, and it is perhaps, appropriate to briefly review the history of the concept. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2462777AbstractThe polar areas have long endured as an exotic playground for adventure in the wilderness. Tourism figures have remained low and hence the regions hold a marginal position in the global tourism system. Today, climate change and its significant impact on ecosystems and communities in high latitudes as well as geopolitical change drive attention to the polar regions. Increasing tourist numbers manifest this. While early travel records and diaries are an integral part of the history of exploration, academic research into tourism cannot be found to any greater degree prior to the 1980s This review highlights major traits in polar tourism research to date and identifies potential avenues for future research within the field. It shows that polar tourism research is a well-established orientation for tourism research today. However, great variations are in place, and far-fetched generalizations about the two polar regions are growing increasingly problematic. In this context, geographical perspectives should be utilized in order to understand polar tourism and its repercussions in a wider context of development, on different geographical scales, and even beyond the polar regions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2598624AbstractPortugal has become one of the most popular countries for digital nomadism in Europe, with Lisbon being a top-rated destination. The global digital nomad hotspots are usually more affordable destinations in which people can live better with their salaries, escaping the high cost of living in Western countries. As such, digital nomads, similar to other types of lifestyle movers, engage in geoarbitrage – the utilization of opportunities for affordable costs of living in foreigner destinations. In Portugal, governmental policies have been developing favorable conditions for these types of travelers. The launch of the digital nomad visa to attract an even greater number of digital nomads supports the growth of this social phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to examine the ways Portuguese government policies are driven by the logic of geoarbitrage, targeting affluent visitors or migrants. Despite the growing relevance of these developments, a comprehensive understanding of how geoarbitrage is constructed and practiced through public policies remains underexplored. This article addresses this gap by exploring the interrelationship between digital nomad visas and geoarbitrage practiced at an institutional level by the Portuguese government. The focus is on the recent Digital Nomad Visa (D8) as well as other residence permits such as the D7 visa previously used by digital nomads. The study shows a pathway of digital nomadism in Portugal from 2007 to the present that has been shaped by strategic policy development of the national government and targeted initiatives like the Digital Nomad Village in Madeira. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates the ways the Portuguese government enacted a geoarbitrage strategy envisioning a logic of immigration of wealthy and highly skilled digital nomads. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2580393AbstractThis paper combines Schumpeter’s creative destruction concept with Harvey’s urban capital circulation theory to investigate the influence of political-economic structures and crisis settings on the development cycles of urban tourism destinations. Using Beirut, Lebanon as a case study, the analysis shows how Beirut’s post-civil war trajectory triggered waves of creative destruction, driven by real estate, tourism, and creative industries, that unfolded in sub-waves across Beirut’s neighbourhoods, reshaping the urban tourism landscape. The relocation of tourism hubs acted as spatial fixes fuelled by cycles of post-crisis capital influx and by tensions between creativity and destruction by overaccumulation. Despite variations in the sources and motivations behind capital injections, their impact on the urban destination’s social and spatial fabric collectively led to creative destruction. The analysis reveals the path-dependent and temporally sensitive nature of urban tourism development patterns, which in the case of Beirut was structurally entangled with broader capital dynamics. Tourism plays a dual role as both a mechanism for advancing capital interests and a source of disruption within capitalist urban transformation processes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2584356AbstractThis study focuses on Las Vegas’ Historic Westside and analyzes how prolonged historical geographies of segregation shaped the area’s tourism present and future. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, railway and highway development adjacent to this neighborhood led to redlining and discriminatory practices. While the area experienced a cultural and economic revival in the mid-twentieth century—with Jackson Street being nicknamed ‘The Black Strip’—it later faced decline and exclusion from the city’s tourism economy due to systemic racism. While research has explored revitalization processes in Black communities, few works have specifically examined their role as destinations. We conducted a qualitative study among Westside residents, small business owners, politicians, and activists to uncover tourism placemaking processes. Moreover, we analyzed archival material, such as newspaper articles, oral histories, and public documents from the City of Las Vegas. While community members expressed their desire to share their rich Civil Rights history and cultural heritage with tourists, they acknowledged the area’s socioeconomic challenges as an obstacle. On the one hand, territorial stigmatization causes tourists to be discouraged from visiting the area due to incorrect perceptions about crime and violence. On the other hand, revitalization strategies that could improve the area’s reputation and attract more visitors might result in harmful forms of gentrification and enhance undesirable kinds of ‘poverty tourism.’ One of this work’s main contributions is the analysis of the relationship between a difficult past and a tourism-oriented future, heard in the voices of those who are often ignored but directly affected by planning strategies and policies. Our findings aim to encourage both academics and professionals working with communities that experience spatial racism to undertake a historical geography approach rooted in decolonial and Critical Race Theory. In line with recent research on Black travel and regenerative tourism, this study advocates for a shift in power dynamics that focuses on inclusion, co-governance, and participatory practices. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2594713AbstractTourism geographers have long addressed the spatiality of injustice, taking concern with the struggles over access to resources and capital that shape inequities in tourism-dominant landscapes. And yet, the substance of justice, that is, what we really mean by ‘justice’ is rarely discussed, with tourism geographers possessing a hesitancy to engage in the constitution of justice, preferring practice-informed ‘bottom up’ identifications. This article argues that there is a requirement to openly discuss the substance of justice, to consider the specificities of claims in relation to one another, avoid extreme relativism whereby all claims to justice are equally valid without grounds for critique, and steer clear of any reductions in its political and analytical utility. To facilitate consideration of a distinctly spatial reading of justice for tourism geographers, we propose a framework to consider injustice as governance-informed situated, patterned and collective in ways that inhibit self-development and self-determination. We end with an articulation of three ways through which the proposed framing brings benefits to tourism geographers: (1) Proposes a distinctly spatial reading of justice, (2) Articulates what might constitute injustice, beyond the universalism/pluriversality binary, (3) Facilitates consideration of the forms of justice worthy of attention. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.