Tourism, Territory and Sustainable Development (eBook)

Dr. João Romão is a Lecturer in Tourism and Regional Economics at Hokkaido University (Japan) and a Researcher at University of Algarve (Portugal), where he obtained his PhD. in Tourism. He also holds a MsC. in Economics and Management of Science of Technology (University of Lisbon, Portugal) and he had international research experiences on environmental studies (Yale University, USA) and spatial economics (VU-Amsterdam, the Netherlands). His research interests and consultancy experience also include aspects related to innovation systems and urban planning. He is a co-chair of the Cluster on Tourism, Leisure and Recreation of the Network on European Communications and Transport Activities Research and a founding member of The Regional Science Academy.

---

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 Joo Romo 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