Does Urbanism bring Tourism?
I stumbled upon this Google tourist map via AllTop. Using images uploaded on Panoramio, Blue Moon plotted the number of images uploaded. Yellow indicates high tourism. Red is medium tourism, and blue illustrates low tourism. Areas with no uploaded images at all are gray.
Zooming in on the map, it seems most urban areas have high numbers of visitors. Beaches, ski resorts and parks are other large draws. But what brings people to travel to these places? Is it the sense of place? Is it the history? Is it the culture?
Most of Europe is highly visited, and many of the major cities in the USA are also popular. But the USA does not have the same popularity of their smaller cities as in Europe. Who wants to see suburban sprawl in Indiana that looks the same as the sprawl in Arizona? There are no small historic towns like rural Italy anywhere in the USA other than in the original colonies. Human developments changed the way people developed because they were no longer creating communities for security. Life was secure enough to be able to spread out and claim their own territory.
If the whole of the United States had been developed similar to historic communities of Europe, would more tourism occur in small town USA? Can designers and planners learn from the small European towns to create new cities that function and bring tourism? Can reverting back to localism and designing unique places start drawing tourists to new communities in addition to old? Tourism is another way to develop methods which measure the success of our communities new and old.
superb read Abbey! thanks for this
I agree. However, is it not fair to assume that due to the size of American states / cities that it is harder to measure (unless in relative terms) the volume of tourism against, say, the smaller areas of Europe. It seems to me as though data would be skewed due to land size and - therefore - concentration of tourist activity...
superb read Abbey! thanks for this
I agree. However, is it not fair to assume that due to the size of American states / cities that it is harder to measure (unless in relative terms) the volume of tourism against, say, the smaller areas of Europe. It seems to me as though data would be skewed due to land size and - therefore - concentration of tourist activity...
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