Research Progress and Enlightenment on Tourism Towns in Foreign Countries
With the declining of traditional industries of agriculture,forestry,fishery and mining,tourism has been one of the significant driving forces in many towns.In the context of rapid development of urbanization and tourism,as an important way to promote the development of urbanization and tourism,a tourism town has become the tourist hotspot and new research focus.In order to explore the current situation and development trend of tourism town research,this paper points out the major results of tourism town research based on the analysis of the related foreign literatures.The paper gives a general review of tourism town research on the major contents,in terms of its evolution,tourism impacts,stakeholders,residents' perception,product development and enterprise behavior,planning and management,and then the research theories and methods are summarized.The conclusions provide a valuable reference for domestic studies.Firstly,the relevant researches abroad are rich range from the groundwork of initial tourism development,economic effects to social,cultural and environmental impacts,stakeholders,marketing and sustainable community development.Cases chosen range from developed counties such as occident to developing counties in Asia and Africa.Secondly,the research of spatial and temporal scales are wide,the capacity and time span of the data are abundant and the regional study scale present binary nature,and a diachronic comparative study of tourism development in the same case at different stages as well as trans-regional contrasts study among different cases are made.Finally,the researches attach great importance to the comprehensive analysis of many theories,quantitative analysis and mode construction and mathematical statistics.Based on the condition of tourism town development and the research status,this article proposes that the following work should be accomplished in the future:completing the study system of tourism town research; analyzing the relationships between various tourism elements and town development; summarizing different paradigms of tourism towns; expanding the space-time scale of tourism research; emphasizing comprehensive analysis of multiple theories and the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.To strengthen the theoretical and practical research about tourism towns can help assessing the tourism impacts of small towns,analyzing the behavior of stakeholders and predicting the direction of development,which provides a scientific basis for the sustainable development.