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Studies in Tourism Geography of India: Definition, Approaches and Prospects

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Urban and Regional Planning and Development

Abstract

Tourism geography is a novel area of research and broadly examines the interaction among such themes as ‘spatial organization’, ‘land-man relations’ and ‘areal differentiation’ (Taaffe 1974; Gibson 2008) in the study of the distribution and spatial pattern of tourist places. Tourist activities generate wealth and employment, attract foreign exchange, promote travel and hospitability industry, advance cross-cultural communication and understanding, build infrastructure, and lead to local as well as global development. Pearce (1979) examined the range and scope of tourism geography and opined the centrality of spatial interaction in the geographies of tourism. The geography of tourism examines a variety of areas like ‘the effects of scale’, ‘spatial distribution of tourist phenomenon’, ‘tourism impacts’, ‘planning for tourism’, and ‘spatial modeling for tourist development’ (Williams 1998). The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2016) reports that tourism will continue to grow in most Western developed economies. Recently, Indian geographers have been interested in the spatial dimension of tourism in India (Mir 2016). Given this overview, the objective of this chapter is to address two research questions: (1) how is tourism conceptualized by geographers? (2) what insights do Indian studies provide about tourism geography?

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Department of Geography, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand for awarding me with the Ron Lister Visiting Fellowship during the summer of 2018. The fellowship facilitated the research and writing of this chapter. I also want to thank Professors Across Borders Grant from California State University, San Bernardino.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, California State University, San Bernardino, CA, USA

    Rajrani Kalra

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  1. Rajrani Kalra
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Correspondence to Rajrani Kalra .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geosciences, Missouri State University, West Plains, MO, USA

    Rajiv R. Thakur

  2. Department of Geography and Planning, The University of Akron, Akron, OH, USA

    Ashok K. Dutt

  3. Department of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate, College of Business Administration, California State University, Sacramento, CA, USA

    Sudhir K. Thakur

  4. Department of Geography-Earth Science, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA, USA

    George M. Pomeroy

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Kalra, R. (2020). Studies in Tourism Geography of India: Definition, Approaches and Prospects. In: Thakur, R., Dutt, A., Thakur, S., Pomeroy, G. (eds) Urban and Regional Planning and Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_27

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