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The research is based on the analysis of recent experiences of participative processes in the reuse and maintenance of contexts considered as “urban waste,” focusing on their role in smart sustainable development processes. The recognition of discarded urban spaces/buildings as regeneration opportunities opens up new perspectives on the communities’ commitments and responsibilities, in new governance models. These experiences, better known as “commons,” highlight the active role of communities in establishing new unconventional forms of value creation and production based on circular processes and interdependences between city and communities. Circularization and synergies are the fundamental precondition for smart sustainable development. Assuming the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach as general framework, the phenomenon of commons represents an opportunity to make it operational through an integrated methodology based on the recovery of the environment built according to an inclusive and hybrid approach, configured by culture and shared with local communities. In this perspective, this contribution proposes an evaluation framework not only to monitor the results and impacts produced by these experiences, but also to stimulate and improve awareness, self-learning and self-evaluation processes of the actors involved in regeneration processes toward a smart sustainable development.

Effective interpretation of Australia’s unique landscapes has the potential to contribute to international tourists’ understanding of natural processes, as well as enhance their perceptions and appreciation of this environment. Research indicates that mystery, familiarity, and comprehension all influence how humans view landscapes and that preferences and perceptions are likely to be culturally determined. This chapter explores human perceptions of landscapes and highlights key differences in Western and Chinese approaches to experiencing and interpreting natural environments. It presents results of a study that used photo-elicitation to explore Chinese students’ perceptions of, and preferences for, six Australian landscapes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications and recommendations for interpreting Australian landscapes for Chinese audiences.

The reflections in this chapter explore the genesis of tourism geography in the Netherlands and Belgium marked by political and linguistic constraints, plus historical, political, and cultural factors, as well as the footprints of some pioneers. The dual language use of French and Dutch/Flemish has often been offered as an excuse for the low profile of the region’s universities in international knowledge networks. However, thanks to the involvement in thematic networks and a growing pressure for researchers to publish internationally in peer-reviewed journals, the research landscape in tourism has definitely changed. Geographical and spatial approaches to tourism have led to a colorful research landscape today.

This chapter reflects upon the trajectory of research in the geography of tourism in Spain. It begins with a review, including the evolution of the main topics present in the subdiscipline, with a special focus on developments since the 1990s. This is followed by an analysis of the current role and potential impact of academic tourism geography and a discussion on the recent growth in the publication of research results in international journals. Of importance are the institutional factors that explain the increasing recognition of research on the geography of tourism in Spain. Finally, the chapter discusses the hegemony of positivist approaches pivoting on land use, local and regional development, impact analysis, and landscape transformation, as well as the emerging links between Spanish tourism geography and the international mainstream schools of thought.

Although the concept of destination is often described as an economic term that describes places of interest for tourists and visitors, currently, there is still little awareness in the extant literature about regional, city, village, resort, or even standalone tourist destinations. This chapter aims to clarify the meaning of destinations. It distinguishes the differences between common locations and tourist destinations. It uses case studies to describe places, placemaking, and the experiencescapes of various destinations. This contribution implies that tourist attractions differentiate themselves from other places, as they offer accessible attractions with amenities.

Travel and tourism have had a long history in the Nordic countries, but research on tourism has a relatively short tradition in the region. Recently, academic interest in the Nordic tourism space has grown and diversified especially as a result of increasing numbers of academics and institutions involved with tourism geographies and studies and education in the region. The Nordic context has provided thematic focus areas for empirical studies that characterize tourism geographies in the region, with topics including nature-based tourism, utilization of wilderness areas, second-home and rural developments, impacts in peripheries, and tourism as a tool for regional development. In addition, there are emerging research themes outside of the traditional core topics, such as urban, events, and heritage tourism.

This chapter aims to familiarize the reader with some of the important aspects of tourism geography in the German-speaking countries. It starts with a primarily historical-genetic perspective on tourism development and the theoretical traditions associated with them. The second section describes the structure of the discipline, with a focus on the institutionalization of the field in the universities including their research specialization. The chapter maintains that tourism geography plays a marginal role compared with other subdisciplines of geography, though this is reflected primarily in its institutionalization and less so in the research undertaken. The last section deals with the current challenges and future prospects in German-speaking geographies of tourism from a problem-centered perspective.

This chapter discusses the main research interests and outputs in the various branches of geography that have influenced the study of tourism from a geographical perspective. It argues that the idiographic tradition has been transversal throughout, leading to the growing interest for tourism within the geography academic community in the last 10 years. There is a focus on the birth of specific research groups, mainly related to a constellation of new university curricula on tourism and—with few exceptions of territorial tradition—to an intermittent availability of public research funds. The chapter concludes with a more general picture of the place of tourism within the geography discipline in Italy and of evolving trends in terms of research results, dissemination, and evaluation.

Depending on the research approach one uses, the development of particular bodies of knowledge over time is the result of a combination of agency, chance, opportunity, patronage, power, or structure. This particular account of the development of geographies of tourism stresses its place as understood within the context of different approaches, different research behaviors and foci, and its location within the wider research community and society. The chapter charts the development of different epistemological, methodological, and theoretical traditions over time, their rise and fall, and, in some cases, rediscovery. The chapter concludes that the marketization of academic production will have an increasingly important influence on the nature and direction of tourism geographies.

This chapter demonstrates that despite an unfavorable disciplinary climate for new academic subjects in France, tourism found its place in the French geographical scene almost 40 years ago. The first part traces the history of tourism in French geography until the epistemological turn due to the research laboratory MIT in the mid-1990s. It also focuses on the absence of knowledge of the Anglo-American literature and of multidisciplinarity in French research on tourism. The second part focuses on the valorization of tourism geography research in France, emphasizing the development of multidisciplinarity since the early 2000s, including the creation of a multi-disciplinary tourism laboratory and two journals. The chapter concludes reflecting on the possibility of a science of tourism.