Search results

Mountains provide more than 40% of global goods and services. The ecosystem services arising from the Hindu Kush-Himalayas (HKH) in the form of water, biodiversity and niche products, hydroelectricity, timber, mineral resources, and recreation are enormous. The HKH region is enriched by a diversity of cultures, ethnic groups, and traditional knowledge systems. Thus, it is a paradox that, in spite of rich natural resources and cultures, poverty is rampant. Additionally, the HKH is a hotspot for climate change impacts, but the region has been identified as a data deficient during the 2007 assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since then, some progress has been made to fill the data gap, specifically relating to biodiversity, cryosphere, and climate change. This chapter introduces the HKH region and elaborates the need for modeling in the context of dealing with climate change.

This paper aims to formulate assumptions on home sharing users’ sensitivity toward sustainability in mountain areas and define the sustainability indicators that may be used to search for home-based accommodation in mountain areas.

The paper is based on a literature review of key terms: mountain tourism, peer-to-peer accommodation and sustainability indicators.

Tourists in mountain areas are more likely to be sensitive toward sustainability than in urban areas, so they are likely to expect home sharing websites to provide sustainability criteria for selecting their accommodation.

Home sharing platforms should offer to mountain tourists the possibility to search for and assess home-based accommodation using sustainability criteria.

Most studies on peer-to-peer accommodation were designed in urban areas. The authors state that in mountain areas, tourists are more sensitive toward sustainability and would therefore be more inclined to consider sustainability in their search for a home-based accommodation.

This chapter analyses residents’ perceptions of mountain destinations. The aim is to develop a scale for assessing residents’ mountain images. An extensive literature review and insights from an empirical study of 315 residents of the Serra da Estrela in Portugal, the Alps in France, Austria and Switzerland, and the Peaks of Europe in Spain show that mountain images held by local people refer to the dimensions: mystic/sacred, historic-cultural life; health and affective image. Results were obtained by both content analysis of open-ended questions and by a quantitative approach based on scale items identified as belonging to specific dimensions in the literature review, whose relevance was confirmed through a confirmatory factor analysis using LISREL. Discussion is focused on theoretical and practical implications of findings and limitations are also presented.

The paper looks at local experience and concerns in environmental disasters in the upper Indus Basin, widely thought to become more serious due to climate change. Emphasis is on the lives and livelihoods, responses, and concerns of those most affected. Several events and their contexts are examined. They highlight socially distributed and differentiated risks, losses, adaptive capacities, and available or absent protections. Cases at the village level underline problems relating to aspects of women's work and health; and how, while traditional practices are being enforced to ensure their continued seclusion and subordination, the villages and men's work are increasingly drawn into the modern economy and modernizing developments. Often these trends undermine traditional risk-averse practices but fail to provide alternatives. Some larger disasters reveal a disconnect between research and official responses, and expose the needs of local communities, whether in villages or mountain towns. This study examines how exposure and vulnerability to environmental dangers are a social construct. It leads to an argument for the “professional ear” in these contexts, finding ways to listen to those rarely heard, and translations that respect their concerns. Such work looks at conditions essentially invisible to climate models, and differing in character and approach. Arguably, it should come ahead of attempts to use model results to propose adaptive responses in these contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of different levels of place understanding (primarily typo-morphological analysis) on the nature of interventions within historic urban setting and buildings within the City of Amman.

The research methodology depended on an extensive thematic survey and analysis. The typo-morphological analysis addressed several of Amman's residential hills and their connections with the downtown area. The thematic place survey tool included different units of analysis (e.g. buildings, public spaces, streets and sloped lands between streets) and addressed the values of these various buildings and spaces, their typology, typo-morphology and relation to the urban context, nature of change and transformations over time to mention a few. The extensive survey also included semi-structured interviews about these buildings addressing their emergence, historic context and values.

The paper presents an architectural typology for Amman's architecture and its relationship with the city's morphology stressing the specificity of Amman's historic core and residential hills. The paper also discusses the effect of this level of place understanding on the nature and levels of interventions within historic settings and buildings.

This level of place understanding (typo-morphological analysis) can have a positive impact on the practice of architectural and urban conservation by informing the nature of interventions within historic urban setting and buildings within the city. More specifically, this level of place understanding can, first, inform the development of urban and heritage guidelines within conservation areas in one of Amman's residential neighborhoods (Weibdeh) and, second, inform the nature of interventions to existing historic buildings based on respect of building typology.

This paper contributes to the disciplines of architectural and urban conservation illustrating how place understanding can inform practices of heritage conservation and future policies and strategies concerning new intervention within such heritage places.

This paper aims to offer some key summary points drawn from the collection of articles gathered in this theme issue as to how Alpine destinations can manage tourism sustainability.

The paper summarizes the contribution made by different articles published in this issue and discusses their connection to the strategic issue of tourism sustainability.

The paper presents four key points that contribute to the debate on tourism sustainability: the sharing economy geared for winter mountain destinations; marketing perspectives on sustainability in winter mountain destinations; sustainability and transportation; and the institutional, legal and socio-economic aspects of sustainability.

Drawing on indicators of tourists’ behavior and from the findings of the articles published in this issue, this concluding study identifies the challenges that winter mountain destinations will have to address in the future. The originality and value of this issue lies in the multidisciplinary approach that was adopted – most research on sustainability tends to focus on a single academic stream. Moreover, the focus is on mountain areas with a cross-border perspective, whereas most research on sustainability is designed for a single country, and wider applicability is bounded by constraints.

This paper aims to examine how poetry and prose relate to each other in the context of architectural design education. While the two notions tend to be presented as distinct opposites, this paper shows how design processes are made possible by designers moving dynamically between poetic and prosaic viewpoints.

The paper illustrates and supports the argument made in the paper through a series of images taken from an educational case study. The case study further shows how perceptions of poetry and prose can vary between different cultural backgrounds.

Building on the case study, the paper shows how architectural design education teaches students to establish links between poetic and prosaic realms in a dynamic and flexible manner. The discussion further provides a basis for understanding how perceptions of the prosaic and poetic can be understood as choices made by observers.

Limitations of this paper arise from the specificity of the reported case study and its reliance on the personal experience of the author as a teacher of architectural design primarily at universities within the greater China area.

This paper shows how the learning to move between perceptions of poetic and prosaic is employed in architectural designing and taught in architectural education. In discussing designers' moving between perceptions of poetic and prosaic, the paper relates epistemologies of cybernetics, design, traditional Chinese thought and radical constructivism.

This introductory paper aims to provide a broad overview of the significance and contributions of this theme issue.

This introductory paper draws from the papers presented at a conference on tourism and local development in the Alpine region (Courmayeur, Italy, June 26-27, 2017). Sustainable tourism from different perspectives was a core topic at this conference, and it is a theme widely discussed in the literature.

Sustainability in mountain tourism has many facets, and it involves many aspects of tourism management: mobility and mobility infrastructure; global warming, snow shortage and long-term viability of ski stations; pollution and clean air; price of accessibility; stakeholders’ involvement and networking; and cross-border partnerships. The tourism literature has always been in transition, with many disciplines contributing to its development. Sustainability adds new perspectives that enrich the field and broaden the horizon and discussion. Even though each paper has its own specific conclusion, there are several key themes that emerge from most of the papers. Among these, sustainability is stimulating a re-think of the “classical” products and services provided in mountain destinations, particularly in relation to the winter season. Snow, water and other physical resources typical of mountain regions can no longer be taken for granted, and their progressive scarcity requires a long-term view.

The findings indicate that it will be necessary to encourage tourists to try and explore the wider range of products and services that a mountain destination can offer. To facilitate this, tourism operators will need to configure a broader and richer experience in the future. The issue of sustainability involves many stakeholders, who can combine their knowledge, competences and activities to maximize the attractiveness of a location while preserving its resources for the future.

The value of this paper is that it highlights the key themes and perspectives that sustainable tourism is raising.

This study forms part of a larger project funded by Cariplo Foundation. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the scope to exploit the full potential and upgrade the functions of abandoned or under-utilized typical highland Alpine pasture systems (made by a complex of grazing fields, buildings for temporal animal and human recovery and dairy production, identified as Malga system or Alpeggio), by adopting the property investor’s point of view.

This study has adapted the traditional property development processes to rural buildings, thus generating an analysis model that proves able to define a new destination of use whenever the project considers the reuse of existing facilities.

The proposed model analyzes the technological, functional and territory features of the building to be upgraded, to assess the technical feasibility of the changeover project and identify the highest and best use of Malga-systems. The model has been applied to all the Malga-systems in the Orobie Bergamasche Park; it performed a comprehensive assessment of the development potential of the Malga-systems in the same Park.

The design of the model took into consideration the specificities of the Orobie Bergamasche Park; nevertheless, the method can be taken as an example to be applied to any grazing land in the Alps.

This research provides the real estate market with a new analysis tool that is specific for the rural buildings, and suitable to streamline the procedures designed to upgrade these properties and to infuse new life into the territories that are experiencing a period of hardship and/or decay.

Overall, there is a lack of research using online reviews as a proxy of customer experience when addressing the study of tourism in island destinations.

The current investigation aims to fill this gap by focussing on an African small island developing states, i.e. Cape Verde. This paper reports of tourist reviews extracted from TripAdvisor from “two islands of the senses” as coined by this archipelago’s national tourism organization, specifically Santo Antão and Fogo islands. The data analysis was performed through Leximancer software to generate concepts out of words, followed by themes.

The present research focussed on experiences in island tourism to identify their main dimensions based on visitors’ narratives in online reviews. The obtained results are of potential value to the literature by contributing to a better understanding of tourist experience in the context of tourism in islands in an understudied country, Cape Verde.

Results are presented and object of discussion vis-à-vis scientific literature and conclusions put forward in this journal paper.