1. Tourism Institute of Beijing Union University, Beijing 100101, China;
2. College of Resource Environment and Tourism, Capital Normal University, Beijing 100048, China
Abstract：As a special type of urbanization, tourism urbanization is an important research topic of Tourism Geography. Based on literature review, this paper elaborates on four core issues of tourism urbanization, that is, the origin, the definition, the driving forces and characteristics and impacts. Differences between domestic and foreign researches are analyzed accordingly, in order to shed light on future deep research on tourism urbanization. The main conclusions of the paper include: 1) On the origin, tourism urbanization in foreign countries originated from the prominence of tourism industry's role played in the process of city transformation and the development power of urbanization, while tourism urbanization in China originated from the spatial concentration of tourism facilities and services towards cities and towns from 1978. 2) On the definition, tourism urbanization is tourism-driven urbanization on the basis of enjoyment and consumption. 3) The main characteristics of tourism urbanization include the increase of tourism land-use and reduce of agricultural land-use, quick increase of population and labor force, appearance of seasonal employment, flexible production system, expansion and obvious style of tourism and holiday buildings. 4) There are three types of tourism urbanization regions, that is, tourism metropolitan, sea and sun city, and portal towns of scenic areas and peculiar tourism towns. Driving forces for tourism urbanization involve funding conditions plus manmade tourist attractions or leisure environment or tourism resources, tourism consumption, positive government intervention and promotion, and participation of residents and enterprises. 5) The impacts of tourism urbanization are mainly presented in three aspects: the development of cities and villages, population and social construction, land-use and landscape environment. 6) Tourism urbanization has become one approach of rural urbanization and breakthrough of newly urbanization, which is of special significance for the poor areas and Minority areas in Western China.
