STUDIES ON THE SPATIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEME TOURISM CLUSTERS IN CHINA
NIE Xian-zhong1,2, ZHANG Jie1, LIU Ze-hua1, ZHANG Jing-he1
1. Department of City and Resource Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China;
2. Center of Tourism Research, Zhejiang Provincial Academy of Social Science, Hangzhou 310025, China
Abstract There is a fact that the concentration of theme parks attracts a great deal of tourism requisites and also enlarges the scale of tourism clusters. And also this phenomenon arouses great attention of researchers, tourism enterprise rs and officials, this is obvious that this kind of concentration also promotes many tourism items especially about the theme parks to centralize into the same area. If analyzes their growth mechanism, we can summarize that the development of theme tourism clusters is mainly deduced to scale economy, diversity of preference of tourists and the concentration of all related tourism factors. Secondly, in terms of their growth model, there are several characteristics at the deferent development phases. Generally speaking, there are three outstretched models, namely level model, transverse model and longitudinal model. And also there is a tendency that the concentrated items represented from nature scenes to human scenes, and then to some excitant participant items. In all these outstretched models, the most valuable extendibility is the high-appended-value items namely the excavation of cultural connotation and the integration between technology and culture, which plays the key role in optimizing and upgrading the structure of tour areas, and boosting up the competitive abilities. Lastly, in terms of the spatial shape of theme tourism clusters, theme tourism clusters is made from the centralization sites for scale economy, then turn into centralization tourism are as for boundary economy, and then into centralization tourism industrial zone and the key area for external economy. In some relative preponderant area, tourism city also develops gradually, that also means that theme tourism clusters is the impetus of region and the essential requisite of tour cities. As above, by analyzing the characteristics and the processes of theme tourist clusters, we could construct global theme tourism clusters by improving on policy environment, optimizing the whole plan of the cluster area. Furthermore, we could advance the competitive abilities of the theme tourism clusters and construct the global theme tourism clusters.
2005, Vol. 20 
