PROGRESS AND CHALLENGES IN STUDIES OF URBAN ECOTOURISM
WANG Xiao-lin1, He You-feng2, Wu Yi-yan2
1. Department of Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture, Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan;
2. Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design, Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan
Abstract The concept of ecotourism emerged in 1960th, and was brought up formally in 1983. After Agenda 21, The International Year of Ecotourism, and The Quebec Declaration on Ecotourism, ecotourism and sustainable tourism are the main stream of tourism industries. However, during the two decades, the definition of ecotourism has always been challenged resulting its bewilderment. And that situation also made the emerging of urban ecotourism full of argument and contradiction.The purpose of this paper is to review the references of urban ecotourism and to explore the trend that urban areas have become the focuses of ecotourism. Considering the point that urban ecotourism has been proposed since 1996, thirty four relative references published both in English and Chinese after 1996 are collected. Four aspects of all the references, including case-study areas, themes of topic, research methods, and locations of researchers are discussed. The result reveals that the theories of urban ecotourism have not been debated in depth and the base of theories has not been constructed yet. The qualitative methods play the main tool among all the references, and descriptive method is used to promote the researchers' hypothesis in some. Reflecting with case-study areas and locations of researchers among them, China was the main country in discussing this topic, and many cities in China are used as case study areas. But most of the research are like the introduction of traveling resources more rather than providing deep suggestions and strategies. All in all, this paper concludes that the relative research, the thickness may have not been formed. Hence, the essence of ecotourism must be held to avoid the operation of urban ecotourism to be covered by fake ecotourism, and become no more than a tool of urban marketing. That will bring a real disaster to the relatively natural areas in a city and make urban tourism departing from the way to real ecotourism. As a result, it is suggested if the distinguishing characteristics are proposed clearly, the relative research in the future may have its contributions.
2009, Vol. 24 
