The tourism–landscape nexus: Assessment and insights from a bibliographic analysis

Over the last two decades, the awareness about landscape as a common good and the definition of tourism as a relevant driver of territorial development have both increased contributions to contemporary reflections on places and mobilities. From a scientific point of view, the need for structured contributions on the “landscape–tourism” nexus has been stressed. In fact, tourism and landscape studies are fed by many disciplines, often returning sectorial articles, sometimes lacking in organicity. Considering recent literary reviews carried out through bibliometric and content analyses, the present paper intends to map different ways of defining and understanding this complex interrelation as it emerges from the main research areas. From geographical contributions to managerial perspectives addressing destination planning and development, and from sociological non-representational to actor network theories applied to tourism, among others, the nexus is faced by approaches and concepts that are both specific and recurrent. Expressions such as “tourist landscape”, “tourism landscape”, “touristscape” with their different meanings orient this literary investigation informing a tentative conceptual framework where interrelated spatial, social, and symbolic dimensions emerge with a key definitional role. The general aim was to possibly enrich the reflection on this relationship, providing new definitional contributions and conceptual frameworks able to coherently influence both theory and practice.