The article explores emerging forms of nuclear tourism through a geographical lens, moving beyond the dark tourism paradigm to introduce curated darkness as a framework for understanding how affect, multisensoriality, and performativity shape visitors' spatial and embodied experiences. Focusing on decommissioned Cold War bunkers in Central and Eastern Europe as layered geopolitical landscapes, the study examines curatorial, spatial, and narrative strategies that construct affective atmospheres of fear - merging memory, spectacle, and territorial imaginaries. Drawing on collaborative autoethnography across four bunker sites located in diverse geopolitical contexts, the paper highlights how multisensory design (darkness, soundscapes, spatial confinement, and tactile cues) mediates visitors' embodied engagement with catastrophe, survival, and the uncanny. Conceptually, the paper advances curated darkness to capture the performative, affective, and sensory dynamics of heritage landscapes. Analytically, it integrates multisensoriality into geographical approaches to tourism and heritage; methodologically, it demonstrates how collaborative autoethnography can bring important insights into studies of affective tourism environments. By situating post-conflict and post-industrial sites within broader spatial economies of remembrance and spectacle, the study expands dark tourism scholarship and calls for a re-theorization of visitor experience through the geography of affect and curation. Ultimately, it argues that nuclear heritage landscapes are geopolitically charged, multisensory terrains where curatorship, storytelling and affect converge, rendering the experience of history both spatially impressive and politically resonant.
This study examines how tourism-like encounters can emerge from forms of mobility that are neither organised as tourism nor structured through commodification. Focusing on the 112-day Walk for Peace undertaken by Theravada Buddhist monks across the United States, the research investigates how a religious and ascetic journey generates patterns of congregation, travel-to-witness practices, and digitally mediated visibility typically associated with tourism. Drawing on qualitative netnography of publicly accessible social media posts, livestreams, images, and participant reflections, the study analyses how mobility produces relational and affective value in the absence of pricing, branding, and formal tourism infrastructures. The findings show that although the monks' mobility is religious rather than touristic, it generates secondary mobilities in which observers travel, gather, and participate through witnessing and voluntary hospitality. These encounters generate dense forms of social and emotional value without being organised through exchange value. At the same time, increasing digital visibility produces tensions related to symbolic capture without translating into economic commodification. The paper introduces the concept of non-extractive mobility to explain how tourism-like spatial formations can emerge from non-touristic practices. In doing so, it contributes to tourism and mobility research by reframing tourism as an emergent relational effect of movement rather than a predefined economic activity.
This study examines the interactions among climate adaptation policies to explain network effects on climate resilience for island destinations. an existential climate crisis necessitates comprehen-sive policy interventions. in light of inadequate resilience strategies within tourism policymaking, this study examines adaptation indi-cators to establish a priority framework for island destinations. in this article, a detailed case study of the Bahamas is presented, illustrating the connections between agencies and actions as climate-resilient actor-networks. Using a policy document, focal actors were identified from a broader list of connected actors. the structure of these actor-networks is then explained through under-lying attributes of sustainability, direct and indirect tourism impacts, and the prevention and mitigation efforts of climate-resilient actors. the results highlight critical policy areas for climate resil-ience, such as regulation and standards, extreme weather manage-ment, agriculture and fisheries, water planning, and the protection of coastal communities. these findings offer theoretical insights into the enactment of climate-resilient actor-networks, while pro-viding practical guidance for prioritizing policies that build sustain-able and resilient island tourism destinations.
This article examines how UNESCO World Heritage listing and its subsequent tourism developments reshape livelihoods, participation, and cultural continuity. The study case is Jingmai Mountain, Yunnan-a tea-forest cultural landscape maintained by the Blang and Dai communities in southwestern China. The research, carried out 18 months after UNESCO's earmarking, unveils the early tourism developments and the community changes in response to these. Based on observation and interviews across four villages in the area, the analysis integrates Community-Based Ecotourism, the Sustainable Livelihood Framework, and critical heritage perspectives into a new model. The results show that residents assess benefit-sharing through a moral economy in which fairness is defined as proportional return, while participation is channelled through mediated representation via hierarchical local governmental structures. Ecotourism is largely a supplementary, risk-buffering strategy that complements under-forest tea cultivation, sustaining livelihood resilience while re-weighting valued competencies toward hospitality, Mandarin language, and platform visibility. Heritage recognition has strengthened cultural confidence and renewed intergenerational engagement with tea-related practices, yet environmental pressures and regulatory demands expose uneven capacities to participate and benefit.
In tourist cities, pronounced heterogeneity in stakeholders' interest claims and value judgments-particularly between residents and tourists-often translates into sharply diverging attitudes toward street vendors. This poses a persistent challenge for spatial governance, yet the typologies and spatial mechanisms of such conflicts remain difficult to diagnose in the absence of robust quantification tools. To address this gap, the present study adopts a cognitive-conflict perspective and integrates PPGIS-based mapping with a questionnaire survey. We first spatialize residents' and tourists' value orientations and attitudinal positions, then develop a spatial conflict model to delineate areas characterized by heightened cognitive divergence, and finally employ regression analysis to clarify the pathways through which individual attributes, vendor types, and value preferences jointly shape perceptions within high-conflict zones. Results identify S & atilde;o Louren & ccedil;o Parish in Macau-an aging inner-city district with intensive tourism functions-as the principal belt of conflict potential. Subsistence-oriented vendors are perceived by both groups as embodying relatively singular values, whereas experience-oriented vendors elicit more plural and differentiated value perceptions. Moreover, individuals with weaker status and fewer resources display greater reliance on everyday provisioning, social connectedness, and sense of place. By enabling micro-scale visualization of conflict potential, this framework provides an empirically grounded basis for zoned interventions and adaptive, resilient street-vendor governance in tourist cities.
This paper examines the financialization of hospitality assets in Australia through the analytical lens of asset manager capitalism. Using Hotel Property Investments (HPI), a pub-focused stapled Australian Real Estate Investment Trust (A-REIT), as a longitudinal case study (2014-2024), the research documents how institutional investors and asset managers increasingly govern hospitality assets through financial mechanisms embedded within evolving institutional governance structures. Drawing on corporate disclosures, investor presentations, and governance documents, the study traces how mechanisms such as long weighted average lease expiry (WALE), triple-net lease (NNN) arrangements, Consumer Price Index (CPI)-linked rent escalations, rentalized capital expenditure, debt-platform engineering, and active portfolio trading contribute to the restructuring of hospitality venues into contractualized income streams designed to reduce sensitivity to local tourism demand cycles. Rather than directly evidencing community-level outcomes, the analysis demonstrates how governance mechanisms reshape the conditions under which hospitality assets are managed and valued. Spatially, the paper shows how financialized governance arrangements operate selectively across regional and suburban hospitality landscapes, contributing to portfolio concentration in jurisdictions aligned with regulatory scarcity, yield stability, and institutional investment preferences. The study contributes to tourism geographies by foregrounding spatial selectivity, regional concentration, and the transformation of tourism-adjacent hospitality infrastructure under asset manager capitalism.
Ethnic tourism is widely promoted as a rural revitalization strategy, yet its uneven livelihood consequences within local communities remain insufficiently understood. Based on several rounds of qualitative fieldwork in Manghong Dazhai, a Blang village in Southwest China, this study examines how ethnic tourism reshapes local livelihood patterns through selective inclusion and institutional exclusion. Drawing on the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, Bourdieu's theory of capital conversion, and spatial political economy, the study constructs a livelihood typology that classifies households into three groups: tourism-invested, mixed-livelihood, and tea-centered households. The findings show that tourism opportunities are unevenly filtered through land access, cooperative governance, political networks, heritage regulation, and spatial visibility. As a result, the local elite can better seize the development opportunities supported by infrastructure development, branding, and policy, while resource-poor households remain confined to low-value participation. Livelihood resilience therefore emerges not as a neutral capacity, but as a socially conditioned ability to convert capital under structural constraints. By revealing how institutional power, spatial marginalization, and capital asymmetry interact, this study contributes to critical tourism geography by conceptualizing ethnic tourism as a selective development regime that reproduces structural inequality.
