Speaker
Description
According to the World Tourism Organization (2024), estimated number of international tourist arrivals (overnight visitors) during the first nine months of 2024 is 1.1 billion and statistics show us that 2024 will be fully recovered the pre-pandemic period. Although Covid-19 is one of the biggest international crises in recent years, the number of travelers has increased rapidly. Therefore, urban spaces where have intensive tourism activities continue to transform. About this issue, the overtourism concept is discussed, while some destinations have been faced discontent of the local people.
Tourism is a complex system that includes many different stakeholders. In addition, these actors have a close relationship with each other in places where tourism activities take place. Understanding the conflicts among stakeholders and identifying problems in tourism destinations can be seen as the first step in a successful spatial planning process and creating useful strategies. For this purpose, conflict analysis is used in this study as a systematic tool for analyzing data and categorizing them according to theoretical framework of (Almeida et al., 2017). This approach is used in various fields in literature; however, it is modified for specific areas in Almeida’s study which creates eight categories in order to evaluate tourism related conflicts in spatial planning process.
Küçük Ayasofya neighborhood is determined as a study area where development of tourism activities lead to spatial and socio-cultural transformation dramatically in. This neighborhood is in the most famous tourism destination of the city called İstanbul Historical Peninsula. There are two underlying reasons why this investigation focuses on this neighborhood as a tourism destination are unique characteristic of this place compared to other neighborhood in this region and having excessive amount of tourism activities and accommodation facilities.
According to results, conflicts related to stakeholder interests and institutional framework are much more than other conflict categories in this neighborhood. The main source of conflicts is about stakeholder interests especially for material and procedural interests. When we look at the material interests, most of them are related to land use problems mentioned by locals and tourism entrepreneurs. It can be considered these material interests as consequence of overtourism. The second most frequently cited conflict category is institutional framework. Conflicts in this category were divided into two groups and mentioned by all stakeholders. Reasons of institutional framework conflicts mentioned by different stakeholders consist of, firstly, the indifference of the administrations about this destination, and secondly the authority fragmentation in planning and the resulting uncertainties. Like procedural conflicts in the category of stakeholder interests, these institutional framework conflicts are generally associated with planning process and governmental issues of the neighborhood.
Managing tourism activities in an urban space is a very complex issue as each stakeholder has different expectations and demands. In this context, the study aims to reveal the reasons for the problems that create conflicts among stakeholders. In addition to evaluating all these conflict categories separately, establishing a holistic relationship between stakeholders and conflict categories is also very important to understand the problems related to tourism in Küçük Ayasofya Neighborhood. Framework provides us with understanding about not only categorizing the conflicts and their underlying reasons but also giving information about which conflicts mentioned more by specific group of stakeholders. It is very crucial for tourism planning and policy making processes for tourism destinations to observe which stakeholder groups consider different conflict categories more important and mentioned more frequently. Determining conflicts systematically is essential for resolving them and a better tourism destination planning process requires understanding these conflicts clearly. Thus, destinations can be more resilient towards crises and destination development process can be more sustainable.
References
Almeida, J., Costa, C., and Nunes da Silva, F. (2017) A framework for conflict analysis in spatial planning for tourism. Tourism Management Perspectives, 24, pp. 94–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tmp.2017.07.021
World Tourism Organization (2024), World Tourism Barometer (volume 22, issue 3). [Online] available at: https://pre-webunwto.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2025-01/UN-toruism_Barom24_04_Nov_EXCERPT.pdf?VersionId=FH4_J87qAor8stgCg9FbM5x8n0WZ2.nq
| Keywords | conflict analysis; overtourism; tourism stakeholders; historical peninsula |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
