Urbanization And Research On Sustainability Of Emerging Tourist Cities

Decades of rapid development of tourism industry has been driving the urbanization of a number of newly established cities across China, with tourism as the major city function. Sanya, Huangshan, Zhangjiajie are the typical representatives of these cities. Based on the research and analysis of this social-economical phenomenon, this dissertation presents a noval concept of'emerging tourist city'to address these cities.China's academic community started to pay attention to this new urbanization model from the late 1990s, but little systematic research has been done yet. With progressing urbanization and further development of the tourism sector, these cities are now facing many challenges such as heavy population pressure, insufficient bearing capacity and gradually loss of their distinguishing traits and culture. Hence, it's critical to reinforce theoretical and empirical studies and find out a sustainable development roadmap for emerging tourist cities.By means of existing urbanization and urban economics studies, this dissertation began with analyzing the dynamics of urbanization and the development status of emerging tourist cities; then investigated the impact of urbanization on the development of these cities. And following the analysis, this dissertation suggested to study sustainable development of these cities from urbanization perspective. Through literature reviews and empirical studies, this dissertation also identified the major problems and obstacles encountered during the development years. Based on the empirical analysis of Sanya City, this dissertation proposed three key aspects for sustainable urban development of emerging tourist cities: industrial structure optimization and promotion, urban planning and supporting infrastructure development. The author wish the study could arise more attention of related scholars to strengthen the theoretical and empirical studies on emerging tourist city, thus provide some guidance and reference for these cities to achieve the goals of sustainable development.