Tourism flow and the consumption of aesthetic landscape values in high-elevation mountain areas in the Alps: A cartographic and spatio-market methodology

Abstract

The process of assigning, changing and promoting place-names and points-of-interest on maps and panoramas raises public eco-cultural interest in Alpine landscapes. The maps territorialise the bio or constructed regions. This led to a misperception of unchanging place-names and points-of-interest, accessibility, feature types or land cover on the ordnance survey saturated maps. Yet, these are subjected to a more profound temporality due to climate change and the change in tourism consumption of aesthetic landscape values. Founded on the cartographic theory and field surveys in Alto Adige/Südtirol, this paper introduces a new spatio-market analysis methodology. The methodology spatially segments the landscape characteristics and funnels the visitor preference into different levels of tourism flow and landscape attraction points. Unlike the monitoring points of tourism flow or the randomly distributed viewpoints used in the scenic beauty models, this methodology analyses the planned and actual points-of-eco-cultural-interest in the market space, i.e., ‘Impact Density of Tourism Flow’ indicator.