Tourism trails as tools for cross-border integration:A best practice case study of the Vennbahn cycling route
This paper evaluates which processes determine the leverage of cycling tourism trails for mainstreaming cross-border contact and 'soft' region-building. Reflecting on the Vennbahn between Germany, Belgium and Luxemburg, the paper shows that the influence of routes on cross border integration depends on the trail's strength as a tourism product, its cross-border institutionalization, and the geography and scale of the trail and the involved destinations. Tourism trails could contribute to cross-border integration, vindicating the substantial money spent on such projects in INTERREG programmes.... Mehr ...
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Dokumenttyp: | Artikel |
Erscheinungsdatum: | 2018 |
Reihe/Periodikum: | Stoffelen , A 2018 , ' Tourism trails as tools for cross-border integration : A best practice case study of the Vennbahn cycling route ' , Annals of Tourism Research , vol. 73 , pp. 91-102 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2018.09.008 |
Schlagwörter: | Cycling routes / Cycling trails / Cross-border cooperation / Regional development / Borderlands / Institutional asymmetry / ECONOMIC-DEVELOPMENT / GERMAN BORDER / RURAL TOURISM / DUTCH-GERMAN / GOVERNANCE / ATTRACTIONS / COOPERATION / CHALLENGES / BOUNDARIES / SPACE |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Permalink: | https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-29027933 |
Datenquelle: | BASE; Originalkatalog |
Powered By: | BASE |
Link(s) : | https://hdl.handle.net/11370/621ffadb-d476-4f88-830e-85b8b79d1449 |
This paper evaluates which processes determine the leverage of cycling tourism trails for mainstreaming cross-border contact and 'soft' region-building. Reflecting on the Vennbahn between Germany, Belgium and Luxemburg, the paper shows that the influence of routes on cross border integration depends on the trail's strength as a tourism product, its cross-border institutionalization, and the geography and scale of the trail and the involved destinations. Tourism trails could contribute to cross-border integration, vindicating the substantial money spent on such projects in INTERREG programmes. However, border-related barriers remain robust even for tourism projects that are best practices of cross-border cooperation. As such, there is an unfulfilled potential of tourism trails in their contribution to cross-border communication and social cohesion in many European borderlands.