Abstract:

The spatialtemporal differentiation of regional tourism development is a dynamic and complicated concept, which has been deeply concerned by academics. As an important type of tourism fields, supply field contains 3 features: field attraction aggregation, field structure and field focal effects. This paper focused on the spatial differentiation of regional tourism development in terms of supply field theory of regional tourism. According to previous researches of field theory and basic concepts, the paper aimed to construct tourism economic space and a series of spaces associated with it, quantify the concept about supply filed of regional tourism, and also provide a method using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to simulate the spatial and temporal differentiation of regional tourism growth. Recent developments in spatial statistics and GIS have aroused an increasing attention on quantitative and visualization of this subject. Based on definition and spatial analysis of relevant concepts about supply field of regional tourism, this paper took tourism spatial density as a variable of regional tourism field, and used the technology of GIS to simulate the regional field of tourism development in the study areas of Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui provinces (SJZA). Major conclusions are drawn as follows. (1) Due to the improved traffic conditions and the deepening of tourism cooperation in recent years, the regional division of tourism spatial density is more significant with the development of tourism industry, but the geographic concentration of tourism spatial density is decreasing. In fact, this is not contradictory. Spatial density of tourism field reflects the absolute differentiation in tourism region, while geographic concentration reflects the relative differentiation. (2) The tourism field of the study areas present 3 levels of field structure, and scope of the 3 levels tourism field in SJZA are similar to that of coreperiphery subregions based on coreperiphery theory by previous study. (3) The extent of regional tourism development, in terms of tourism spatial density, reduced significantly with increasing distances away from city proper (which can be seen as regional tourism growth poles), leading to the appearance of different density fluctuationvalley between different cities. (4) The key fluctuationvalley zones between the city of Shanghai and Hefei lies 50-60 km and 300-330 km to the center of Shanghai. It indicates that administrative boundaries have certain influence on tourism development, which should be considered in tourism cooperation of SJZA. In addition, tourism development level in the whole SJZA improved significantly from 2005 to 2011, of which polarized growth was dominant, especially for shanghai. However, as the tourism development engines in SJZA, the pull effects of Shanghai on the whole area seemed to be comparatively weak, except for those on Hefei. As can be predicted, tourism region of SJZA would still be in the stage of polarizing development in the coming several years, and the characteristics of regional differentiation of tourism economy would still be embodied as polarized growth of city. The results above show that it is feasible to study regional tourism differentiation based on the concepts and quantitative definition about supply field of regional tourism. 〖