Community Fragmentation? A 15-Year Study of Residents Perception on Tourism Development

Abstract

Tourism development may result in polarization among the community residents with simple social relations, mutual misunderstanding or even hostility between the foreign residents and indigenous residents. Such conflict and estrangement between resident relationship is called the “effect of community fragmentation” of tourism development. Based on a study of Ciqikou, which is an ancient town, this paper found that, the “effect of community fragmentation” did exist and such effect may cause the “crowding-out effect”, which would influence the continuous development of tourism. Therefore, the paper proposes that a new benefit mechanism for tourism must be explored, to benefit all the residents in scenic region from the tourism development; to avoid the “crowding-out effect”, legislation based on house reservation to indigenous residents must be enacted to ensure their residences would not be occupied by external capital; tourism development must take the realization of community development as the basic target.