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Abstract
Tourism area development is affected by the competitive global tourism industry and the complex, multilevel dynamics of the contemporary network society. The strategic planning and governance challenge is stimulating tourism areas to become adaptive areas, being capable of responding to changing contexts in order to maintain or improve the performance of these areas as competitive tourism destinations. This article examines conditions for “adaptive tourism areas”. It does so on the basis of a complex adaptive system (CAS) perspective on tourism area development. The perspective is used to conceptualise tourism areas as complex and potentially adaptive systems, and to discuss how tourism area development can be understood as a multilevel, co-evolutionary and path dependent process. Furthermore, the CAS perspective is used to draw attention to the importance of a degree of diversity in terms of tourism products, experiences and firms. Encouraging a degree of diversity requires among other things interconnectivity among actors to ease communication and coordination, (policy) experimentation for niche-innovations, learning and reflexivity. The article ends with a discussion on the potential of, and constraints on, pursuing adaptive tourism areas from a strategic planning and governance point of view.
向自适应旅游区发展？一个复杂的眼光去审视适应能力的条件摘要
旅游区的发展受竞争激烈的全球旅游产业和复杂、多层次动态的现代网络社会所影响。战略规划和管理的挑战是刺激旅游区成为适应区域，能够应对不断变化的环境，以维持或改善这些具有领域竞争力的旅游目的地的性能。本文探讨了“自适应旅游区”的情况。它这样做是建立在对旅游区开发持有一个复杂的适应系统（CAS）的角度的基础上的。这个视角用于把旅游区概念化为一个复杂的和潜在的自适应系统，并讨论如何把旅游区发展理解为一个多层次、协同发展和路径依赖的过程。此外，CAS的角度也用来提醒大家注意旅游产品、体验和公司条款多样性的程度。鼓励一定程度的多样性要求人员之间的缓和沟通和协调、创新（政策）试验、学习和反思之间的相互连接。文章结尾讨论了从战略规划和治理点寻求适应旅游区的潜在可能以及约束。
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note
Notes
1. Jacobs (Citation1961) is well known for emphasising the importance of diversity. Other notions are also used to draw attention to diversity, such as requisite variety (Ashby, Citation1958; Jessop, Citation2003), redundancy (Low et al., Citation2002), variation (Axelrod & Cohen, Citation2000), institutional thickness (Amin & Thrift, Citation1994), polycentrism (Folke et al., Citation2005), smart specialisation (McCann & Ortega-Argilés, Citation2011), specialised diversification (Pike, Dawley, & Tomaney, Citation2010), pluripotency (Hartman et al., Citation2011), related and unrelated variety (Frenken, Van Oort, & Verburg, Citation2007).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stefan Hartman
Stefan Hartman is a researcher in spatial planning and tourism development at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and at the European Tourism Futures Institute, The Netherlands. His research interests include sustainable tourism, planning theory, adaptive planning and reflexive governance.