Identifying Tourist Places of Interest Based on Digital Imprints: Towards a Sustainable Smart City

Luis Encalada, Inês Boavida-Portugal, Carlos Cardoso Ferreira and Jorge Rocha
Additional contact information
Luis Encalada: Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, Universidade de Lisboa, Rua Branca Edmée Marques, 1600-276 Lisboa, Portugal
Inês Boavida-Portugal: Department of Spatial Planning and Environment, University of Groningen (RUG) P.O. Box 800, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands
Carlos Cardoso Ferreira: Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, Universidade de Lisboa, Rua Branca Edmée Marques, 1600-276 Lisboa, Portugal
Jorge Rocha: Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, Universidade de Lisboa, Rua Branca Edmée Marques, 1600-276 Lisboa, Portugal

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, issue 12, 1-19

Abstract: As cities become increasingly complex, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) bring smartness into organisations and communities, contributing to a more competitive tourism destination, i.e., smart tourism destinations. Enhanced information access coupled with a new kind of tourists avid for online content and predisposed to share information on social media, allows for a better understanding of tourist behaviour regarding their spatial distribution in urban destinations. Thus, smart tourism portrays individuals as information makers, refining the available alternatives for tracking their location. Big data analytics is a technology with the potential to develop Smart City services. From the analysis of the spatial distribution of tourists in the city of Lisbon based on data collected from the ‘Panoramio’ social network, we identify the most popular places in the city in a context of tourist visits. This new data largely contributes to understanding the consumption of space within urban tourist destinations and therefore enables us to differentiate the overcrowded places from the ones with potential to grow. This allows decision-makers to imagine new ways of planning and managing towards a sustainable ‘smart’ future.

Keywords: smart city; smart tourism; big data; sustainability; social networks; geotagged photos (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/12/2317/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/12/2317/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:9:y:2017:i:12:p:2317-:d:122794

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().