Vacationscape: Designing Tourist Regions
C. A. Gunn’s 1988 book examined how tourist regions and attractions could be planned to satisfy visitors while protecting the environmental qualities on which destinations depend, using land-use principles and design examples across commercial, cultural and natural settings.
What the study did and found
C. A. Gunn’s 1988 book “Vacationscape: designing tourist regions.” presented a planning and design approach for tourism destinations rather than a single empirical study. The book describes its central aim as helping designers and developers create attractions that meet visitor expectations while maintaining the natural integrity of their surroundings. It covered land-use principles and examples of site design, showing how development could be combined with environmental protection. The examples ranged from campgrounds, cultural and historic sites to shopping areas, convention centres, sports arenas, theme parks and holiday homes. The book therefore treated tourism as a regional design problem involving visitor experience, commercial viability, land use and environmental quality.
Why it is cited
Jonathan N. Goodrich reviewed the 1988 second edition of Vacationscape in the Journal of Travel Research in October that year. This documents contemporary scholarly attention to the book, but does not establish the frequency of its later citation.
Many of the book’s broad planning concerns remain consistent with current destination-management practice, especially the need to coordinate visitor needs, environmental protection and land-use decisions. Modern sustainable-tourism frameworks add more explicit requirements for stakeholder participation, monitoring, social and cultural impacts, climate and resource management, and visitor-pressure controls. Current standards therefore support the book’s integrated planning perspective while extending it beyond physical design. They do not establish that any single design model works universally; destination scale, local communities, environmental sensitivity and tourism intensity still shape what is appropriate.
The topic today
Destination planning today combines spatial design with sustainability governance and measurable management systems. The Global Sustainable Tourism Council’s destination criteria call for coordinated management, multi-year strategies, stakeholder engagement, monitoring of socio-economic and environmental impacts, protection of natural and cultural sites and visitor-management systems. UN Tourism likewise treats sustainable destination development as an integrated economic, environmental and social task. Compared with the 1988 book, the field now places more emphasis on resident participation, indicators, climate resilience and ongoing monitoring, but the core challenge remains similar: designing places that work for visitors without degrading the assets that make them attractive.