Tourismus – Treiber des Wandels oder Bewahrer alpiner Kultur und Landschaft?

Abstract

According to well-known critics tourism is often said to show negative cultural influences. Examples state that the customs, of locals, the traditional way of life and the culturallandscapes are affected and com~ercialized. This critique has also been applied to tourism in the Alps-one ofthe most traditional destinations of global tour-ism. In a first step the most relevant conceptual and theoretical approaches aiming at explaining the relationship between tourism and culture!cultural landscapes are summarized by conducting a broad literature review. Second, the empirical results of existing research on the consequences of tourism for culture and landscape are com-piled. Results dernonstrafe ambiguous cultural effects of Alpine tourism: On the one hand, traditional structures are preserved despite several processes of modernization, on the other hand they underlie a change process accelerated by tourism.