Restructuring Integrated Spatial Tourism Planning in the Syrian Coastal Region: Tourism for Peace

Abstract

Based on the Mare Nostrum programme; Project entitled: A heritage trail along the Phoenician maritime routes and historic port-cities of the Mediterranean Sea. This paper aimed at opening discussions concerning a new strategy of integrated tourism planning based on improving the competitive potential of tourist destinations in the Syrian coastal region within land/marine space alike. It is basically to reach a sustainable tourism industry, which could constitute the skeleton of the regional economy. When a step-by-step approach is adopted, including interviews and a questionnaire for a specific sample of respondents, then the TOWS matrix is applied to analyse the information collected, in parallel with the use of quantitative data from relevant directorates in the creation of regional tourism charts. Finally, the data were adapted to build the proposed scenario “2 + 1 Corridors and One Ring” for spatial tourism planning “STP”. Thus, three corridors emanate from the region’s marine gateways; two land corridors directed towards the regional interior to achieve an urban-rural integrated tourism planning as a non-partial unit, while the tourist investment corridor runs towards the marine space. The scenario completes by interaction/integration between these three corridors in one regional tourism network “tourist ring within Mediterranean series”. Hence, this paper is considered as one of the future directive bottom-up approaches to upgrading into multi-gateways tourist ring in the post-war stage for international tourist connecting ports. Therefore, this scenario could be classified as a policy to convey knowledge and culture between nations “Tourism for Peace”.