Contenu du sommaire

Ice, mountains, sea and wilderness: tourism in the South Shetland Islands (Maritime Antarctic). Tourism in the Antarctic began in the 1950s, but the most remarkable growth has been relatively recent with an increase of 550 % in tourist numbers over the last decade. To date, 800,000 tourists have visited the South Shetland Islands, with a current rate of 5 000 tourists per year. The tourist population is now greater than the number of scientific staff on the Islands and represents between 50 and 75 % of total Antarctic tourism. In the South Shetland islands, there are seven main tourist destinations, and ship tourism is dominant. The development of Antarctic tourism has led to more frequent landings of cruise ships at an extremely limited number of sites, resulting in serious problems of overcrowding in coastal areas which are ecologically very fragile. Indeed, although tourist visits are not very frequent, they are concentrated along narrow coastal strips which causes considerable pressure on the natural environment. The tourists generally visit the ice- free areas for short periods of time and particularly those areas with exceptional landscapes (mountains, glaciers, fjords, craters, thermal waters). From an ecological point of view, such sites are not only the richest, they are also the most sensitive. The growth in tourism therefore makes it necessary today to implement management measures in accordance with article 2 of the Environmental Protection Protocol of the Antarctic Treaty System. Today, tourist activity must be regulated to ensure the management of protected areas and conservation of the environment, just as scientific activity and the exploitation of other resources in the Antarctic were subject to regulations in the past.

Traditionally, travel in the Indian Himalayas was regulated by codes of ethics or conduct and principles set down by ancient Indian sages. Such codes governed in particular the means of travel, abstention from non-vegetarian diets, and teetotalism. Thus, the problem of keeping sacred sites clean and the regulation of behaviour stemming from drunkenness were largely taken care of. With the development of roads and the increase in the frequency of vehicles for transporting travellers, there has been a huge influx of visitors to the Indian Himalayas since the 1960s. The number of pilgrims and tourists visiting sacred sites and areas of outstanding natural beauty in the Himalayas rose at a tremendous rate in the 1990s. To counter this huge increase in visitors, efforts have been made to manage tourist flows. However, generally they have not been very successful in diverting tourists/pilgrims from problem-prone areas. The new laissez-faire approach of the government has led to conflict at the local and regional level. Increases in the number of tourists have also led to an increase in congestion, overcrowding and pollution, a fact which may dissuade affluent ecotourists from repeat visits. This is significant because, on the one hand, the state governments are keen to promote ecotourism and the hill states are highly dependent on income from tourists, and, on the other, administrators find it difficult to manage visitor rates. It is suggested that the problem of managing tourist flows in the Indian Himalayas could be alleviated if lesser known places were promoted for mass tourism, and ecotourists were encouraged to visit pristine remote areas, but with certain restrictions. Combined with targeted marketing and a wide dissemination of the codes of conduct suitable for such mountain areas, this approach would provide a means of sustaining tourism in the long term.

Activities that concern tourism are a source of economic development for regions having attractive areas, either due to natural or cultural resources, but it may also endanger fragile environments. Evaluating and preventing over a long period of time the environment from the consequences of tourist activities is a major task. A better knowledge of spatial distribution and frequent usage over time of such areas can give evidence to pheno- mena like saturation, and give clues to understand what controls individual choices and/or typical collective itineraries. We present two studies based on an survey that combines information on: - the perception and the motivation of tourist practices, - a graphical representation of a trajectory in the tourist area that includes time period information. The first study concerns natural protected areas in the French Ardèche mountains and Northern Alpine Mountains (France). The second study concerns the Dutch National Park "De Hoge Veluwe" and the Kroller-Muller Museum (and its famous Van-Gogh paintings). By comparison, we show that a statistical analysis combined with a time-space oriented GIS (CDV-TS system) prove to be in both cases a powerful tool for recreational areas managers. The resulting information produced is related to symbolic systems based on practices and observed use of time-space. A principle of the CDV-TS system (Cartographic Data Visualizer for Time- Space data) is to give the user an access to data on tourist itineraries in a fully dynamic computing environment. The user selects items (e.g., type of hikers, type of day, type of motivation: such categories are defined from a previous statistical treatment) and visualises the selected list of existing itineraries. A temporal selection is also possible among the itineraries, either at a given time, or on periods of time during the day. The main results or concerns are: • from a fundamental point of view, the interest of developing new tools for both temporal and spatial data that will lead to new hypotheses; • from an operational point of view, the necessity of long term decisions on the development of such areas: insufficiently exploited resources, inappropriated uses, and simulation of consequences of controlling individual behaviour on areas.

Transport planning and tourism: specific constraints and innovations in an alpine tourist context. This paper deals with mobility within a mountain tourist area (Chamonix Valley, France). In this area, there are marked seasonal variations in traffic which have led to serious traffic management problems and to an original management response for public transport. In addition, there is considerable diversity in mobility behaviour, which can be linked to various social representations of mobility. Social representations of public transport seem to distinguish several groups of tourists and residents. Social representations of mobility also tend to structure transport planning and management, creating links between transport and local tourism development stakes.

ve present study on mobility behaviour in winter sports is based on the premise that strategies to modify behaviour entail particularly high conversion costs in this segment of the transport market. Indeed both theoretical reflection and empirical research show that transport as a whole is an area of human behaviour in which adaptation costs are particularly high. In such a context, efforts to promote environmentally friendly behaviour are inevitably limited. As shown by a study of two winter sports destinations in the Bernese Oberland (Switze- ralnd), long-term mobility decisions leading to the ownership of an automobile or a rail pass greatly influence the choice of a means of transport to a sports destination. In addition to the observed domination of winter sports traffic by privately owned cars, there is an extremely high loyalty to the chosen means of transport that is not found in other transport segments, least of all in the routine circumstances of daily life. These empirical findings point to a high-cost situation which it will not be easy to change for as long as the car remains readily accessible to the average household. Analysis of the possibility of controlling winter sports traffic through the various transport actors reveals a clear "lock-in" situation, from which it is difficult for the actors to escape, whether on the supply side or on the demand side. We can therefore not expect any significant change in the extremely car- dependent behaviour of winter sport practitioners in the near future. The study does, however, point to long-term possibilities of changing this situation.

Road cycling in the Hautes-Alpes (France): shared itineraries for cars and bicycles. As part of its tourism development scheme, the French Hautes-Alpes department aims to develop cycling on its road network. Many famous cycling itineraries use the mountain roads of this region to reach some of the most famous passes in cycling history. With the development of shared itineraries, the local authorities are trying to encourage the various road users to coexist peaceably and to attract cyclists to roads with lighter traffic. The study asks whether such measures will help to lengthen the tourist season and to spread tourism more evenly across the region.