Measurement Of Tourists' Space Perception In World Heritage Site

With the deepening development of modern tourism, cultural heritage tourism has become a vital part in tourism industry, and it has aroused more and more attentions. The Classical Gardens of Suzhous are essential part of chinese cultural heritage. They contain a wealth of material culture and intangible cultural information, including Humble Administrator's Garden, Nets Garden, the Lingering Garden, Lion Grove, etc. They have been listed into"World Heritage List"by UNESCO, and have become the common wealth of mankind. Changing with the time, The classical gardens of Suzhou have turned from urban living space to the space of tourism and recreation. Under the background of urbanization and touristification, China's urban heritage suffers a great damage from the negative impacts. Therefore, how to coordinate the contradictory relationship between urban heritage conservation and tourism development, and make a win-win situation for urban heritage conservation and tourism development, become an important theoretical subject.Space perception theory has been an important theory of behavioral geography since the 60s of the 20th century, focusing on the analysis of residents' urban perception space. In recent years, the theory has been applied in tourist destinations. Cognitive map survey is an important research method of this theory, which is conducive to qualitatively describe the characteristics and influencing factors of tourists' perceptional space. However, this theory is lack of quantitative study and only pay little attention to tourists' emotions. Sense of place is an important theory to quantitatively measure the emotional link relations between people and land, and it has become a hot topic of the studies of Environmental Psychology, Recreation Geography and Leisure abroad since the 80s of the 20th century. Most of the researches based on natural tourist attractions, while few on cultural heritage tourist destination. And so far, the domestic is still in the initial stage of the theoretical research on sense of place. In the background of the intensification of globalization, modernization and informationization, the concept of sense of place gets re-interpretation and construction. With the promotion of tourism tide, universal attentions have been paid to the preservation of local elements with significant local characteristics in cultural heritage and the creation and manifestation of local characteristics, and the theoretical implication of the research into sense of space is becoming increasingly prominent.This paper introduces the sense of space theory into the study of space perception theory. With a pointcut of tourists and a case study of The Classical Gardens of Suzhous, it combined cognitive map investigation with a construction of structural equation model of sense of place. Through the analysis of the cognitive map investigation, we depicted qualitatively the composition of the material basic elements of tourists' perception space, the frequency of their distribution and the basic pattern of perceptional space structure. Then we built a structural relationship model of tourists' sense of place of classical gardens to measure the impact factors of tourists' sense of place and their effects on the attitudes and behavior of heritage protection. Finally,we conducted the correlation analysis between cognitive map investigation and the differences of tourists' sense of place, and tried to reveal the coupling relationship between the shaping of sense of place and the characteristics of the elements of tourists's space perception. This study was intended to find key elements of the shaping of sense of place and explore a new study method to construct a coordinated and mutually beneficial model for heritage conservation and tourism development.Tourist' space perception research of The Classical Gardens of Suzhou is a forward topic, which has a complex system and meets the historical background. this study finds:(1) Based on the investigation of cognitive map, this paper depicts basic elements, characteristics and spatial structure model of tourists'spacial perception. Perceptional space contains five basic elements. The frequency of the five elements in the total sample is balance and certain differences exist among the single samples; five elements have a high identifiability, and the identifiability and identifiable images of node and boundary elements are the highest; the frequency distribution of five elements in space has a certain regularity, on the whole, showing a"core– periphery"spatial pattern decaying from the core scenic area of the center waters to the surrounding area.(2) Based on the principles of structural equation, this paper built and validated the structural relationship model of sense of place. The model consists of antecedent variables, measured variables and consequence effect variable. The results have shown that tourism involvement, tourist attraction and tourism function all have significant positive effects on sense of place. And at the same time, the formation of sense of place also has vital effect on tourists'attitudes and behavior of heritage protection.(3) Based on cognitive map survey and test results of structural relationship model of sense of place, this paper explains and analyses the coupling relationship between the characteristics of tourists'space perception elements and the intensity disparity of sense of place. According to the intensity disparity, tourists of the classical gardens are divided into place strangeness visitors, place familiarity visitors, place identity visitors and place dependence visitors. Different types of tourists show some differences on the cognition of map type and the elements of space perception.(4) Based on the practice of space perception, this paper quotes a constructive model of tourists'sense of place, reveals the mechanism of spatial evolution of"space-place-sense of place", and specially discusses the effect mechanism of sense of place. The research shows that the operation process and result of the"Import– Export"System Mechanism, which consists of the antecedent and consequence effect mechanisms, are the influence relationship mechanism of tourists' sense of place in The Classical Gardens of Suzhous.