Professor, Northern Arizona University
Alan A. Lew is a Professor in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Recreation at Northern Arizona University where he teaches courses in geography, urban planning and tourism development. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and is a Fellow of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism (IAST). His research interests focus on tourism in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly in Southeast Asia and greater China, with topics covering community resilience, tourism planning, tourist movements, sustainable tourism, heritage tourism, tourism geography.
Professor Lew has authored over 80 articles and book chapters and has written and edited over 25 books, including Tourism in China (1995 and 2003), Sustainable Tourism: A Geographical Perspective (1998), Tourism and Gaming on American Indian Lands (1998), Companion to Tourism (2004 and 2014), Seductions of Place (2005), Understanding and Managing Tourism Impacts: An Integrated Approach (2009), and World Regional Geography: Human Mobilities, Tourism Destinations, Sustainable Environments (2011), and Tourism Geography (2014), among others.
He is the founding editor-in-chief of the ISI/SSCI listed journal, Tourism Geographies (since 1999), serves on the editorial boards of 16 other journals, and has served in leadership positions for the Tourism Commission of the International Geographical Union (IGU) and the Recreation, Tourism and Sport (RTS) specialty group of the Association of American Geographers (AAG).
Key research Interests: Resilience planning, Community development, Rural communities, Tourism development, Sustainable tourism, Human geography, East Asia, Southeast Asia
This Collaborative is intended to encourage international collaboration on the topics of community sustainability and community resilience as they relate to tourism development.
Research Questions: Are sustainability and resilience approaches different from one another in theory and practice? Do they share commonalities? How can the best be integrated to support one another?
