Spatial Relationships of Cultural Amenities in Rural Tourism Areas

초록

Amenity resources are significant to the development of the rural areas economy and tourism along with population migration and income distribution. For this reason, many government officials have adopted these amenities as main resources of regional planning and development strategies, and especially have used the spatial characteristics of these amenities when they establish rural tourism policies. Therefore, this study analyzes the spatial distribution of amenity resources using geographic information systems and their spatial autocorrelation using spatial relationship tools focused on cultural amenities in rural tourism areas. The study chooses 17 cultural amenities based on the official amenity database in Republic of Korea and finds that most cultural amenities in rural tourism area are not clustered spatially and that, according to the global spatial autocorrelation index (Moran's I), they have few positive correlations. Finally, the analysis of local indicator of spatial association shows some "hot spots" or "cold spots" in the spatial distribution of the cultural amenities, but additional research is needed to determine whether these cultural amenities affect rural economies. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.