Although tourism has increasingly become an important activity with wide influences on the economic, social, and spatial development of a city, knowledge and interest mostly remain on its industrial performance and promotion. The synergy between tourism and city development is largely overlooked in many cases, resulting in suboptimal design and planning of city tourism activities and unfledged potentials of city development. The aim of the paper is to propose a view of tourism-industrial complex based on a synergistic perspective in order to clarify the systematic characteristics of urban tourism in an integrated, sustainable manner. Availing of bibliometric methods and drawing on city/urban tourism literature, this paper proposes a concept of tourism-industrial complex to cover current complicated and various tourism activities that are embedded in cities at diverse levels regardless of social, economic, and spatial factors. Then, four types of tourism-industrial complexes are proposed, including demand-driven, resource-dependent, externally forced, and hybrid-driven models. Due to the networked connectivity of urban tourism, urban backgrounds, tourism industry, and external circumstances all contribute to a coupling the tourism city development system. The results provide theoretical constructs and policy recommendations for optimization and sustainable city and tourism development.
Keywords: bibliometric method; development models; dynamic mechanism; tourism urbanization; urban-industrial complex.