NS34 Session 33

Title: Rural Drive Tourism: Roads as Experience, Practice and Planning

Organisers: Eyrún Jenný Bjarnadóttir, Reidar J. Mykletun and Tarja Tuulia Salmela

Affiliation: Icelandic Tourism Research Centre, University of Stavanger, Arctic University of Norway 

Description

This session focuses on rural drive tourism from the perspective of movement rather than destinations alone. Instead of seeing roads mainly as access to attractions, we approach them as spaces where tourism happens, through driving, enjoying, learning, stopping, negotiating routes, encountering others and making ongoing decisions along the way.

We are interested in how routes are planned, branded and governed, but also how they are used in practice. This includes how travellers balance transport and experience, how they follow, adapt or avoid suggested routes and how navigation tools, information and in-car activities shape attention to surroundings and engagement with place.

We also welcome perspectives on safety and risk, including preparedness, driving cultures and accidents as well as everyday frictions between visitors, residents and different road users. Finally, we invite contributions that look at roads in a longer perspective: their histories, their role in regional development and how infrastructure, planning and sustainability ambitions influence mobility and experiences in rural areas.

In the context of a changing tourism landscape, rural roads also become sites of transition. Shifts towards electrification, new mobility patterns and changing expectations of sustainability reshape both infrastructure and everyday travel practices. Studying drive tourism therefore offers a concrete way to understand how tourism adapts (or struggles to adapt) to broader environmental and societal change. The session aims to bring together different approaches to better understand the road not only as infrastructure, but as a lived and negotiated tourism space.