Inhabit tourist urban regions. Six forms of domesticate the space in Puerto Vallarta – Bahía de Banderas Region in México

Abstract

Over the last 40 years in Mexico has been observed the formation of urban regions influenced by the “sun and beach” tourism, such as the case of Puerto Vallarta – Bahía de Banderas. In 2010 this urban tourist region was structured by an interconnected net of economic and people flow, which comprehend around 300.000 inhabitants, distributed in 17 localities of over 2.500 inhabitants each, and a crowd of small localities dispersed over the territory. The aim of this article is to approach the recognition of places and the experiences of the inhabitants of “Sun and beach” tourist regions, insofar as they reflect their capacity to domesticate the space (Giglia, 2012) as well as its availability to be domesticated, with the intention of building new ways of planning the tourist territory. The methodology was constructed from the interrelation of socioeconomic variables, used to construct the functional typology, with special variables linked to physic, use and meaning characteristics of the public space. The main finding of this stage of the research is the linkage of six ways of inhabit in the five functional typologies of the localities that integrate the region. The contribution consist in connecting the functional characterization of the region of Puerto Vallarta – Bahía de Banderas with the inhabitants experiences and the meaning of space; considering that specialized bibliography has considered fundamentally only aspects of economic and functional nature.