The Role of Second Home in Tourism and Capital Flow in rural Areas - The Case of Binalud Area (Northeast Iran)

Tourism has been gaining fast in prominence in recent years, both in national and international levels and a huge volume of literature has been published (George et al., 2009; Robinson et al. 2011; Conrady and Buck, 2012); Many have focused on the significance of economic aspects of the activity (Oredegbe and Fadeyibi, 2009; Chang, 2007; Azarya, 2004), though others have studied the second home issues (Rahnemaee, 1979; Hall and Muller, 2004; Pitkänen, 2008; Overvåg and Berg, 2011). Moreover, studies of tourism development have often been based on the idea of ‘destination’ as a territorially bounded place (Matias et al., 2011; Williams, 2009). This understanding of tourism and place, though less developed, has been challenged with studies emphasizing the relational nature of place and the role of the tourist’s performance in developing and shaping these in the context of production of these spaces. In this context, tourism in different ways is seen as practice in space that involves multiple spatial mobilities, which promotes different kinds of flows and networks being dependent on spatialitities. Research grounded on these theoretical insights has primarily focused on the central role of tourists may in some face with the risk of overemphasizing the dichotomies found in tourism research between hosts and guests, production and consumption and economy and culture (Jóhannesson, 2005). Some studies have focused on “action-network theory” (Jóhannesson, 2005), others on un issues (cole and Morgan, 2010), social identities (Burns and Novelli, 2006), environmental impacts (Moll, 1995; Hill and Gale, 2009; Buckley, 2011), potentials and opportunities (Wearing and Neil, 2009) and ethics and culture (Fennell and Malloy, 2007; Moufakhir and Burns, 2012). This article is aiming to investigate the rural settlements of Binalud Area, considering the very aspects, with emphasizing on the second home tourism and its role in flows of capital, in a new approach in context of “structural- functional Dynamics” (saidi (A), 1391/2012). This approach to the issues of tourism emphasizes on this point, that the ultimate goal of rural tourism in nonsense isn’t to transform the rural spheres into semi-urban spaces, but to protect the rural landscapes and their indigenous socio-economic values should be the initial consideration in different ways of encouraging the rural tourism (saidi et al., 1391/2012).