Tourism Geography and Planning

The University of Groningen is the only university in the Netherlands that offers a Master in Cultural Geography. Your compulsory courses are taught in Leeuwarden. Students are trained with the necessary critical, analytical, methodological and theoretical tools to contribute to place-related liveability in society. Career perspectives vary from governments, NGOs and corporate roles.

Dutch/EU/EEA: € 2.168 Non-EU/EEA: € 15.900

Graduates can apply their knowledge internationally and locally as:

• policy analysts in governmental offices
• tourism officers
• destination planners
• tourism entrepreneurs
• UNWTO officers
• researchers
• lecturers

During the programme at the University of Groningen we offer support for your career preparation.

The research at the Department of Cultural Geography is strongly embedded in the research programme of the Faculty of Campus Fryslân.

It is labelled ‘tWIST: Towards Wellbeing, Innovation and Spatial Transformation’. Central in this research are experiences of local communities around the globe. The research in Cultural Geography focuses on place, identity and wellbeing and includes population decline and healthy aging.

Topics of recent research projects are:

• Community participation;
• Aging and wellbeing;
• Innovation and rural transformation;
• Socio-spatial consequences of population decline;
• Heritage; evolution of the historical landscape;
• Nature and health;
• Entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility;
• Employment opportunities
• Housing and the living environment of the different groups in society;
• Social impact assessment;
• Social aspects of new technologies;
• Social aspects of agriculture;
• Social aspects of natural resource management;
• Tourism and (cross-border) regional development; film and music tourism.

The research projects deal with the relations between people and place. Knowing your own 'place' is of fundamental importance for the formation of human identity and well-being. Cultural expressions such as art, architecture, rituals and language, and our knowledge and appreciation of nature and landscape interact with the physical environment to form our live stories and the liveability of places. Therefore, the ways in which we construct space and place are physical manifestations of both our imagination and our self-awareness. This perspective allows you to understand and explain differences between places, communities and the spatial behaviour of humans.

Our research is strongly empirical. Students will become familiar with qualitative and quantitative research methods during the Master, applied to the topics of place attachment, identity and liveability. Innovative research methods such as visual methodologies and location-based applications (social or soft GIS) can be used for the Master Thesis.