The Phenomenology of Lived Experiences of Yazd Historical District Residents in Encountering Tourism

As a society becomes a destination for tourism, the lives of its residents are affected and achieving sustainable tourism to preserve and enhance the characteristics of the residents is of particular importance in the field of tourism planning and development. The presence of tourists in the host cities has positive economic, social, and environmental impact on the local and national levels, however, increasing economic interests have affected residents as well as historical and cultural heritage. With increasing the growing trend of internal and external tourism, sustainable tourism development in a district requires attention to desires and perceptions of the host community to tourism phenomenon, and overlooking this matter can create challenges for tourism development in the long term. Tourism is a multi-faceted phenomenon, and its analysis focuses on two basic aspects. The first aspect relies on the trend of economic marketing and the second aspect is based on the socio-cultural framework. The general public has been opting for the first aspect by examining the phenomenon of tourism from the quantitative position and leaving the gap in the theoretical and methodological research and this gap reflects a complex relationship between the facts and their meanings. This duality shows the dominance of the positivism approach to the study of tourism phenomenon while also implies eliminating a significant volume of cultural and social issues related to tourism in such studies. According to available statistics, the Historic City of Yazd has had a significant growth in tourism in recent years. Considering the fact that Yazd is a religious society, economic motivation is not merely a reason for participation or non-participation of the residents. The factors that determine the satisfaction of residents toward tourism are their perception of tourism, the tourists behaviour, and the impact that tourism has on the lived experience of residents. This research uses the interpretive paradigm and in particular, the phenomenological approach derived from Heidegger's ideas to address the perceptual aspect of tourism from the perspective of those experiencing it, namely the host community. Data collection has been carried out through semi-structured field observations and semi-structured deep interviews from residents in Yazd historical district using the first-person approach and existential phenomenology. The data has been analyzed by using qualitative content analysis method with coding process, and the conceptual framework of the phenomenological narrative of residents in Yazd historical district from the tourism phenomenon and its main and subsidiary elements has been developed. According to the research findings, lived experience of historical district residents (in term of individual characters, lived relations, values) and lifeworld characteristics of the historical district (in term of business space, physical space, social space, and individual-residence space), have been identified as influencing factors in the phenomenology of lived experiences of Yazd historical district residents in encountering tourism.