Investigation of Multi-Sensory Tourism based on Sense of Place Approach in Tabriz City

The "place" attitude has been expressed as an important component in many fields of knowledge and professional activities. However, little attention has been paid to this concept in tourism that place is a main element. The sense of place enables tourism destinations to maintain their own unique nature and to attract tourists. By studying the theoretical framework of the subject, the dimensions of the sense of place have been categorized into three physical, semantic and functional dimensions, and human interaction with these three elements forms the sense of place. On the other hand, in recent years, tourism market of Tabriz has grown significantly and multi-sensory attraction in the city can increase domestic and foreign tourists. Accordingly, in this research, the sense of place has been measured with three physical, semantic, and functional dimensions, and its relation with attracting tourists has been investigated. Also the research aims to investigate the relationship between the sense of place and attracting tourists in Tabriz city to answer the question whether there is a relationship between the sense of place dimensions and attracting tourists in Tabriz?

The type and method of this research is applied and descriptive-analytical one and also it is a survey in the form of a questionnaire. The study area is Tabriz city. It is the most visited city in northwestern Iran, one of the historical capitals of Iran and the current center of East Azerbaijan province. The statistical sample of the research includes tourists who visited Tabriz from summer 1397 to spring 1398.The sample size of tourists by using of the Cochran formula was estimated to be 384 people and SPSS and PLS statistical software programs have been also used to analyze the data obtained from the questionnaire.

In this study, the average age of the respondents was, 20.1% under 20 years old, 29.7% between 29-20, 33.6% between 30-39, 20.8% between 50-40 and 14.1% above 50 years old,respectively. Most people had a bachelor's degree (37.5%) and a private job (31% of respondents). Also, 48.4% of the statistical sample have stayed in Tabriz for more than two nights and 47.9% of them have visited Tabriz for the first time. Most of the research indicators have substantially expressed the research structure. Among the indicators related to the physical dimention variable, "facade" (0.76) and "element" (0.72) had the highest factor load and "Permeability" (0.35) and "Color" (0.35) had the lowest factor load Due to the path coefficient, the intensity of the relationship between the semantic dimension variable and tourist attraction to the value of (0.37) is higher than other  variables.The t-value between the physical, semantic and functional variables with the tourist attraction variable is 3.79, 4.7 and 3.57, respectivelythat indicates a significant relationship between mentioned variables at the 99% confidence level.

The results of this research show that there is a significant relationship between the physical variable of the sense of place and attracting tourist. Also, there is a significant relationship between the semantic and functional variables of the sense of place with the attracting tourist variable. The semantic variable also explains more than the other two variables of the dependent variable changes, and the physical and functional variables are the next priority. The results of the study can be used to identify important indicators of the sense of place that are extremely notable in attracting urban tourists. It can also be considered by tourists and urban planners. According to the physical dimension of the sense of place expresses 31% of the tourist attraction variable, so it indicates the importance of this dimension in attracting urban tourists. The urban elements and building facades indicators are effective on encouraging visitors to walk around the city, and the "permeability" and "color" ones have the lowest factor load. It was also found that the semantic variable with more impact than other variables expresses 37% of the changes in the attracting tourist variable that indicates the importance of maintaining sense in the city for tourists. In this variable, the beauty and legibility of the city have become more important for tourists. But the collective/ individual memories and security indicators, as compared to other indicators, require more attention. Among the indicators of functional variable that describes 26% of the changes in tourist attraction, tourist satisfaction, recreational diversity and compliance with expectations demonstrate the highest amount, and the event indicator had the lowest factor load. This indicative that there is the lack of local events and ritual in Tabriz city. In fact, Tabriz has performed very poorly in terms of them.