Insights from the relationship between urban form, social media, and edu-tourism

Educational tourism and urban spaces are complex and interwoven phenomena of the contemporary globalized world. The extended windows of time that students of higher education institutes spend in the host cities makes them more than mere visitors; they become part of the everyday life of the urban context. Nevertheless, the interdisciplinary relationship between urban studies and edu-tourism remains understudied in contemporary literature, especially considering emerging types of data that can provide new insights. This paper draws on volunteered geographic information to explore interactions between higher education students and their host cities. Geotagged Twitter data was analysed in terms of both spatial density and content. The study was conducted in two coastal cities of Cyprus. The analysis indicates tendencies for student interactions with spaces outside the university campuses—with the majority of tweets associated with non-educational interaction types and venues with diverse spatial signatures. This study argues that edu-tourism is largely associated with urban tourism and it is essential to consider these interactions in decision-making and urban planning to improve both the tourism industry and the urban spaces.