Can Tourism Development Make Cities More Livable? Investigating 40 Cities in China

The field of rapid urbanization has recently paid more attention to the relationship between tourism development and liveable city construction. Previous studies have mainly focused on the experiences of tourists in tourist cities and seldom paid attention to the perceptions of local residents. Based on survey data of nearly 10,000 permanent residents in 40 key tourist cities in China, this study uses a multilevel model to quantitatively analyse the natural environment characteristics, sociocultural environment characteristics and comprehensive attraction of tourism in different tourist cities to explore their impact on urban liveability satisfaction. Results show that the developed tourist cities do not exactly correspond to the cities with a high liveability evaluation. The objective evaluation of both the natural environment and the sociocultural environment has an important influence on the liveability of cities, but the influence of the natural environment is stronger than that of the sociocultural environment. An intermediary effect exists in the subjective evaluation of the natural environment and environments for liveability perception. Simultaneously, residents' liveability satisfaction varies according to their age, education level, annual household income and other social and economic conditions. These findings provide insights for developing countries to further improve residents' living quality and urban construction under the condition of the rapid development of tourism.