ABSTRACT
There has always been a link between tourism and property development. Within European literature works such as Frank’s (1920) book on the economics of the Roman Republic leads one to believe that Roman property speculators built villas on the Italian coast-line to sell to the emergent merchant classes in the second century BC. However, it was in the nineteenth century, as part of the Industrial Revolution that created both a new management and administrative class and ease of access through rail transport, that one began to see the development of purpose-built coastal resorts combining property development in locations such as Bournemouth and Nice (Meller 2001). In modern China, such a development model has come to be regarded as the ideal choice for city planning. This chapter examines the characteristics of the real estate and tourism interactive development model by taking the Overseas Chinese Town in Shenzhen as a case study.
