Tourism as a Vehicle Towards Recovery MAXIMILIANO E. KORSTANJE Department of Economics, University of Palermo, Larrea ST 1079, Buenos Aires, Argentina 1017, E-mail: mkorst@palermo.edu CHAPTER 2 2.1 INTRODUCTION Over the decades, scholars have agreed that tourism showed to be a resilient industry (Hassan, 2000). Let’s clarify that resiliency was a term originally coined by Viktor Frankl who has been hosted in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, to denote the capacity of an individual to overcome to extreme situations (cited in Coutu, 2002). Although such a word was widely used in different fields of psychology, it was imported to disaster studies at the turn of the twentieth century (Rose, 2004). One of the limitations the theory dangles was the lack of variables to construct a multivariable matrix to understand the evolutions of communities during the recovery timeframe. At a closer look, the specialized literature in built environment enthusiastically introduced resiliency as a key factor to understand not only how disasters obstruct the human development but also those strategies which help in disaster risk reduction. Disasters are disruptive events that certainly interrogate the social background accelerating–in some conditions–substantial shifts in the society. The quake of Lisbon in 1755 not only prompted the rise of a more humanist philosophy but also questioned the Theo-centric view, which later paved the ways for the emergence of modern seismography (Haigh and Amaratunga, 2010). As this argument is given, one might speculate that the reasons for and efects of disasters are varied, even if the fear of death remains the same. To wit, the notion of culture is constructed and evolved according to how successfully death is domesticated. Before the hostility of the environment, humans built the contours of security, as a shelter towards the unknown. The culture is never afected by disasters; rather, culture is