Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
In the case of Ankara, Erkip (1997) found that the use of the nearest park or recreational
facility was a function of users' income and distance from the resource. As a result, for
low income groups proximity was more important, with higher income groups enjoying
greater distributional justice. This highlights one of the inherent concerns of welfare
geographers such as D.M.Smith (1977): concepts of territorial justice obscure the social
and economic processes which condition recreational activity, whereby distributional
justice by social group is neglected and access to public goods is constrained. In fact,
Crouch (2000:72) questions the value of such rational concepts as territorial justice that
were used in the early research on welfare geography, since in a leisure context, 'People
behave subjectively rather than rationally. It is easy to apply explanations of rationality to
what people do, but very often that provides categories that do not fit subjective
practices'—again questioning the empiricist-positivist tradition of model building and
testing to understand critical recreational supply issues. As a result of Crouch's (2000)
criticisms of the empiricist-positivist paradigm in human geography which have been
applied to recreational issues, one might add a new category to the geographical analysis
of supply—the interaction between supply and demand. While this results in distinct
spatial interactions, research informed by the new cultural geography (Aitchison 1999)
departs from a model building tradition, to understand the nuances, unique features and
above all, the human experiences of different forms of encounter with recreation and
leisure supply. Again, to reiterate some of the comments from Chapter 2, the approach,
methodologies used and lines of inquiry pursued in seeking to understand the human
geographies of recreation and leisure supply place the people to the fore, affected by
agency, structure and the political economy of leisure provision. This places many of the
conventional spatially derived explanations of leisure supply in a different context,
seeking more theoretically informed answers to conventional place and space-specific
forms of leisure consumption. This highlights many of the tensions reviewed in Chapter
10 on the nexus between academic analyses of tourism and recreation which are objective
and robust, and the challenge of applied geographical research, often for clients, that does
not permit more challenging analyses that are associated with issues of power, control
and political economy.
SUPPLY AND DEMAND IN RECREATIONAL CONTEXTS:
SPATIAL INTERACTIONS
Given the comparative neglect of recreational supply issues by geographers and the
overriding emphasis in demand studies and impact assessment (Owens 1984), it is
pertinent to acknowledge the geographer's synthesising role in recognising that
'recreationalists and the resources they use are separated in space, [and] the interaction
between demand and supply creates patterns of movement, and the distances between
origins and destinations influence not only the scale of demand, but also the available
supply of resources' (Coppock and Duffield 1975:150). Few studies, with the exception
of Coppock and Duffield (1975), acknowledge this essential role the geographer has
played in contextualising the real-world impact of recreational activities in a spatial
framework. While many recreational researchers may view such contributions as passé,
they are notable since no other discipline offers such a holistic and integrative assessment
