Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
THE GEOGRAPHER'S APPROACH TO RURAL RECREATION
AND TOURISM
Coppock (1982:2) argues that 'much of the literature in the leisure field has been
produced by multidisciplinary teams' of which geographers have been a part. According
to Owens (1984):
until very recently at least, leisure and recreation have been
overwhelmingly viewed as synonymous with the rural outdoors.
Participation in rural leisure and recreation grew rapidly during the 1950s
and 1960s and was accompanied by a surge of interest in applied
research…. In the 1950s and 1960s two types of study became
particularly important, national and regional demand surveys, and site
studies which tackled a wide range of applied problems.
(Owens 1984:157)
There was a tendency towards such studies being published quite rapidly in Europe and
North America, though as Coppock (1982:9) observed, 'little attention has been paid to
geographical aspects of leisure in developing countries', an area which still remains
relatively poorly researched.
In documenting the development of geographical research on rural recreation,
Coppock (1980) points to topics on leisure and recreation which appeared in five years
from 1970, which were Patmore (1970, later updated in 1983), Lavery (1971c), Cosgrove
and Jackson (1972), I.G. Simmons (1974), Coppock and Duffield (1975), H.Robinson
(1976) and Appleton (1974). These topics highlight the breadth of focus in recreation and
policy management with the spatial dimension being discussed within each text. Yet,
according to Owens (1984), in the period 1975 to 1984 few major contributions were
published by geographers in the UK due to the lessening of government research funds
for this area. At the same time overlapping areas of research emerged in terms of a
behavioural focus and perception studies. The research by R.Lucas (1964) marks the
early origins and development of work in recreational behaviour in human geography and
it reflects a concern over the logical positivist tradition (R.J.Johnston 1991), and its
inherent shortcomings, particularly the focus on management-oriented and site-based
empirical studies at the expense of conceptual and theoretical studies.
STUDIES OF DEMAND
Demand for rural recreation grew at 10 per cent per annum in the period 1945 to 1958 in
the USA (Clawson 1958) and in the UK at a compound rate of 10 to 15 per cent per
annum up to 1973 (Coppock 1980) and for researchers this heralded an era of rapid
growth. As G.M.Robinson (1990) observes, the demand for rural recreation is strongly
