Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
D.Williams and Kaltenborn's (1999) analysis of the use and meaning of recreational
cottages is significant in this context because it also questioned the traditional notion of
geography and tourism, with the focus on tourism as a temporary phenomenon in time
and space (see also A.M.Williams and Hall 2000). Indeed, they challenged the
conventional way of viewing tourism, arguing that tourism and leisure needs to be
viewed as a more dynamic phenomenon, where the circulation and movement of people
in space is the rule rather than the exception. They argue that it is the movement to
tourism and leisure spaces that adds meaning, by allowing people to establish an identity
and to connect with place. In other words, tourism and leisure are deeply embedded in
everyday lives and the meaning that people attach to their lives, since changing work
practices and less separation of work, leisure and pleasure has made tourism and
recreation more important to people's lives. This is intrinsically linked to the rapidly
changing nature of time-space compression (see Hall 2005a for more detail), with other
mechanisms contributing to people's lives increasingly connected to the concept of a
'global village'. What is clear from the transformation occurring in the new cultural
geographies of leisure and tourism is the lack of a specific frame of reference or guiding
research agenda to incorporate these perspectives into mainstream tourism and recreation
geography. There appears to be an emerging social and cultural detachment within the
subdiscipline, mirroring other developments in human geography, where two different
languages, knowledge bases and modes of analysis are emerging (i.e. the empiricist-
positivist and inducturequalitative culturalists), neither of whom have found a common
language to communicate with each other. With these issues in mind, attention now turns
to the historical development of the geography of tourism and recreation and a discussion
of many of the formative studies.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE GEOGRAPHY OF TOURISM AND
RECREATION
Tourism and recreation have been the subject of research and scholarship in Anglo-
American geography since the early twentieth century, with an early focus on
demographic and economic issues (Cleveland 1910; Wrigley 1919; Whitbeck 1920; Allix
1922; Cornish 1930,1934; McMurray 1930; S.B.Jones 1933; O'Dell 1935; Selke 1936;
Carlson 1938), as well as the role of recreation in the national parks and national forest
areas of the United States (e.g. Carhart 1920; Graves 1920; Meinecke 1929; Atwood
1931; Chapman 1938). Brown (1935) offered what he termed 'an invitation to
geographers' in the following terms:
From the geographical point of view the study of tourism offers inviting
possibilities for the development of new and ingenious techniques for
research, for the discovery of facts of value in their social implications in
what is virtually a virgin field.
(Brown 1935:471)
However, as Campbell (1966:85) wryly commented, 'it would appear that this invitation
was declined'. As Deasy (1949:240) observed: 'because of the inadequate attention to the
