Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Plate 6.7:
Savonlinna, Finland. Much
of the tourist infrastructure of the rural
municipality of Savonlinna is unused
for most of the year because visitation
is concentrated in the summer months.
RECREATION, TOURISM AND SUSTAINABILITY
Ideas of sustainable development have been as influential in the area of rural policy as
they have elsewhere (Murdoch 1993; Whatmore 1993). However, much of the discussion
on applications of sustainability has been about individual components of rurality (e.g.
attempts at developing sustainable agriculture), rather than a comprehensive approach to
integrate the socio-cultural, economic and environmental components of both
sustainability and rurality. For example, the Rural White Paper entitled
Rural England: A
Nation Committed to a Living Countryside
(Department of the Environment and Ministry
of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (DoE/MAFF) 1995) was the first specifically rural
policy from a British government for fifty years (Blake 1996).
According to Butler and Hall (1998), in many western regions and countries the
structure of the relative homogeneous and distinct rural systems of the post-Second
World War period has been either destroyed or weakened. They argue that such weakness
is a result of at least three types of restructuring, namely, the collapse of peripheral areas
unable to shift to a more capital-intensive economy; the selective and reductionist process
of industrialisation of the remaining agricultural sector; and the pressures of urban and
ex-urban development. Butler and Hall (1998) concluded that the result is a rural system
suffering absolute decline along its extensive margins and the rural-urban
interface, with the intervening core area weakened by decoupling of farm
and non-farm sectors and the shift of decision making to urban based
corporations and governments. Restructuring has created a fragmented
and reduced rural system which seems to lack most of the criteria for
sustainability in either economic or community terms.
(Butler and Hall 1998:252)
