Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
tourist industry by geographers, there exists a concomitant dearth of techniques,
adaptable to the collection, analysis, interpretation and cartographic representation of
geographical data of the subject.' Yet the period from 1945 to the late 1960s is perhaps
not as barren as Campbell would have us believe.
Building on the initial research on tourism and recreation in American economic
geography in the 1930s, research was primarily undertaken in the post-war period in the
United States on the economic impact of tourism in both a regional destination setting
(e.g. Crisler and Hunt 1952; Ullman 1954; Ullman and Volk 1961; Deasy and Griess
1966) and on travel routes (Eiselen 1945). Although Cooper's (1947) discussion of issues
of seasonality and travel motivations foreshadowed some of the geographical research of
the 1980s and 1990s, interest in this area of study lay dormant for many years.
Nevertheless, the geography of recreation and tourism was at least of a sufficient profile
in the discipline to warrant a chapter in an overview text on the state of geography in the
United States in the 1950s (McMurray 1954). (See also Meyer-Arendt's (2000) article on
tourism as a subject of North American doctoral dissertations and master's theses 1951 to
1998, which expands on the earlier studies by Jafari and Aaser (1988) and Meyer-Arendt
and Lew (1999) in the United States.)
In Britain, significant research was undertaken by E.W.Gilbert (1939, 1949, 1954) on
the development of British seaside resorts, with geographers also contributing to
government studies on coastal holiday development (
Observer
1944). But, little further
direct research was undertaken on tourism and recreation in the United Kingdom until the
1960s, although some doctoral work on resorts was undertaken (Butler 2004). There was
certainly an interest from the generation of geographers studying patterns of tourism and
recreation in postcolonial South Asia, as Robinson (1972) noted the contribution of
earlier studies by Spencer and Thomas (1948), Withington (1961) and Sopher (1968)
published in
The Geographical Review
. In Canada over the same period substantive
geographical research on tourism was primarily focused on one geographer, Roy Wolfe
(1964), whose early work on summer cottages in Ontario (Wolfe 1951, 1952), laid the
foundation for later research on the geography of second home development (e.g.
Coppock 1977a; Hall and Müller 2004) and tourism and migration (Williams and Hall
2000; Hall and Williams 2002).
While significant work was undertaken on tourism and recreation from the 1930s to
the 1950s, it was not really until the 1960s that research started to accelerate with a
blossoming of publications on tourism and recreation in the 1970s. During the 1960s
several influential reviews were undertaken of the geography of tourism and recreation
(R.E.Murphy 1963; Wolfe 1964, 1967; Winsberg 1966; L.S.Mitchell 1969a, 1969b;
Mercer 1970), while a substantive contribution to the development of the area also came
from regional sciences (e.g. Guthrie 1961; Christaller 1963; Piperoglou 1966), with the
conceptual developments and research undertaken on carrying capacity in a resource and
land management context (R.Lucas 1964; Wagar 1964) still resonating in present-day
discussions on sustainability and environmental management (Coccossis 2004).
Nevertheless, even as late as 1970, A.Williams and Zelinsky (1970) were able to
comment that Virtually all the scholarship in the domain of tourism has been confined to
intra-national description and analysis'. Indeed, in commenting on the field of tourism
research as a whole they observed:
