Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
watching, reef walking, cruise ship supply and yachting events, within the overall ambit
of marine tourism.
This chapter seeks to review the principal ways in which the geographer has
approached the coastal and marine environment. In particular, it highlights the reluctance
of geographers to adopt a holistic understanding, whereby recreation and tourism are
analysed as competing and yet complementary activities using the same resource base.
The chapter commences with a discussion of the way in which the coast, and the beach in
particular, was created by recreationalists and tourists. Like wilderness areas, the
comparatively recent discovery of the coast as a potential resource for leisure use
illustrates that leisure resources are
created:
they exist in a latent form until their
discovery, recognition and their development leads to their use. In most geographical
analyses of the coastline as such a resource, the value of a historical approach is
acknowledged in virtually every textbook on resorts. And yet the geographer has been
largely remiss in addressing this vital theme—how the resource was discovered and
developed. It developed in the human consciousness, supplanting perceptions of the
coastal zone as a repulsive environment once the lure of the seaside marked a changing
sensibility in society. For this reason, historical reconstructions of coastal environment
need to recognise the way in which the resource was discovered, popularised and
developed, and assumed a cultural significance in society.
COASTLINE AS A RECREATION AND TOURIST RESOURCE:
ITS DISCOVERY AND RECOGNITION AS A LEISURE
RESOURCE
According to Lenĉek and Bosker (1999):
The beach as we know it is, historically speaking, a recent phenomenon.
In fact, it took hundreds of years for the seashore to be colonised as the
preeminent site for human recreation…. A proscenium for history, the
beach has become a conspicuous signpost against which Western culture
has registered its economic, aesthetic, sexual, religious, and even
technological milestones.
(Lenĉek and Bosker 1999:xx)
This illustrates the changing perception of a natural resource for leisure through history:
the European acceptance of the beach embodied notions of utility which replaced a
reverence for the sea and images of nature dominating human existence in the littoral
zone. In the Romantic period the beach represented a site for pleasure, spiritual exercise
and a positive experience. The symbolic value of the beach was also incorporated in
poetry, landscape painting and created a new sensibility and practices. This brought new
social, psychological, economic and spatial prestige to a landscape as a place of leisure
and pleasure (see Lenĉek and Bosker's (1999) stimulating cultural history of the beach
for more detail). In Corbin's (1995)
The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside
1750-1840,
the dramatic changes in western attitudes towards the sea, the seaside and the
landscape are reviewed in a European context. As a French translation of the European
