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changes in the internal and external hierarchies that all these effects generate (see the case
of the effects of tourism development in the Australian Great Barrier Reef destination in
Vacher, 1999).
Williams and Hall (2000) provided an interpretative framework to explain the relationship
between tourism and mobility that frames mass tourism not only as a source of wealth or a
generator of environmental and cultural impacts, but also as an important transformative
agent, linked to the emergence of transnational living and the onset of a new culture of leisure.
Much of the empirical research states, in this respect, that in numerous places the residential
mobility into a tourist destination has provoked new production dynamics (Gustafson, 2002;
Mazón, 2006; O'Reilly, 2003; Warnes and Williams, 2006). In this context, tourist destina-
tions evolve from their main tourism uses into more complex territorial structures - complex
urban places - that reveal new and multiple functions in terms of residential location, connec-
tivity, productivity, innovative capacity and contribution to the territorial competitiveness of
a regional structure (Urtasun and Gutiérrez, 2006). Tourists, residents, global business elites,
businesspeople, migrant workers and others interact in shaping the cultural milieu of each
destination, inducing transformations of the spatial hierarchies of the regions where they are
located (Casado-Diaz
et al.
, 2004; Mullins, 1994). It is really not necessary to reiterate here that
the rapid growth of mass coastal destinations has generated many and varied environmental
and cultural sustainability problems (Murray
et al.
, 2005).
All of this leads to new ways of thinking about destinations as places without identity; with
a seasonal way of life - sprawled spatially and focused only on satisfying leisure and recrea-
tional needs (and, thus, considered in many cases as a good examples of what Augé, 1995
terms as 'non places'). They could actually be considered as potentially urban innovative
spaces, which provide well-being to their users (whether tourist or resident). Indeed, they
could be conceived of as being global in scope, due to their capacity for attraction and their
external connectivity, as well as the nature of their inhabitants, and (though analysts only
have a very short chronological perspective) also as socially and culturally sedimentary places
(see Mullins, 1991; Sheller and Urry, 2004).
Bearing in mind these considerations, it seems pertinent to indicate a necessity to analyse
in detail whether the dynamics of the current 'information and hypermobility society'
(Castells, 2000) excludes or includes mass tourism spaces in the processes of reconfi guration
of networks, hierarchies, fl ows and spatial confl icts (for more refl ection on this question see
Quaglieri-Domínguez and Russo, 2010 in the case of urban destinations). It is even possible
to raise the question as to whether social groups that carry creative capital and that are located
in tolerant, open and permissive places are also attracted by mass tourism destinations (see on
this general argument Florida, 2002 as well as, among others, Peck's critical review, 2005 and
Wilson,
Chapter 16
of this volume). From the same perspective, we could ask whether the
current dynamics of destination restructuring can facilitate their transformation into places of
innovation in the conceptual frameworks proposed and discussed by Richards and Wilson
(2007a). In fact, mass coastal destinations are places produced (and restructured) by means of
processes and dynamics that are particularly and necessarily linked to the mobility of people,
capital, goods, signs and information ( Jackson and Murphy, 2002). As such, and beyond
the critiques that it has received, the 'creative class' concept has brought the new mobilities
paradigm (NMP) into the heart of the urban and regional policy and politics, bringing into
question traditional human capital attraction/retention policies and discourses on local
economic development (Cooke and Lazzeretti, 2008).
There appears, therefore, to be a need to look for new analytical perspectives on mass
coastal destinations, building on accumulated research knowledge to date, that allow us to
