The Shoreline between Nature and Society, a Changing Heritage - Vulnerability of Coastal Ecosystems and Adaptation - page 204

especially foreign tourists (northern Europeans), who normally spend
their summer on the Spanish Costa Brava nearby. This influx of
tourists is a source of income. However, the choice of tourism
developed to the large coastal scale between the Alberes mountains
and the Rhone delta was supposed to generate jobs, both directly
while building the beach resorts, and indirectly through the jobs
produced by the demands from the tourism industry. In terms of
planning, the operation was to take place in a practically virgin field
(at least considered as such by many who do not care much about the
traditional cottages thriving in popular environments). Therefore, the
tourism units are easy to design and draw on paper, with planners and
architects deciding how tourism-based urbanization will unfold.
People are not allowed to develop in the direction they want as
following the typical liberal “laissez-faire” of the coasts. It goes
without saying that the perverse effects of “land speculation” are
largely mitigated within the resorts and should not be extended to the
unspoilt margins that will function as breaks from urbanization, and
will constitute “windows” in which nature is protected and offered to
holidaymakers. Finally, the aim was to build tourist units around the
leisure ports, which there again creates opportunities for the nautical
industry and generates jobs that do not rely solely on the tourist
season. We are faced with a proper coastal planning operation, if we
use Paul Claval's definition of planning: “the set of concerted
measures which regulate the use of space and its planning so as to
ensure the full thriving of individuals, to make social life easier while
minimizing frictions that might arise from the distance or the
proximity of antinomian activities and to avoid disturbing the natural
balance whose destruction would be, in the short or long term
detrimental to the collective”. After all, planning is a deeply proactive,
political act that mobilizes large amounts of space, humans and
capitals and betrays an interest in “managing” space that could not be
left for the set of stakeholders to dispose freely of.
This vision of territorial planning persists in France in the texts and
in the mentalities of people, at least at the State level for several
decades; however, the golden age of the 1960s is over. The
interministerial coastal planning mission for the Aquitaine coast did
not achieve the same success in the next decade. This was due to the