by Sibel Bozdoğan (Editor), Panayiota Pyla (Editor), Petros Phokaides (Editor)
This
volume offers a critical and complicated picture of how leisure tourism
connected the world after the World War II, transforming coastal lands,
traditional societies, and national economies in new ways.
The
21 chapters in this book analyze selected case studies of architectures
and landscapes around the world, contextualizing them within economic
geographies of national development, the geopolitics of the Cold War,
the legacies of colonialism, and the international dynamics of
decolonization. Postwar leisure tourism evokes a rich array of
architectural spaces and altered coastal landscapes, which is explored
in this collection through discussions of tourism developments in the
Mediterranean littoral, such as Greece, Turkey, and southern France, as
well as compelling analyses of Soviet bloc seaside resorts along the
Black Sea and Baltic coasts, and in beachscapes and tourism
architectures of western and eastern hemispheres, from Southern
California to Sri Lanka, South Korea, and Egypt.
This
collection makes a compelling argument that "leisurescapes," far from
being supra-ideological and apolitical spatial expressions of
modernization, development, and progress, have often concealed histories
of conflict, violence, social inequalities, and environmental
degradation. It will be of interest to architectural and urban
historians, architects and planners, as well as urban geographers,
economic and environmental historians.
