How to Deal with Regional Tourism? Historical (and Interdisciplinary) Reflections

Abstract

The paper advocates a regional perspective for a better understanding of tourism history and discusses historiographical concepts and tools of relevance for this understanding. It links the development of the tourism sector in history with regional transformation processes. The different ways in which tourism evolves in certain regional contexts can help to identify patterns and explain decisive phenomena like the sector’s vulnerability. The investigation proceeds in three steps: The first explores the links between tourism, regional change and historiography on a more general level, the second discusses conceptual approaches to tourism and regional transformation based in economics and economic history, hereby dealing with cluster theories and path dependency in particular. The final chapter guides a methodological discussion taking stock of the experience provided by a research project on the Lake Geneva region.

Regional Planning and the Environmental Impact of Coastal Tourism: The Mission Racine for the Redevelopment of Languedoc-Roussillon’s Littoral

“…The growing environmental history of tourism (Walton 2011;Mosley 2012;Moranda 2015) has brought into focus the initiative of private investors and the dynamics of land ownership, environmental change, and race between the 19th and the early 20th century (Chiang 2011;Kahrl 2012). Environmental histories of European tourism have also begun to illuminate the significance of postwar regional planning-especially in the post-World War II era-both as driver of tourism development and of related environmental changes (Denning 2014;Winiwarter 2015a, 2015b;Hagimont 2017;Humair et al 2017). These studies participate to the growing interest in the environmental history of regional planning, which seeks to reassess regional planning's significance as driver of ecological, and not only economic, transformation (Pessis et al 2013;Fournier and Massard-Guilbaud 2016).…”