Utopian resort living: islands of reclamation and environmental resistance in Bali and Western Australia

Abstract

This article provides a comparative analysis of localized contests over the reclamation of new islands for resort-style development projects in waters near tourist destinations in Bali and Western Australia. The research focuses on the Tirta Wahana Bali Internasional Resort proposed for a seabed site in Benoa Bay, Bali, and the North Port Quay development proposed for a seabed site off the coast of Fremantle, Western Australia. The investigation finds that proximity plays a common critical role in the shaping of discourses, environmental alliances and planning determinations around the resort-island reclamation projects.Representations of the proposed new islands stimulated local community resistance movements because the projects reflected the utopian desires of their developers to create resort lifestyle communities that were geographically near yet socially far from people already enjoying the coastal waters targeted for reclamation. By comparing discourses around the two projects, we identify how the artful reimagining of environmental and cultural heritage within each of the resistance movements has influenced local politics and created opportunities for bringing Indigenous perspectives into public view to unsettle nationalist and colonial nativist views of lands and waters in tourist areas.

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“…Bali is currently facing serious economic, social, water shortages, water inequity, widespread sewage pollution, and biodiversity and habitat loss. (Kerr & Wardana, 2019). The number of tourists that continue to increase has not significantly maintained the sustainability of the LPD and is even more damaging (Adityanandana & Gerber, 2019).…”

‘Kill Venice’: a systems thinking conceptualisation of urban life, economy, and resilience in tourist cities

“…The acceleration of material and immaterial transformations to increase the accommodation capacity and location branding is causing conflicts in many mass tourist destinations. Against what is often defined as overtourism (Dodds and Butler, 2019;Milano et al, 2019;Perkumienė and Pranskūnienė, 2019;Seraphin et al, 2018), forms of resistance have been reported worldwide: from Oceania and South-Eastern Asia (Kerr and Wardana, 2019;Camisani, 2018;Winengan, 2019) to Latin America (Loperena, 2017), from Northern (Oklevik et al, 2019;Stanley, 2020) to Central (Smith et al, 2019) and Southern Europe (Schiermeier, 2004;Carballo et al, 2019;García-Hernández et al, 2017;Ioannides et al, 2016;Navarro-Jurado et al, 2019). More detailed insights might come from the real-time observation of oppositional movements 1 .…”