Self-proclaimed poststructuralist account (by giving de Certeau inspired account of people actively determining landscape) actually gives tons of awesome history instead of great theory

Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geographies

Intro

• Geography
  • First professorships in geography: 1880s-1900s they begin
  • 1900-1950: a physical geography field
    • Had two parts: physical and human geography; regional and systematic geography (say Mitchell and Murphy 1991)
    • Focused on regional details
    • Worked for growth of nation-state and empire (who is surprised?)
    • Aided warfare, nationalism, imperialism, and “commercial exploitation” (Barnes and Gregory 1997)
    • Thus, geography not disinterested but from the start an arm of power: “legitimisation and reproduction of existing and emerging power structures” (9)
    • Uses lots of mathematics and statistics
  • Mid-century, becomes aligned w/social sciences
    • 1960s: emergence of critical geographies
      • Giddens 1985: “time-space distanciation”
      • Harvey 1989: “time-space compression”
  • Now, all three: natural sciences, social sciences, humanities
    • “Post-positive geography:” a category that includes post-structural, post-colonial, and post-modernist geographies
      • But not too far: always trying to balance the postmodern bent of “culture” (differences, fragments, micor-narratives) with sociology (method, analysis, large structures) b/c some critics
        (Gregory, Martin and Smith 1994) worry about “social” being lost underneath the new “cultural” bent: don’t forget broader structures
      • All reject totality, grand narratives, doubt “objectivity”
      • Results in “new” cultural geography
  • The Last 100 Years
    • From colonial maps and national boundaries to postcolonial critiques of such representations
    • From “macro” (nation/region) to “micro” (streets, everyday spaces)
    • From material and absolute to recent relativist, socio-cultural, symbolic analyses
• Human Geography
  • Studies relationships among people, places, and nature (society, spaces, and environment)
  • A field of subfields: usually refers to people using one discipline in conjunction w/geography: “social, political, economic, historical geography” (10)
  • This field also includes “urban, environmental, and cultural geographies” (10)
  • Also includes feminist geography
• Cultural geography
  • New cultural geography result of post-structural, post-modernist, and post-colonial strains in the academy
    • Collaborates with sociology and cultural studies
    • Example: Urry, The Tourist Gaze (1990) applies Foucault’s analysis of the gaze (interpenetrating, unstable, etc) to tourism
    • For example, Fyfe, Images of the Street 1998 used Foucault’s concept of surveillance on street (cameras), showing how street is homogenized by it
    • For example, Davis 1990 City of Quartz on L.A., uses Foucault’s panopticon to talk about the shopping mall
  • Current trend is to look at “geographies,” not Geography: poststructural
    • “refutation of the notion of one single theory or ‘grand narrative’ capable of explaining spatiality” (3)
  • Interdisciplinary
    • sociology, cultural studies, gender studies, tourism studies
      • My Question: if you’re really talking about production and representation of tourist spaces, where are the economists and literary theorists?
  • “Both structural and cultural determinants of spatiality” (3): not base/superstructure model but mutual influence
    • “Cultural construction rather than material determinacy” (3)
      • Um, but where did the culture come from?
  • Foucauldian: assume that power is everywhere and relational
    • Counterarg: some sociologists worry about it cuz sociology assumes that culture does have power that is localizable (contra Foucault)
    • Thus, one of the goals of the book is to explore how much systemic social power determines leisure spaces and how much a local and particular structure of power operates instead
• Leisure Spaces
  • Earliest works: 30s and 40s to help develop tourist sites
    • Produced at same time government is creating park departments, etc
    • 1934: Creation of Standing Committee on National Parks by the Councils for the Preservation of Rural England, Scotland, and Wales
    • 1949: National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act (creates National Parks Commission)
  • Before critical geography, studies of leisure/tourism still working the “geographical determinism” vein of post-1945 geography
    • Even in 1960s and 70s, still had “positivist paradigm” despite their acceptance of Marxism and structuralism (12)
    • Uses maps, models, categories, math (12)
    • Some of the limitations as a result of this practice:
      • Limits studies to the easily accounted for (ie, less emphasis on countryside tourism, which is harder to count than, say, entering a theme park with a ticket)
      • Even in 1970s, focused on urban leisure b/c that had been what had been mathematically modeled, despite the increasing significance of out-of-town leisure
      • Although there were a few people critiquing this positivist stance (ie Crofts and Cooke 1974; Blacksell and Gilg 1975; both working on “landscape evaluation”), the idea that there could be a social construction of space didn’t occur till mid-90s
  • New strain of analyses begin in 1980s (1980: Carlson “Geographical research on international and domestic tourism” in Journal of Cultural Geography; Coppock’s very important article 1982; Barbier “Geography of tourism and leisure” _Geojournal 9.1 1984) but these are all before the major sea-changes in cultural geography of later 80s and early 90s
  • Not really examined within larger, newer movement of cultural geography until around turn of 21st century—mid-90s onward—which is post-modern/post-structural/etc: this moment is where leisure studies comes into its own
  • Naturally, works for the past century have “illuminated” aspects of leisure and tourism but have not been “explicitly framed as leisure and tourism studies,” (7) which is only happening now
  • 1982: foundation of Leisure Studies journal
  • 1999: foundation of journal Tourism Geographies to “express a sensitivity and effort to reach out to the diversity of perspectives that fall under this subject matter,” including all over the globe and all over academia: “anthropologists and other social scientists, landscape architects, urban and regional planners, and environmental scientists and managers” (2)
  • Example books
    • Daniels and Cosgrove 1988: iconography of landscape
    • Bell and Valentine 1995: desire and space
    • Duncan 1996: “Body Space?”
    • Fyfe 1998: the street as leisure/tourism
    • Miller et al 1998: shopping, space, and identity
    • Caplan 1997: food and identity
    • Rojek and Urry 1997: touring cultures
  • Shared Assumptions: “leisure, culture, sport, and tourism have been theorised as central sites and processes of identity construction, performance, contestation and negotiation.” (3)
  • The Most Important Books in Leisure Space Geography, despite “the apparent lack of articulation between geography and leisure studies” (27)
    • Urry 1995: Consuming Places
    • Shields 1991: Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity
    • Rojek 1995: Decentering Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory
      • “one cannot separate leisure from the rest of life and claim that it has unique laws” (27)...but I think you can.
    • Many of the works on leisure space or geography are about the body (Nast and Pile’s edited volume, Places Through the Body 1998; Skelton and Valentine’s edited volume, Cool Places: Geography of Youth Culture 1997)
  • Common Themes
    • Quick transportation
    • The “past” in the present
    • Creation of dedicated tourist spaces by changing landscape
• Method of this book
  • Uses poststructural and structural theory
    • de Certeau (1984): people actively contribute to consuming, not just dupes
      • gives them “space for resistance, contestation, disruption, and transgression of dominant discourses” (1)
      • my critique: why isn’t there wiggle room w/in the discourse? Most people don’t care about “disrupting:” that’s too strong of a term for what happens (I’d say negotiation and eventual acceptance of terms or rejection from society)
    • How to justify this in modernism?
      • Well, they justify the postmodern stance because “Western philosophy’s quest for truth and certainty….is therefore abandoned and is seen as the product of a particular historical era that is becoming inappropriate in a postmodern society that is increasingly characterised by fragmentation, diversity, and diffuseness in all spheres of life” (Lois Bryson 1992, qtd page 3)
      • Two responses: this person nostalgically thinks that modernity was centralized and homogeneous, and yet it wasn’t, so we can talk about the supposedly post-modern; OR, maybe we do need to find a theory more appropriate than poststructuralism
  • Interdisciplinary
  • Use of Older Theorists
    • Adorno: 1993 Dialectics: “leisure industry” (corporate interests) control the presentation and consumption of tourist spaces
  • “examine leisure and tourism landscapes as regimes of signification in which the production, representation and consumption of landscape are mediated by sites and processes of leisure and tourism.” (4)
    • Clearly shows that the “point” is space, and the “interpretive lens” is tourism and leisure: how do people see landscape? through tourism and leisure
    • Leisure as SITES and PROCESS (cool)
• Goals
  • To balance systemic and local power (iron cage or contingent power?)
    • Calls it “narrative of closure” (following Elshtain 1981) to emphasize the repressive elements of material world influencing the social, so they prefer looking at “cultural and symbolic nature of power” (rather than material basis), which gives the people more room to revolt, rebel, etc
      • Personally, I can’t see why you can’t find negotiations of power within a material framework (ie, you can even have looseness and rebellion written into the literal space, so that no material environment actually works homogeneously), and I can’t see why “cultural and symbolic power” is any less repressive by nature than material power.
  • “to situate contemporary leisure and tourism landscapes within their historical contexts” (4): they are “histories”
  • Avoid totalization: “no attempt at closure” (6)
  • To be open to “resistance, subversion, transgression, and reappropriation” (4)
    • Again I think the word is too strong; I’d say negotiation
• Don’t Forget
  • Leisure mediates place
  • Culture plays a role, not just material arrangements: “nexus of the material and symbolic” (6)

Eight Perspectives: An Historical Overview of Work on Leisure Spaces

Regional Geographies (early geography, esp 1880s-1900s)

• Study one terrain at a time
• They map regions for colonial and imperial use
• Near/far, foreign/domestic, us/Other

Systematic Geographies (develops just after turn of century)

• Thematic: a topic is studied across various terrains, instead of studying one terrain
• Alfred Weber 1909: “theory of industrial location” suggests placing factory where you could minimize transport costs of raw materials and exportation
  • Was also used “in determining the location of early twentieth-century seaside resorts” (11)
    • This is a common occurrence: “Economic geography provided a number of positivist models of industrial development and location which were adapted for use in tourism studies and which are still used widely today.” (14)
    • Me: If industry is literally used as a model for developing leisure sites, then I really have good reason to approach historical tourism via economics and Marxism and Adornian critique
• August Losch 1940: models “optimum geographical distribution of industrial activity” (11)
• Their Limitations
  • Early systematic geographies such as these assume “isotropic landscape,” where all spaces and people are the same, used the same way, react in the same way, etc: very grand narrative and abstract, so not in vogue now
  • Barnes and Gregory (1997: 1) show how “positivist geography” even post-WWII more interested in “coherence” and “certainty” and “cumulation” (ie, gathering into one unit), which Aitchson et all call “geographic essentialism”
    • What’s the problem? “Cultural geographical phenomena” seen in terms of physical characteristics (11), a kind of determinism
      • Query: were the literary works of this time also spatially determinist?

“Scenic amenity” (30s and 40s)

• When the systematic geography method actually begins to talk about leisure space
• Cornish 1934: “The scenic amenity of Great Britain”
  • Wants to classify landscapes by the “type” of scenery they have
  • Builds upon earlier positivist, statistical geographies to do so (ie Tansley 1939 mapping Gr8 regions by the types of vegetation they have)
• “Seeks to map and model provision and participation within particular public policy frameworks” (13), rather than from social geography or cultural geography framework (social construction of leisure space won’t begin until mid-90s)

Positivist Tourism: From Economics to Psychology (40s onward)

• Growing interest in seaside resorts, coastal landscapes in late 30s, 40s
  • 1939 Gilbert: “The growth of inland and seaside health resorts in England”
    • “a systematic geographical approach to tourism development and planning” (13)
• Positivist strategies used to evaluate existing and locate potential leisure spaces in economic terms: still used today (cf Ellis Curve, Butler’s “tourism area cycle of evolution” 1980)
  • Ellis Curve: relation of benefits to costs in making tourist space
  • Butler: “involvement, development, consolidation, and stagnation of a tourist resort” (14)
• 1970s: Begin to talk about psychology
  • Plog 1974: “Why destinations rise and fall in popularity,” sorting tourists according to their “allocentric” or “psychocentric” tendencies (former adventurous, latter like planned, centralized tourism)
    • This account is influential throughout 70s-90s

Structuralist Geographies (60s onward)

• 1960s: “transitional period,” say Gregory, Martin, and Smith (1994), where people study uneven development as a result of capitalism
• The relevant structuralism here is the dialectical structuralism of Berger (P Berger 1963, Invitation to Sociology) and Giddens (A Giddens 1984, The Constitution of Society)
  • Where social structure works dialectically with phenomenology: “structure and agency” mutually influencing (“an individual both shapes and is shaped by society” 15), so that “cultural meanings are often built into the structures of institutions, the cultural artefacts of society, and the landscape of the build environment and rural surroundings” (15)
• Marxism
  • 1960s-70s “Marxist analyses had re-emerged in other disciplines through the works of Thompson (1986) in social history, Althusser (1971) in social theory and R. Williams (1961, 1965, 1977) in literary criticism and cultural studies.” (15) (ie, The Making of the English Working Class; Lenin and Philosophy; Culture and Society, The Long Revolution, and Marxism and Literature)
  • Geography in re-emerging Marxism
    • Harvey, Explanation in Geography (1969), Social Justice and the City (1973), using Marxism to analyze patterns of production and consumption as the base of urban landscape, esp with the change from industrial to service economy
    • But new paradigms (feminism, poco, post-structuralist) prevented it from being any major, major continuing influence on geography
  • Marxism in Leisure Geography?
    • No: leisure geo still positivist

Post-colonial Geography (mid-70s, but really picks up in 80s)

• Themes
  • Construction of exotic landscape, exotic Other
  • Contemporary leisure and tourist spaces as part of “legacy of colonialism” (17)
    • Shurmer-Smith and Hannam 1994 Worlds of Desire, Realms of Power: A Cultural Geography (ie, taking pictures of the native is “military geography’s masculine gaze”)
    • Notes Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), where section on Kathakali dancing being corrupted/adapted for tourists is called “their humiliation in the Heart of Darkness,” wherein “He becomes a Regional Flavour” (qtd 18)
  • Destabilizing “host”/”guest” binary
  • Commodification of the Other’s culture
    • Edwards 1996 The Tourist Image, saying that tourism industry creates traditional culture as a commodity: a key to modern tourism
    • Mac Cannell? (1976): tourists want to find something authentic
    • Turner and Ash (1975): tourists want “pseudo-event,” ie spectacle (not even authenticity)
• Generating from Said (1978 Orientalism, 1993 Culture and Imperialism), Spivak (1985 “Three women’s texts and a critique of imperialism,” 1987 (In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 1993 _Outside the Teaching Machine) on language and discourse and the Other
• 1995 Sibley’s Geographies of Exclusion
  • Points out how collaborationist geography has been in colonialism: “a subject whose history is so much bound up with colonialism” (17)

Geography’s Cultural Turn (80s-90s)

• Spatial determination now replaced by more dynamic conception of “spatiality”
• Geography’s new task: now involved with other disciplines, not just separated to inform them about geography (Gregory, Martin and Smith 1994, Human Geography)
  • Influenced by “humanist Marxist tradition” of Gramsci (1985, Prison Notebooks), Raymond Williams (1977, Marxism and Literature), Thompson (1968, The Making of the English Working Class), Berger (1963, Invitation to Sociology), which all relate social and material production
• Examples
  • Giddens 1984: “structuration” (dialectic of agency and structure), esp to recognize lots of different agencies such as subcultures
  • Soja 1985: “spatiality” (nature is “socially produced and interpreted” 19) (“The spatiality of social life: towards a transformative rhetorisation” in _Social Relations and Spatial Structures ed Urry)
  • Urry 1995 (Consuming Places): inclusion/exclusion are enacted but continually changing from dialectical struggle between power and resistance
  • Gleeson 1999: critiqued earlier geography as merely celebrating spaces and not seeing the gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, disability based inequalities
  • Bender 1993 introduction to his edited volume Landscape: Politics and Perspective, p. 3: “Landscapes are thus polysemic, and not so much artefact as in process of construction and reconstruction…The landscape is never inert, people engage with it, re-work it, appropriate and contest it” (in order to shape identity)
• Redefinition of Landscape
  • Not just a physical given, but a part of social relationships and cultural symbology
  • “landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring, and symbolising surroundings” (Daniels and Cosgrove 1998, The Iconography of Landscape: 1)
  • Landscape is “social and cultural geography of the imagination” (Gregory 1994, _Geographical Imaginations)
  • “Whether written or painted, grown or built, a landscape’s meanings draw on the cultural codes of the society for which it was made” (Rose 1993, Feminism and Geography: 89)

“Leisure Geographies of the Street” (21)

• Infl. by de Certeau
  • The Practice of Everyday Life 1984
  • “space as practiced place”
  • street: “the street defined by urban planning is the place which becomes transformed into space by people who use it” 117
• Street as a leisure space (consumption, spectacle, identity performance
  • Esp in late 1990s: eg, Fyfe (1998 Images of the Street), Wearing and Wearing (work on the flaneur), Rendell (gender identity displayed on street)

Monument/Spectacle Geographies

• Rojek 1993, “After popular culture” in Leisure Studies journal
  • Four kinds of tourism “escape areas:” “heritage attractions,” “black spots,” “literary landscapes,” “theme parks”
• Barthes 1982 Empire of Signs: cultural semiotics of monuments
• As a part of national culture
• Also refer to Nietzsche on monument and antiquarian historiography (On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life)
• They suggest something about time: either preserving past or trying to look forward to some desired future
• Destruction of monuments very important in cultural history

Exclusion

• Recent monuments try to recover lost local tradition (for example, local industries), whereas earlier tourism excluded local for the national
• Recent attempts at urban renewal focus on including formerly marginalized groups, incl. disabled
• Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion (1995): power in private and public spaces
• Shields, Places on the Margin (1991): use of “peripheral spaces” (27) by marginalized groups for their own purposes (often leisure)

Domestic Tourism: Scenery

• Until mid 18th century, travel seen as arduous, a means to get somewhere (cf etymology “travaile”), so mostly just for necessity, some kind of work (business, political work, religious travel until Reformation, when replaced by secular Grand Tour); the scenery often seen as dangerous or just monotonous
  • Since 1500s, system of inns already established (commercial hospitality in England thus well developed)
  • Early 17th c: stage coach services begin; increase in private carriages
  • Difficulties: had to change horses (costly, slow); highway robbers; no good roads (esp b/c increase in trade traffic which put strain on medieval roads) or reliable directions
• Better Infrastructure
  • 1800: Parliament’s “turnpike trusts” (1600 plus of them) to raise money to build roads, crossings, etc, paid by tolls)
  • Domestic Maps
    • Latter half of 16th century, provoked by surveyors hired by lords mapping their territories
    • Develop engraving techniques, insets, scale, personal planning of routes, portable maps (1719: the “pocket guide” invented)
  • Rail transport
    • 1830s: cheap rail transport via charter trains (to countryside, coasts, festivals; prizefighting, horse racing; seaside resorts) (39) (for pictures of these activities, see William Powell Frith’s “crowd scenes” at seaside, railway station, derby, during 1850s-60s)
    • 1851: trains brought folks to Great Exhibition
    • Urban lower class still constrained to local neighborhood for leisure
    • Changing ideas of landscape b/c landscape is ephemeral, to your side, passing quickly (see Schivelsbusch 1986, The Railway Journey)
  • Guidebooks growing in popularity (Murray, Baedeker), esp Victorian era, as well as photographic collections in 1890s to save you the trouble of touring yourself
  • Turn of Century Amenities
    • Kodaks, the amateur photographer (Cosgrove: photos more accessible to all than paintings)
    • Mass communication: 1870s telephone; 1890s telegraph
    • Cheap bicycles (mass produced), for the poor, for women, etc not just men and wealthy; freer than mass transit
  • Beginning of automobiles (bus services)
    • 1930s: the touring car
• Domestic Touring
  • Not popular: Continentals toured Britain, or British toured Continent: that’s it
  • But then people being to think it patriotic, healthy, energizing, towards end of 18th c
    • Also, wars on the continent (think Napoleon) made domestic tourism seem more tempting b/c easier
    • Also b/c of Romanticism: against materialism, urbanization, go back to Nature (Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, anyone?)
  • Last half of 18th c: British “scenery” is appreciated for itself, esp within Britain, so traveling becomes a pleasure: the ancient remains (forts, ruins), industrial landscapes (mines, shipyards)
    • Also connected with growing popularity of landscape painting (in fact, word landscape came into British lang from the Dutch referring to a specific type of painting, often arcadian/traditional theme) and devpt of “Picturesque” style: ie, you like the landscape cuz it’s like a pretty picture, which are at first Romanesque or affect old ruins but then yield to just being British (ie, we like our own particular scenery): however, they don’t show contemporary changes to it like enclosure
      • J. M. W. Turner: Picturesque Views of the Southern Coast of England 1811; Picturesque Views in England and Wales (1832 and 1838), which Ruskin said “undermin[ed] the concept of a single aesthetic nation” (qtd 39) b/c of his working class people AND rural poor together
      • Other painters: Laura Knight, Philip Wilson Steer, Ben Nicholson (seaside): painting not just about war and Cubism early 20th c
    • Also connected with vogue for painting as a pastime or vogue for looking over paintings or prints: all considered social accomplishments (36) (amateur artists often encouraged to “add onto” the landscape to perfect Nature cf Rev Gilpin in last decades of 18th c)
      • His books popularized the association of landscape with strong feeling as well as the passion for sketching/painting/representing landscape; his picturesque paintings were published in book form; “roughness” and “variety” were the keys to this style
      • Gilpin shows relationship of commodification of scenery with development of scenic tourism: scenic tourism as commodifying scenery is a common interpretation now (ex: Punter The Politics of the Picturesque 1994) b/c he “frames” landscape like an object to consume
  • By 19th century, a taste for scenery has resulted in common plans for scenery (ie, the Lake district; 1780, West’s Guide to the Lakes and Wordsworth’s 1810 Guide Through the District of the Lakes, Martineau’s guide to Lake district adapted for railway culture 1855)
• Until 19th century, travel a resource for rich only
  • Middle classes rise in power, get to travel
  • Growing mobility: Urry 1995 “responsible for altering how people experience the modern worlds,” changing subjectivity, sociability, and aesthetic experiences (qtd 30), so mobility central to modernity
  • Webbs 1913: see increasing mobility as sign of economic growth
• Seaside resorts
  • Celia Fiennes, early 18th c diarist, wrote about watering places that were developing
  • Why? “Fresh water had become a valued commodity in expanding urban centres…and medicinal springs and wells within a day’s walk were popular places of recreation” (34) like “Tomas Sadler’s musick house in Islington”
  • Why? “Rising prosperity of leisured classes and their desire for diversions as well as health cures” (34)
  • Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1712)
    • Nobility and gentry: Tunbridge
    • Merchants and rich citizens: Epsome
    • Commoners: Dullwich, Stretham (near London)
• Early 20th century “an era of multinational tourism providers, relatively cheap and quick transportation, and global communications” (11)

Countryside

• Urbanization = nostalgia for country
  • 18th c: growth of Arcadian pastoral nostalgia in lit
  • Growing availability of prints and engravings that have country as theme
  • Romanticism: glamorizes nature again, a huge influence on the growing popularity of scenery tourism and rambling excursions
  • 1815 Stopping Up of Unnecessary Roads Act (helped out rich to enclose lands, but messed up the traditional accesses, sometimes preventing say industrial workers from getting a breath of fresh air through a little walk after work)
• Countryside more about a social construct resulting from industrial society (Bunce 1994)
  • There really wasn’t ever a swain living a perfect existence: agriculture quite developed and difficult; and enclosure means it isn’t wide open for all, but instead privately owned, and even ruins traditional pathways and byways (sometimes, could prevent you from playing sports 52)
  • This was a time when the countryside was changed forever
• What for? Retreat
  • Refreshment (not stultifying city)
  • Health
    • Walking, sunshine
  • Reconnect with nature
  • Feeling of continuity: you are one with the land
  • Aesthetic enjoyment
  • Scientific pursuits: botany, zoology, ornithology
  • Companionship (Sir Leslie Stephen: “Sunday Tramps” circle)
  • Sport
    • Hunting, fishing, shooting
  • Self-improvement (clubs are made for it, cf Clarion socialist club for rambling/cycling; also Mechanics’ Institute did so, seeing field visits as important part of education)
    • As conscious alternative to mass entertainment or traditional entertainments that are seen as wastes of time or as licentious: “rational leisure” (H Taylor 1997)
  • Walking: which loses its stigma/assoc. with criminality/homelessness
    • 1930s: “half a million regular walkers” 59
    • Walking societies grow and grow (“rambling clubs”)
  • Non-corrupted Good Times (religious folk ok with it)
• Hazlitt
  • “On the Love of the Country” 1814: nostalgia, connect with your past and childhood
    • Walking as personal time, time for reflection
  • “On Going a Journey” 1822
    • So he can be alone
    • So he can “vegetate”
    • “There are those who for this purpose go to watering places, and carry the metropolis with them. I like more elbow room and fewer encumbrances.” (qtd 54)
• As a place to experience Romantic sublime
• Jerks who are preventing lower-class leisure
  • 1815 Stopping Up act allowed Northern manufacturing cities to deny workers access to footpaths leading to fresh air
  • Wordsworth 1844 protested opening up of a railway line to Lake Windermere because of the Lancashire folk who would get to go (ie, industrial classes)
    • “arisans, labourers, and the humbler classes of shopkeepers” shouldn’t be allowed to access country excursions b/c they aren’t educated enough
  • C E M Joad 1938: they misbehave, damage, loud, scantily or ill clad, too many “roadhouses” and cafes for them
  • Counter-attacks
    • 1848 Phillips writes countryside guidebook for the factory workers, saying that it’s “an inalienable right” (57) to enjoy scenery
    • 1932: a mass demonstration (some imprisoned) where people deliberately “mass trespass” Lord of Devonshire’s land: they want access to walking land
    • 1935: Ramblers’ Association: founded to protect walkers’ access to moorland and mountains
• Controversy
  • Scotland: letting your land out for hunting was more remunerative than agriculture, so increasingly lands were being closed to public, closed for the elite who could buy estates
  • Bills introduced to Parliament to say that owners of uncultivated land had to let people walk through it, but never passed (too much opposition)
  • Worries about Preservation
    • Think that allowing all sorts of folks to ramble will endanger it
    • National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty (1895): conservation
      • John Ruskin and Holman Hunt are members
      • Achievements: protecting sites from telegraph poles; preventing certain railway stations from being made
    • National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1947, which balances preservation and enjoyment of landscape
  • Octavia Hill
    • She founded the Trust
    • Also involved in Commons, Open Spaces and Footpaths Preservation Society (58)
  • Concerns about the commercialization of countryside to open it up to visitors
    • Tourism to see undisturbed country disturbs that country.
  • Generally, concerns about saving countryside spawn: a national concern
    • Organizations formed to curb noise, stop advertisements, limit smoke in such areas (cf Society for Checking the Abuse of Public Advertising; Council for Preservation of Rural England, still working today)
• After turn of century
  • Public access to countryside ramps up
  • Veritable countryside movement had been spawned
  • Various institutions organized to take advantage of countryside
• Speculative Building
  • Suburbs
  • Hostels: by 1940, 400 hostels in UK

Representing Landscapes

• Landscape: “a scene from nature that has been appropriated and framed by the agency of human perspective” (72)
  • Its etymological association with painting reveals how caught up it is with artistic representation
    • For the consumers then, think of the prints they bought, widely available
  • Associates tourism and representation (cf Romantic movement, which made people run and scramble to go see the beautiful scenes they’d just seen painted/read poeticized)
• Addison: “natural scenery embodied particular values,” either ordered/cultivated or august/majestic (73)
• Edmund Burke 1757, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
  • Physiological causes of aesthetic responses to landscape
  • Sublime: pain and fear, but contained (my example: Radcliffe’s Udolpho)
  • Beautiful: pleasure, assoc. with social world (domestic world)
  • Appleton The Experience of Landscape 1996 takes this physiological cue and says good landscapes are ones that we find “prospects” and “refuges” (ie a shady nook that has a wide view) b/c it’s safe
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1761, La Nouvelle Heloise
  • Leave corrupt city for healing nature!
  • Rousseau as Romantic: part of the movement away from the rational; instead use Nature as your model to return to “natural state” and be happy; it’s against the commercialization of society w/glorification of science and math; it’s popular b/c “common man” can be free too
• English Romanticism
  • Blake, Wordsworth
  • Constructs nature as healing, soothing, dramatic
  • Immediate human response
  • Get away from our unnatural, industrial society! Get back to nature.
  • Victorian middle class eats up this stuff (Bunce 1994: 26 says that Victorian era is height of romanticization of nature): it becomes a “fashionable taste” (75)
• The connection between the thirst for landscape and the rise of industrial society, with the attendant changes on land usage, was explained extensively in the 1990s (Bourassa, Bunce, Cosgrove, Schama – personal memory, Urry)
  • Cosgrove, Bourassa
    • “once land ceased to become the site of everyday labor for the majority, it became a commodity” (76)
    • Bourassa 1991, The Aesthetics of Landscape: the concept of landscape came into being “as the intimate tie between land and its users was severed by the development of capitalism” (76)
  • Bunce: “armchair countrysides” are consumed by middle classes (1994 The Countryside Ideal); creation of countryside is “inevitable” effect of industrial rev.
  • Cosgrove: Landscape is a class issue, and ideological in the Althusserian sense: “imagined relationship with nature…through which they have underlined and communicated their social role and that of others” (1984: 15)
• The Point: landscapes are mostly imagined, “shaped by a variety of social and cultural constructs” (77); not natural but artificial
  • Literature and fine arts have had large hand in perception of landscape, as Apollinaire noted, citing “tradition of art” as creating the tropes, not nature itself
• Urry: Landscape history
  • 1. Stewardship
  • 2. Exploitation
  • 3. Scientisation
  • 4. Visual consumption: where we are still

Random

• Heritage tourism
  • History: “raw facts of the past”
  • Heritage: “processed product of history…history reshaped and made palatable for contemporary consumption” 96
    • Schouten: “Heritage is history processed through mythology, ideology, nationalism, local pride, romantic ideas or just palin marketing, into a commodity” qtd 96
    • Heritage thus selective
• Gender
  • First women and leisure study: Women and Lesiure: A State of the Art Review Talbot 1979; workshop on the topic given at the Leisure Studies Association Annual Conference
  • But most of it is done about contemporary leisure, not historical
    • They just note the gender-inflected relation of tourism with freedom (ie women in 18th and 19th c getting freedom by traveling 127)
  • “Feminist research has always rejected the political separation o the ppublic and the private,” as well as seen significance of private (Scraton 1994 article in Leisure Studies
  • R. Deem works on women and leisure All Work and No Play? The Sociology of Women and Leisure 1986
  • Green et al. Women’s Leisure, What Leisure? 1990
• Work
  • “The binary divide of work/leisure has therefore served to marginalise any informal leisure activities from the leisure research agenda.” (121) ie, forgetting “hidden forms of leisure” esp related to home, children, etc (122)
• The Gothic (138-9)
  • Interest in “native traditions” in the late 18th century also associated w/signif of the Gothic
    • Ruins and medieval remains
    • Early archaeology thus tied up with the Picturesque movement of Gilpin (Gilpin who exhorted land owners not to ruin the marks of the past in their property)
  • Some Dates
    • 1720s: fake ruins put in gardens are fashionable
    • 1760s: Walpoles Strawberry Hill neo-Gothic house
    • As century turns, becomes less about fun and novelty, more about “integrity” of that style
  • Augustus Pugin
    • His support of Gothic architecture contains moral and aesthetic judgment against modernity
    • Juxtaposed pictures of medieval streets w/modern ones to show how terrible modern stuff it
    • Medieval: purposive, when people really cared about their work and craft (Church construction today “like all that was produced by zeal or art in ancient days, has dwindled down into a mere trade… The are erected by men who ponder between a mortgage, a railroad, or a chapel as the best investment of their money” 1836 Contrasts)
      • Medieval also reflected religious values
  • Ruskin
    • Modern art and architecture not “organic” enough
    • Preferred God-inspired works that use natural images as patterns (flora, fauna, landscape lines)
    • Seven Lamps of Architecture: medieval Venice is great, with harmonious balance of humble, middle, and high buildings, as well as religious and political dwellings and buildings
    • Preservationist about ancient structures: “We have no right to touch them. They are not ours.” He has a stewardship view of it.
  • Morris
    • Arts and Crafts leader
    • Middle Ages architecture shows “collective spirit absent from the Victorian capitalist ethic” (140)
    • Not totally regressive b/c used mass production too in tandem w/crafts
  • Examples: St Pancras Station; Midland Grand Hotel
• Protection of Historical Buildings
  • Last quarter of 19th century when these movements really took off, buildings off of the nostalgia that had been slowly accumulating
    • 1875: Society for Photographing Relics of Old London (17th c inns)
    • 1877: Morris, Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, “for the purpose of watching over and protecting these relics, which, scanty as they are now become, are still wonderful treasures” (141)
    • 1882: Ancient Monument Protection Act (fifty sites not allowed to be demolished)
    • 1894: Committee for the Survey of the Memorials of Greater London by Ashbee (and Arts and Craftsian)
    • 1895: National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty
      • This is the important one
    • 1899: Garden City Association
      • Inspired by Ebenezer Howard
      • “create a series of free-standing settlements, through investment by limited-dividend companies” in “relatively open country on major transport routes” but far enough away from urban centers to be cheap; industrialists would move their factories near them so the workers could have almost country-like living areas (142)
      • Architects: Parker and Unwin, Arts and Crafts architects
      • Village greens
      • Organized around natural streams, woods, etc
    • 1908: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England
      • 1913: Second Act gives them rights to purchase sites or to have “guardianship” without buying
  • Aitchson notes: look how the progressive optimism of mid-Victorian period has collapsed, suggesting that the urge for saving this stuff “provided constants in a changing world” and “stand for continuity, stability, and tradition, against the rootless stirrings of industrial capitalism: the antithesis of artificial creations and vulgar materialism in the modern age” (141)
• Opposite Movement: New New New
  • Contra to these “get back to our past” movements, we have people wanting to break with the past
    • That’s what Aitchson says, but I say that to call Arts and Crafts only backward looking is kind of reductive.
  • Le Corbusier: the foremost Modernist architect at early 20th c
    • 1933 The Radiant City: demolish all, start anew
    • “high-rise, high-density living in ‘cells’ within mass-produced, uniform house-machines” (142) set in green spaces; traversed by roads for transit
    • Upper class gets the “core” of office buildings and entertainment facilities
    • Lower class gets “satellite units” at periphery w/green spaces
    • Critiqued as totalitarian
      • Mumford 1968: by cutting off all of the monuments and cultural sites from their natural contexts, their meaning would be lost; a history of growth that’s so important for citizens would be lost
      • Result: “Collective amnesia,” says Aitchson
  • Other Modernist stuff
    • Clean lines, functional
    • None of the historically influenced stuff that C&A liked
    • Not very successful
• Inter-war Years
  • Home-ownership triples from 1914 to 1939
    • Dream: nuclear family in area with garden
  • Tourism within Britain increases (esp with private cars)
    • Poet laureate John Betjeman popularizes sightseeing Georgian and Victorian architecture and writes the Shell County Guides for automobile tourism
    • A neo-Romantic discourse of getting back in touch
• More Preservation
  • Hilaire Belloc, “The Crooked Streets” 1911
    • “Why do they pull down and do away with the Crooked Streets, I wonder, which are my delight, and hurt no man living?” Wants to avoid “destroying all the history and all the humanity in between” the suburb and the city; “Crooked Streets are packed with human experience and reflect in a lively manner al the chances and misfortunes and expectations and domesticity and wonderment of men” (144)
  • 1932 Town and Country Planning Act
    • Previous acts only really about monuments
    • This one covers even occupied buildings
    • “Timid” and “cumbersome” and Parliament doesn’t want to “interfere” with property rights, but at least it got media attention (144)
  • WWII destroys lots of it, though; along with “ignorance, callousness and criminal apathy of local authorities” says guidebook writer Clive Rouse in 1943
  • 1947 Town and Country Planning Act
    • Much more control given to gov
    • Can’t demolish or alter the buildings without prior consent
• Also, post-WWII gov tries to put into place Ebenezer Howard’s ideas in their New Town corporations to avoid urban sprawl
  • Townscape: 1940s and later term for
  • Gov tries to control town growth until 1960s
    • 1950s and 60s movements growing supporting “incremental growth and democratic as opposed to technocratic planning” (146)
  • Yet 1960s do see growth of high-rise buildings, Corbusian
  • 1937: Georgian Group
    • Spin-off of SPAB
    • Georgian and Regency buildings
    • For protection and research
  • 1952: Vernacular Architecture Group (for traditional architecture)
  • 1957: An MP founds the Civic Trust
    • Using old buildings instead of tearing them down, “local” oriented styles, “respectful” new buildings
  • 1958: the Victorian Society
    • See how it’s come full circle: earlier movements focused on pre-1700 works, but as time goes on, they protect later and later buildings
• The City Fringe
  • Marginal area of London, north and east of City
  • From traditional “liberties” of medieval times
    • Had hosted all sorts of undesirables and immigrants: Flemish clothmakers (14th c), Sephardic Jews (16th c), Huguenots (17th c)
  • Hosted lots of festivals, parades, fairs, markets
    • ie, theatres
  • 18th c
    • Poor housing: dense, squalid
    • Great spot for reformists, revolutionaries, etc
  • Victorian
    • Jack the Ripper around here
    • Dickens describes these areas
    • Cheap labor = growth of factories, industry here (stops after WWII)
  • Now: a tourism and heritage spot
• Leisure Spaces and Sexuality
  • Often “normalise” heterosexuality via landscape (161)

Go Get these Books

• Lash, S 1990. “Sociology of Postmodernism.”
  • “Cultural economy” with “relations of production” “conditions of reception” and “particular way in which cultural objects circulate.”
  • Cool Marxist metaphors: that’s why I can use this supposedly postmodern stuff: it’s not actually postmodern only, but actually very modern indeed, using it for semiotics (they seem to use postmodern as a chronological descriptor instead of a content descriptor)
  • Interesting way to make sense of objects: “the signifier is a sound, image, word or statement; the signified is a concept or meaning; and the referent is an object in the real world to which the signifier and signified connect” (4)
• Coppock, “Geographical contributions to the study of leisure” in Leisure Studies, vol 1 issue 1 (1982): one of the first studies of leisure space ever (covers 1930s-70s)
• Granville 1841: guide to England’s spas and seaside resorts
• Buzard The Beaten Track 1993
  • Tourist attractions consciously marketed off literary representations (13)
• Clarke and Critcher 1985 The Devil Makes Work: Leisure in Capitalist Britain
• Bellamy, Looking Backward
• Urban Geography Hall 1998