Resumen de Interconnecting tourist and everyday space: Chances and challenges of a tourism-induced urbanisation in post-industrial, rural landscapes
Michael Schmölz, Marta Somoza Medina
In a context of transition from the abstract space of an industrial society into adifferential space of an urban society, our research deals with the challenges andopportunities of a tourism-induced urbanisation of post-industrial landscapesin rural areas, that lie, based on Lefebvre, in the urban qualities arised in theprocess of urbanisation, which emerge in encounters, exchanges, festivity and in acollectively designed and used space.The tourism industry, in particular, has generated service landscapes controlled bytravel-motifs such as “holidays as a counterpole to everyday life” and “holidays asa time of extreme leisure”, which have produced pictorially reproducible, highlyspecialised, needs-based, functionally optimised cluster uses in the landscape.The problematic consequence of this is that this type of land use then explicitlydistinguishes itself from the surrounding everyday landscapes of the localpopulation, perforating it without giving any benefit beyond its economicattractiveness.The vulnerability of a territory to such processes of homogenization,fragmentation and specialization of an industrial, abstract logic, can be opposedby the resilience of its landscapes and their permanent structures. They form theantitheses and the residuals in the abstract space and at the same time the seedsfor a new differential space.Based on these ideas and others related to the groundbreaking definition of theEuropean Landscape Convention, and using the example of the OberpfälzerSeenland a region in the Upper Palatinate, that has been transformed from anindustrially shaped mining landscape into a tertiary, post-industrial tourism-servicelandscape, we will explore the connection between touristic places and theeveryday space of the local community.
