1st Edition

Coastal Architectures and Politics of Tourism Leisurescapes in the Global Sunbelt

Edited By Sibel Bozdoğan, Panayiota Pyla, Petros Phokaides Copyright 2023
    408 Pages 157 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    408 Pages 157 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    Part I: Colonial Legacies of Tourism

    1. The Postcolonial Appropriation of Tourist Environments in Libya, 1943-1969

    Brian L. McLaren

    2. Decolonizing Leisurescapes: Sri Lanka’s Aesthetically Integrated Resort Designs

    Anoma Pieris

    3. The Anaesthetics of Tourism: Bali, Internationalism, and Post-Conflict Developments

    Jiat-Hwee Chang

    4. Designing Terra nullius: Mid-Century Modernism and Settler-Colonial Leisure

    Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió

    Part II: Collective Leisure and Market Ideologies

    5. Emblems of Socialism: Romania’s Black Sea Resorts, 1950s-60s

    Juliana Maxim

    6. Stretching Socialism: Company Holiday Homes in Estonian Coastal Villages

    Epp Lankots

    7. Por el Pueblo, Para el Pueblo: Leisurescapes and Revolutionary Ideology in Castro’s Cuba

    Erica Morawski

    8. Leisure Between the First and Second Worlds: Hilton Tel-Aviv and Mivtachim Convalescent Home in Zichron Ya’akov

    Alona Nitzan-Shiftan and Duffy Half

    Part III: Territorial Planning and Transnational Expertise

    9. Towers on a Golden Coast: Competing Visions of Development on Famagusta’s Beach

    Panayiota Pyla and Dimitris Venizelos

    10. Transnational Experts and the Architecture of Tourism Industry in Francoist Spain

    José Vela Castillo and Sıla Karataş

    11. Making the Border Irrelevant: An Israeli Hotel in the Sinai Peninsula

    Neta Feniger

    12. The African Riviera: Tourism, Infrastructure and Regional Development in the Ivory Coast

    Ayala Levin

    Part IV: Mobility and Infrastructure in the Mediterranean Littoral

    13. Scales of Modernization: The Adriatic Highway as an Agent of Coastal Transformation

    Melita Čavlović

    14. Mobility, Modernity, and Hospitality: TUSAN Tourism Initiative in Postwar Turkey

    Gökçeçiçek Savaşır and Zeynep Tuna Ultav

    15. ‘And They all Go to the Seashore!’ Roads, Seaside Leisure, and Camping in Postwar Greece

    Stavros Alifragkis and Emilia Athanassiou

    16. Plastic Leisure for All: The Hexacube and the Seaside Development of Leucate-Barcarès

    Panagiotis Farantatos

    Part V: Leisure Politics, Modernity and Beach Culture

    17. The Paradox of Baywatch: Questioning the Enduring Appeal of the ‘SoCal’ Beachscape

    Elsa Devienne

    18. Concrete Shores: Illusions and Desires of Total Control on the Littoral Edge of Egypt

    Manar Moursi

    19. Architectural Visions of Modernity and Exclusion: Mid-Century Tourism Projects for Istanbul’s Florya Coast

    Meltem Ö. Gürel

    20. Black Sea Geopolitics and Architectures of Leisure: Turban Kilyos Holiday Complex

    Emine Görgül

    21. Walkerhill Resort: A Space of Exception in Postwar South Korea

    Alex Young Il Seo

    Biography

    Sibel Bozdoǧan is a visiting professor at Boston University, previously taught at MIT and GSD, Harvard University. She is the author of Modernism and Nation-Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (2001, recipient of the SAH Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award) and co-author, with Esra Akcan, of Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (2012).

    Panayiota Pyla has a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a professor of architecture at the University of Cyprus, having previously served on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among her works is the edited volume Landscapes of Development: The Impact of Modernization Discourses on the Physical Environment of the Eastern Mediterranean (2013).

    Petros Phokaides is an assistant professor at the University of Thessaly, Greece. His research focuses on architecture, infrastructures, and broader landscape transformations across multiple spatial scales to understand postcolonial visions, geopolitics, and socio-environmental change in the global South. He currently serves on the editorial board of Architectural Histories.

     

    "This book is an outstanding collaboration with unforeseen innovations. On the one hand, it is a unique global history of the Cold-War that follows the path of the sun-belt from the Caribbean to Mediterranean, Black Sea and Indian Ocean. On the other hand, it demonstrates the architecture of tourism in all its complexity. Reading the essays together, we understand how building hotels and going on vacation could be a political act against austerity impositions or an infrastructure to lure investors; a rebellion against former colonizers or a settler colonial violence that dispossessed indigenous habitants; a force that globalized western bourgeois standards or an impetus for an identifiable local aesthetic; a cultural tranquilizer or a declaration of the right to rest; a competition with oil industry or a policy to occupy countries with oil-dependent highway networks."

    Esra Akcan, Author of Architecture in Translation; Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (with S. Bozdoğan); Open Architecture and Abolish Human Bans.

    "Sun, sea and sand, the token features of leisurely holidays, represent much more than just the bounty of nature. The sunbelt came into being as a result of geopolitical forces, architectural formations and socio-economic evolutions, which produced not only beach resorts but also political tensions, racial hierarchies and environmental degradation. Built on detailed case studies, this volume offers a thorough analysis of the phenomenon."

    Hilde Heynen, University of Leuven, Belgium

    "A highly innovative book that expands our understanding of the role played by modern architecture in shaping the contours of the post WWII geopolitical arena. This collection is a a must read for anyone interested in not only the global history of modernism, but also how its scale and materiality allowed for new ways of imagining and managing power, modes which are still very much in play in the emerging politics of global climate change and pandemics."

    Ijlal Muzaffar, Associate Professor of Modern Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design