Book Description

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.