Modes of ordering tourismscapes
6 Modes of ordering tourismscapes
6.3 Centres of power
6.3.2 Landscapes of power
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and institutions to make the close at hand seem surprisingly distant. People move in and around one another, sliding across each other’s lives in a more or less powerful fashion to make their presence felt. In this topology of places, what is near and what is far, who ‘belongs’ and who does not, may be distorted by the placement of forces and their relational ties, where the presence of others may be smothered, excluded, barred, threatened, enticed or simply constrained. Their tangled arrangements of power may produce a degree of remoteness and proximity in social relationships that owes much to other times and other places also being present (ibid.: 193; see also Lefebvre, 1991 and Lengkeek, 2002). Cultural tourism in Tanzania produces community fractions that are part and others who are barred from the benefits, similarly villages and regions are ‘hooked up’ with and others are disconnected from the tourismscapes deployed.
Thus, in conclusion, tourismscapes are to be seen as particular configurations of power, stabilized by the engagement of ‘other wills by translating what they want and by reifying that translation in such a way that none of them can desire anything else any longer’ (Callon and Latour, 1981. In: Allen, 2003: 133). It would then seem that the key to the success of this kind of arrangement is the ability to ‘hook up’ others in the process of circulation, that is, to draw others into the network of meanings in such a way that it extends and reproduces itself through time and space. However, the extension of tourismscapes involves more than the mere circulation of resources; it also involves a mediated exercise of power where distances are overcome by the successive engagement of others to form something akin to a single will. Then again, our cases demonstrate that establishing domination at a distance through the process of engaging, signing up and obliging others to adhere to a particular line of action does not always result in a successful translation strategy.
One could take for granted that it is possible to replicate controlled conditions, given the immutability of the many devices in circulation. If, however, we take a different view, namely that much of what is extended across a network is not replicable in a simple way, that the arrangements are more open than closed, less connected than is hoped for, more prone to leakages than is presumed, then power’s successive reach is rather more hit and miss than controlling (Allen, 2003: 134). As we have seen, once for example local agents have engaged hoteliers, guides or the module coordinators of the Cultural Tourism Programme they are also empowered and able to make independent use of their new-found capabilities. And in a related way, the wider the dispersal of power, the more opportunity there is at the many points of intersection with other bodies for agents to mobilize other resources, other sets of interests, and to shift the line of discretionary judgement in unanticipated and unforeseen ways or even to break with it (ibid.:
134). Similarly successful modules in the Cultural Tourism Programme more or less dissociated themselves from the less successful and do not need TACTO or any other agency to sustain their relations with agents, tour operators and the like, and thus their power base.
Chapter 6 Modes of ordering tourismscapes
Although tourismscapes unfold in a topological way, they also ground at particular places.
Lanzarote’s, Texel’s or Manuel Antonio’s space is at least partly translated into tourismscapes to allow tourists to bathe, bike and hike, stay overnight and/or enjoy the landscape. Tangible outcome in the format of forms of land use, buildings and infrastructure reflect the way particular actor-networks stipulate the organization and production of space through legal or extra-legal means (Harvey, 1989: 222; see also Murdoch, 1998). It is the result of spatial practices in which people and things relationally are pooled into hotels, attractions, airports and resorts, national parks become attractions and landscapes become ‘leisure landscapes’.
Thus, space is constructed within tourismscapes, and tourismscapes are always a means of acting upon space. Spatial analysis is therefore also network analysis, as space is bound into networks and any assessment of spatial qualities is simultaneously an assessment of network relations (cf. Murdoch, 1997 and 1998).
Indeed, the particular ways space is translated into tourismscapes reflect the way different modes of ordering collide and the subsequent relations of power. In other words, modes of ordering define not only human-human but also human-spatial interactions. They are carried through by architectures, landscapes and transport infrastructures. Tourismscapes are embodied in a series of performances, a series of materials and a series of spatial arrangements. None of them is necessarily central, but ‘if we take them together then they generate the effect’ (Law, 1994: 143).
Referring to the three dimensions of ‘modes of ordering’ as depicted in the above, these modes contain notions about the way tourism should be spatially practised. It involves the way spatial practices in tourism are represented in mental constructions, consisting of values, facts or the desires of tourism planners, tourism entrepreneurs, tourists and locals (see also Harvey, 1989;
Lefebvre, 1991 and Meethan, 2001). It entails the conceptualizations of what tourism ‘should look like’ held by tour operators, hoteliers, tourists, travel agencies and tourism offices. It is the
‘imagined tourism space’ 16 (Lengkeek, 2002) like that of the ‘Mediterranean tourism landscape’
as portrayed on postcards or in holiday brochures (see also Dietvorst, 2001) or the ‘primary tropical forest’ as depicted by, for example, National Geographic, which inspired ten of thousands of ‘ecotourists’ to visit Costa Rica.
But modes of ordering entail not only particular ‘dreams’ but also spatial practices, ways of performing tourism spatially. However, these practices are seldom the result of one particular mode of ordering. In other words, the spatial developments of tourism are the result of a diversity of interacting and sometimes conflicting modes of ordering. The Manrique model illustrates that different modes of ordering (of, in this case, an artist, local civil servants, tourism entrepreneurs and NGOs) can knit in a particular way of organizing space, which demonstrates, as Maslonski and Wassiljewski (1993) put it:
What just one imaginative, tradition-conscious, nature-loving mind, dreaming and planning in four dimensions, is able to do: to overcome the dictates of money-driven modern civilization for a little while, if the circumstances are right.
As we have seen, ‘circumstances’ were only temporarily ‘right’ and Lanzarote, just like other places in the world, became the object of competing modes of ordering tourism. New actors came
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into play, bringing in new resources (like money, ideas, contacts, property or land, possibilities to act at a distance) and engaging other political actors on the island. New coalitions replaced the Group César Manrique, and what was once known as ‘alternative tourism’ in Lanzarote succumbed to intense resort development (as in Puerto del Carmen and Costa Teguise) and the rise of what Bianchi (2002b) denotes as a typical ‘coastal mode of tourism development’, similar to that in other parts of the Canary Islands and in Spain and, more recently, Turkey17.
The control by certain groups of particular resources (such as money, land, contacts or tourists) might even lead to spaces that, according to Lengkeek (2002), are ‘possessed’ (bezeten ruimtes).
Here, particular power relations are consolidated and preserved by material objects and space.
They might resemble what Zukin (1991) describes as ‘landscapes of power’ and Murdoch (1998) as ‘spaces of prescription’.
Strongly converging networks, where particular modes of ordering dominate and subsequent translations are flawlessly accomplished, might configure ‘spaces of prescription’. The preferred way of performing tourism is inscribed in architectures and spatial designs, which in turn act to consolidate the network. There is little room for conciliation. Spaces shaped by networks where the links between actors are provisional and divergent, where coalitions are variable and revisable, will be more fluid, interactional and unstable; they will be ‘spaces of negotiation’
(Murdoch, 1998).
However, prescription and negotiation are two sides of the same coin: one cannot exist without the other. As we have seen, modes of ordering are never ever-lasting, complete and closed totalities: they always generate uncertainties, ambivalences, transgressions and resistances.
Therefore, rather than seeing orders and resistances as being in opposition, we have to identify how these two dimensions come to depend on another within particular sets of heterogeneous relations and, secondly, how these complex relations are woven into various spatial forms (ibid.:
364).
In the case of Manuel Antonio/Quepos, for example, we have seen how the protected status of the Manuel Antonio National Park, which is rather strictly directed by the Costa Rican National Park Service in San José, still is contested by all kind of claims from within (former landowners to whom the park is still indebted) and from outside (new tourism developments in and on the fringes of the park). The most glaring evidence of the latter are two three-story blocks of apartments on a former wetland, immediately adjacent to the border of the National Park and just 250 metres from its entrance (see Duim et al., 2001). Although a variety of tourism entrepreneurs – varying from hotel and restaurant owners, to fruit and handicraft sellers – translated Espadilla Beach into a tourism zone, the outcome is continuously challenged by local organizations like Comité de Lucha. Rather then seeing the National Park or Espadilla Beach either as ‘spaces of prescription’ or as ‘spaces of negotiation’, they are both. On the one hand, they are constantly aligned with the ordering work of, respectively, nature conservationists (and organizations representing them) and tourism entrepreneurs, while on the other hand this work of prescription and control is challenged and outcomes are continuously negotiated. Therefore, all spaces should be seen as complex relations between different modes of ordering and their subsequent forms of resistance (Murdoch, 1998: 364).
Chapter 6 Modes of ordering tourismscapes
However, this interaction of different modes of ordering is not purely ‘local’ as it is also constituted and configured by ‘distant others’. The work of prescription and negotiation also reflects the ability or inability of some (like the National Park Service, former land owners who left the region, and particular investors and entrepreneurs from Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica or even outside Costa Rica) to direct the course of events. Indeed, as Urry (2000: 140) explains, particular tourism regions can be understood as multiplex, as a set of spaces where ranges of relational networks coalesce, interconnect and fragment. Any such place can be viewed as the particular nexus between, on the one hand, propinquity characterized by intensely thick co-present interaction, and on the other hand, fast flowing webs and networks stretched corporeally, virtually and imaginatively across distances. These propinquities and extensive networks come together to enable performances in, and of, particular places.