Tourism essay 2nd draft

Essentially a new 1st draft of my tourism essay showing the shift in focus of the project:

The Landscape of Leisure

With its beautiful beaches backed by mountains Dalian is ideally situated on the Liaodong peninsular in Liaoning province, Dongbei (North East) China, to receive a large portion of domestic as well as international holidaymakers.  Unlike the more frequently visited locations such as Beijing, Xi’an or Hangzou, Dalian offers a completely different experience than purely temples and history.  The past 20 years have seen Dalian set about becoming an attractive city with many green parks and its many beaches provide extra weight for its tourist market.   The former Mayor of the city Bo Xilai set about making Dalian full of green areas during his governing in the 1990s.

It is obvious wherever you look or whenever you turn on the television now in China that this is a country undergoing rapid changes to both the economic and natural landscape as it progresses through its own industrial age at an impressive rate.  Leisure tourism is always a strong indicator of the social development of a country and China is no exception, with many businesses springing on the opportunities that tourism can generate for an area.

With a population now topping 1,300,000,000, the most populace country in the world spends on average a x year on domestic tourism and earns y from it.  This makes tourism big business in China.  Add further analysis and figures.

Add information about the growth of global tourism and its sociological position and impact within a society and the reasons behind leisure tourism.

Leisure tourism owes its much of its history to the Industrialisation of Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the new British middle class –the factory and machinery owners, the traders and the oligarchy started using their free time for leisure tourism.  This later spread to the working classes with the rise of the seaside resort and improvements in transport infrastructure in the UK allowing people to affordably access resorts such as Blackpool, Southend-on-sea and Weston-Super-Mare.

The rise of cheap air travel world wide in the past decade has bought the opportunities for foreign travel to even greater heights, with many locations now depending on foreign tourism as an intricate part of their economy.  This has led to a change in many locations to make room for these migratory tourists and greater and greater impact on the landscape as the built environment increases to provide leisure entertainment.

Dave Wyatt has experience of working with many environmental issues concerning the relationship between man and his environment.  This work includes working with a community of Albanians who migrated to a heavily polluted area in Albania called Porto Romano in order to seek out work in nearby Durres, work on land rights issues from the West Bank in Palestine that was exhibited at the Chobi Mela IV in Bangladesh in 2006 and work on environmental research into crop growing in desert environments being undertaken in Spain for use in Africa.  He has had work included in a variety of international exhibitions and published in both magazines and reference books.  His work today focuses on the relationship between man and the landscape.

Dalian is a city stuck between vast natural beauty and the ever-present human condition of commercialising nature resulting in an often-bizarre landscape that aptly represents China’s rapid surge for progress.  The development of theme parks alongside this natural beauty perfectly illustrates the global culture of advertising tourism to beautiful unspoilt areas that in reality come under threat through the increased visitation and development of the landscape.   Much like in documentary work of photographers such as Joel Sternfeld and Martin Parr in the 1980s in which we saw the sprawl of the growing middle classes in the West, China is now to experiencing the early ruminations of this same phenomenon and where better to witness it than through how a culture spends it’s leisure time?

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 12:24 am and is filed under Killing Time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.