Researching the coast

How can we arrive at, and make readily available, a body of evidence on the full spectrum of information that might be relevant to optimizing coastal regeneration? We have firm foundations, recently updated, from the Beatty and Fothergill reports, from the English Heritage architectural survey, and from the British Resorts and Destinations Association’s evidence on seaside entertainment. We should be able to pull together extensive databases, in one form or another, on such matters as erosion, sea defences and global warming, or traffic and transport flows to and from coasts and along coastlines. We have ways of measuring seasonal fluctuations and bed occupancy, and we can chart the relationships between tourism and other kinds of economic activity on coastlines, and examine the relationships between them and the viability of alternative options and mixes.

Crucial to all this is making decisions about what to measure, how to measure it, how to compare, and how to take account of what is not susceptible to measurement and even what is too important to measure. There is a growing literature on the limitations of cost–benefit analysis.¹ Definitions are always a problem in coastal settlement analysis, and once we have resolved these issues our choice of methodologies will be crucial to the outcomes of our deliberations and recommendations. It will be important to agree on the values that underpin our choices, or at least to be transparent about the nature of such values and choices. This is therefore an important, demanding and potentially contentious chapter.

To begin with, we must decide what we need in the way of contextual material, identifying trends and patterns at national and regional levels, and across particular coastlines. Within such a framework, what kinds of local research are appropriate to the needs and opportunities of specific places or kinds of place? Can we identify clusters or systems of coastal towns that would benefit from complementary development, and how might we make this work? Clearly, untrammelled competition between destinations is not the best way forward, resulting as it does in over-development, surplus capacity, waste and decay. The British seaside has always flourished best on the basis of complementary development, the creation of niche markets, the sharing of complementary assets, and an understanding that attractions within resorts are more complementary than competitive: having two piers rather than one, for example, makes a coastal destination more attractive, offers choices to visitors, and brings in a larger pool of visitors for each attraction. This is not always understood by private companies, which are likely to take a narrow, instrumental and short-term view in the current climate of economic expectation. Taking a wider view would add an extra dimension to their need to identify markets and compete for their share of them.

This should also remind us that coastal destinations depend on attractions and amenities that may not be profitable in themselves without subsidy, but are essential to sustainability and success for the resort economy as a whole. The most obvious examples involve sea defences, bathing water quality control, promenades, parks and gardens. But the questions of to what extent and under what conditions subsidy may be valid on these terms, and the legality and practical politics of providing such assistance, is of longstanding and continuing relevance.

These themes are brought together when a regeneration scheme involves providing support from the public purse for attractions that may be thought to be competing with existing private companies, and these issues need to be carefully managed.² An excellent illustration might be found in the endemic and enduring conflicts at Bexhill over the De La Warr pavilion, which began with the original proposal, pitting residential against resort interests, the public purse against the private, and (at least in origins) the xenophobic against the international.³ There are lessons to be learnt, too, from the unhappy saga of Brighton’s West Pier, and the shifting conflicts between sectors and interest-groups that have accompanied the pier’s demise and proposed revival in a new form.⁴ Examples could be multiplied endlessly.

We all know that there is a politics of regeneration – who makes decisions? how should income, expenditure, subsidy and profit be allocated? how are conflicts managed? Managers of interventions need to keep this constantly in mind at the research and planning stage as well as in day-to-day operation, by which time – for better or worse – the rules of the game will have been established^.5 And beyond all this, how do we assess the potential and actual impact of interventions, and how should we incorporate qualitative dimensions that take us beyond ‘things that can be counted’, or at least that appear susceptible to counting?

A lot of the quantitative groundwork has been laid in the academic field by the Sheffield Hallam studies of coastal town economies, demographics and social problems, which have already been discussed extensively. Fred Gray has also emphasised the importance, as a resource, of league tables of indices of multiple deprivation, and of aggregating social analysis from the smallest units of statistical capture. This draws attention to the scope for detailed local studies that might probe more deeply into particularly problematic locations, seeking the roots of problems and the potential levers of positive change, providing scope for identifying patches of deprivation and disorder that have been shifted elsewhere rather than rectified, and offering insights that may be transferable as well as being of local relevance . Here as elsewhere, access to contextual and background information becomes important, to assist in identifying what is unusual and where the most promising comparators are.

This is where the discussion of definitions of coastal towns, and of which sub-set of the wider category we are concerned with, becomes important. The Sheffield Hallam studies enable us to focus on a particular group of towns, and it will be dangerous to stray too far beyond their categories. Some of the evidence available to us is rendered unusable for most statistical purposes by the extent to which its coverage diverges from our central dataset.

For example, we cannot incorporate the findings of surveys of 130 ‘coastal places’, or of coastal ‘marginal seats’, or even the North-West Coastal Forum’s interesting recent analysis of coastal settlements in that part of England , into quantitative analyses based on the Beatty and Fothergill projects.⁶ The categories employed are widely divergent, and some of the places concerned are barely recognisable as coastal towns of any kind, although some of this material is of course usable as supplementary evidence.

• The list of ‘coastal places’ seems to include everywhere with an administrative boundary that touches tidal waters, a category that apparently includes Sherwood in Nottinghamshire, one of England’s most obviously ‘inland’ constituencies.

• The ‘coastal marginals’ are a very diverse group, from which it is impossible to generate useful generalisations. The fact that they include Westmorland and Lonsdale, whose coastal strip is completely swamped by rural and inland small-town settlements, or old industrial Camborne and Redruth, or rural and suburban Beverley and Holderness, illustrates that very few coastal towns, or even stretches of coastline, have sufficient population concentrations to dominate the character of a parliamentary constituency.

• The north-west survey recognised this problem at one level, by looking at coastal ‘places’ rather than local government units. But its categorisations are sometimes eccentric (putting Silloth and Barrow-in-Furness in the same box as ‘maritime towns’, for example), while grouping the places into counties is contradictory and unhelpful on the NWCF’s own terms . Meanwhile, any attempt at averaging, or even aggregating, would fall foul of the numerical predominance of Liverpool, whose size and distinctive characteristics present a longstanding problem of distortion for attempts to provide statistical portrayals of the region. Such problems underline the utility of the Sheffield Hallam studies in providing a clearly articulated national baseline.

But even the solid-looking economic and demographic evidence pulled together by the Sheffield Hallam and similar studies runs up against the endemic and deep-rooted problems presented by the seaside economy. For example, the populations of coastal resorts vary widely through the year, owing to seasonal migration as well as to the ebb and flow of visitors. So what should our base figure be for making local calculations? This problem became apparent to me as a historical researcher when looking at the impact of changes in the census date on apparent population trends in resorts. When the census date was moved from early April to early June in 1841 and 1921, the population returns for resorts were considerably inflated by seasonal workers and residents as well as visitors, and this affected apparent inter-censal population trends, to such an extent that in 1921 attempts were made to adjust the official census figures to take account of the problem.⁷

So the question of when and how to count resort populations needs to be taken seriously. Their structures, as well as their numbers, will change considerably during the year, as those local authorities who complain about the failure of central government financial allocations to recognise this are well aware. The taking of a census on a single day is highly problematic when we are examining seasonal economies: the historic ‘Spanish’ system of combining a New Year’s Day census with a record of regular and transient residents has provided one way of reducing this problem.⁸

We need to be aware more generally of the problems entailed in using census-type statistical evidence as a direct record of reality. By defining the classifications used for localities, occupations and even ages, the census-takers influence in advance the versions of reality they present to us.⁹ It is quite clear that ‘official’ figures of all kinds underestimate the complexity of real economies, especially in seasonal industries with extensive intermittent opportunities for female, child and indeed pensioner employment, often in the ‘black economy’. Any exercise in information gathering that assumes that individuals have one, stable occupation – if only as a heuristic device to make a kind of provisional sense of complex data – will miss out on fundamental insights into how things ‘really’ work.

High levels of mobility in coastal populations, which are recognised as generating such problems as ‘churn’ in school enrolments, are also likely to be imperfectly grasped by the existing statistically driven methodologies. This is where qualitative disciplines such as anthropology, ethnography and some kinds of sociology – using survey, interview and participant observation methodologies – should come into their own. Phenomena such as ‘dovetailing’, where people move between occupations on a seasonal basis, and different family members may become dominant earners at different times, are well established in coastal settings. This applies to fishing, trade, building and manufacturing as well as tourism, which also provides large numbers of ill-paid but flexible and part-time opportunities for women and young people.

All these are well-established and persisting phenomena for which there is a good deal of historical evidence, and we need to be able to take them into account when assessing the nature of coastal employment, under-employment, migration and demography.¹⁰ These and other questions of definition will also affect the gathering, classification and assessment of issues relating to health, disability, access to services, and problems of educational outcomes, antisocial behaviour, addiction and self-harm. Therefore it is essential that researchers look critically and analytically at the statistics they mull over, and try to situate them within the wider picture.¹¹

Our understanding of coastal tourist economies is hampered even further by the continuing lack of convincing, or even plausible, statistics of visitor numbers, length of stay and expenditure. This problem is not peculiar to Britain: it is endemic in the nature of tourism itself, which sells experiences rather than tangible products and whose infrastructure is easier to quantify than its customers or consumers. This applies especially to domestic tourism, with its characteristic multitude of small firms, informal arrangements and complex family economies which mix incomes derived from tourism with those from a variety of other sources. This tends to make domestic tourism, which of course predominates overwhelmingly at the British seaside, less visible and susceptible to quantification than its international counterpart, where tour operating companies and formal travel arrangements involving public transport and frontier controls make basic figures and trends easier to establish – though still by no means infallible.¹²

Alarm bells ring immediately when we try to look comparatively at visitor numbers to the English seaside. An obvious approach might be to examine submissions to the Casino Advisory Panel for the allocation of casino licences in 2006, which drew bids from several coastal towns. They, alongside their inland rivals, proffered current estimates of visitor footfall. In fact, such an exercise immediately brings out the scale and scope of the problems. Some of the comparative evidence presented on visitor numbers is counter-intuitive. North East Lincolnshire (represented by Grimsby and Cleethorpes) reported higher visitor numbers than Bournemouth, while East Lindsey (Skegness and district) was not far behind the big south coast resort. Newquay’s staying visitors were ahead of Bournemouth and Torbay, which in turn was only just ahead of Great Yarmouth on overall visitor numbers. Torbay, Great Yarmouth and Blackpool attempted to present trends over time since a 1970s peak, but there is no suggestion that they were all calculating on the same basis.

Even more worrying is the evidence that several inland towns with no pretensions as tourism magnets were claiming similar or greater tourist numbers than major coastal resorts. The industrial town of Dudley, in the West Midlands, recorded visitor totals on a par with Bournemouth, and staying visitor numbers on a par with Folkestone. Coastal tourism in Britain may have declined, but surely not to the extent that Dudley, even with its Merry Hill retail centre, open-air museum, castle and zoo, is as attractive to leisure visitors as Bournemouth.

Some of the bidders were using the widely adopted STEAM model developed by Global Tourism Solutions. This presents itself as a supply-side model that provides only an ‘indicative base for modelling trends’, and anyway displays vague flexibility about some of its data sources while shrouding many of its assumptions in ‘commercial confidentiality’. Others, including Shepway (Folkestone), used the alternative model on the market, the Cambridge Economic Impact Model. This accepts that, just as its sources are of variable quality, so its outcomes are of uncertain accuracy – to the extent that no numerical confidence level (in terms of being accurate to plus or minus x per cent) can be provided.

This display of disarming honesty has not prevented some local authorities from presenting the figures generated by both models as if they were solid, firm and grounded, rather than cloudy and vaporous as (implicitly and sometimes explicitly) admitted by the proprietors. West Sussex, for example, displays the results of the STEAM model (up to 2005) and of Cambridge (after 2006) as ‘Tourism facts and figures’ to the nearest pound, giving a ‘headline’ impression of undisputed accuracy, without making clear how the change from one model to another might have affected apparent trends.

Several key inputs to the models are based on remarkably vulnerable assumptions about accuracy of data capture and the scope for extrapolation. An example is the attempt to derive national, regional and county tourism patterns from 1000 weekly telephone interviews under the auspices of Visit Britain. Another is the UK Occupancy Survey which is based on a sample of occupation providers and relies on the accurate completion of monthly forms. Any attempt to derive remotely plausible local statistics from these highly generalised datasets, or to fine-tune the sub-division of categories such as types of accommodation, becomes highly vulnerable to the magnification of error in small sub-samples.

The remarkable career of the STEAM model, since it was imported from Canada to Scarborough in 1988, has been summarised by its main proponent in an ‘overview’.¹³ What seems remarkable is the degree of influence that such packages have been able to exert, given their disturbing reliance on ‘proxy variables’ and admitted lack of precision at the local level.

Generalised models such as Cambridge and STEAM have not swept all before them, and other casino bidders preferred to rely on local surveys organised by tourist boards or local government, which the standard models (as they seem to be) also try to incorporate where available, in ways that are not precisely specified. As Restormel council rightly pointed out with regard to Newquay: ‘Day visitors are difficult to categorise and vary according to weather patterns’ – and they do so in ways that are unlikely to be picked up by the relevant databases.¹⁴

The STEAM definition of a ‘tourist day visit’, as one that ‘crosses a boundary from one area into another area for a period of at least three hours for non-routine leisure purposes’ provides an indication of the problems of both definition and measurement. It is very similar to the Cambridge definition, and seems to be endorsed by the DCMS. But it is clearly highly problematic. If I travel the short distance from Lancaster to Blackpool to watch a football match, crossing municipal and parliamentary constituency but not county boundaries, arriving three quarters of an hour before the game and leaving half an hour after it, paying at the gate and perhaps buying a pie at half-time, this makes me a tourist. The same would apply if I travelled for the same purpose from Lancaster to a rather marginal ‘tourist’ destination such as Accrington. What is a ‘non-routine’ leisure activity? Would it become ‘routine’ if the match were played, and visited, every year; or would regular attendance at any kind of football match make attendance at this one ‘routine’, even if it were itself an annual or random event? If I go to Blackpool six times a year to see a show, is this ‘routine’? Is this definition sensible? And how can such activities really be captured with any conviction? This raises very difficult issues about how tourism levels and impacts can or should be measured, and existing methods remain unreliable and inconsistent.¹⁵

Day trips are especially problematic, as is widely acknowledged, but the problems are endemic across the board. Comparative tourist expenditure is, of course, even more difficult to measure or model, and the continuing lack of remotely plausible data on tourist numbers and expenditure, especially for individual destinations, is attracting increasing attention. Some of the problems are now being recognised by, for example, the English Tourism Information Partnership, following rather belatedly from the unease about the validity of current national, regional and especially local tourism statistics that was articulated in the Allnutt Report in 2004.¹⁶ This was commissioned by government and exposed a general lack of fitness for purpose in national tourism statistics; but four years later Professors John E. Fletcher and Victor Middleton complained to a DCMS Select Committee that the report had still had no positive impact:

There is no other sector in the United Kingdom economy as significant as tourism in which the key strategic and management decisions are so hampered by a lack of adequate data.

They suggested that, if anything, the quality of available tourism statistics had deteriorated over the last quarter of a century, and they singled out five key issues:

* the lack of definition and understanding of the widely used concept of ‘visitor economy’;

* the misleading precision too often imputed to the use of Tourism Satellite Accounting to assess national and regional value, and the damaging impact of the poor quality statistics that were often used;

* the impossibility of conducting effective destination management in the absence of trustworthy local statistics (with a plethora of improvised local studies that could not be compared with each other);

* the complete impossibility of pursuing the fashionable goal of ‘sustainable development’ in the absence of usable definitions or methodologies;

* the general lack of timely information of all kinds to feed into rational management decisions.

This was a scathing indictment of current practice and of the absence of any sort of central direction or even advice.¹⁷

It now seems that this nettle is about to be grasped, although there have been so many false starts that a certain enduring scepticism remains permissible. The establishment of ETIP by the Partners for England Forum at the end of 2007 is a promising initiative, alongside the Tourism Intelligence Unit of the Office of National Statistics. The report it commissioned from The Tourism Company points up a lot of the problems identified above, indicating the lack of available statistical data to inform tourism planners, noting the dangers that arise from undue reliance on modelling from national databases of doubtful validity, and expressing well-founded doubts about the prevalence of proprietary economic impact models.¹⁸ Current attempts to place tourism statistics on a more convincing footing, to enable trends, contexts and local conditions to be assessed in a more plausible manner, are admittedly unlikely to bear much fruit before 2011 or 2012. In the meantime the poverty of existing models, especially at the local level, has been thoroughly exposed. The age of STEAM may well be drawing to its close.¹⁹

Beyond all this, an unhealthy aspect of the ruling assumptions underlying the collection of tourism statistics is the exclusive focus on businesses that levy charges for the services and experiences they supply. This neglects the importance of free access and the uncommodified enjoyment of views, tranquillity, relaxation or wildlife as part of what draws people to the coast and makes destinations attractive to residents as well as visitors. Attempts to conduct economic modelling on the basis of ‘willingness to pay’ for such experiences are more disturbing still. It is not only commercial provision that generates ‘indirect’ or ‘induced’ employment: so do coastal paths, nature reserves, National Trust or English Heritage sites, or attractive public spaces that draw people in who then make use of commercially provided services.

This is a variant on the recognised importance of local authority infrastructure and amenity provision that does not make a profit itself, but enables others to do so, creating multiplier effects in the process. The development of Blackpool is a classic example of this phenomenon at work.²⁰ Similar arguments might be applied to public transport. Most railways to resorts, most of the time, probably did not make a profit in their own right, depending on the accounting conventions adopted; but they did enable others to invest successfully in providing goods and services for those who used their facilities.²¹ We must not lose sight of this dimension in developing new tourism statistics.

The unreliability of quantitative tourism data is, not surprisingly, also evident in other settings. A current Italian study informs us that:²²

The unreliability of quantitative tourism data is, not surprisingly, also evident in other settings. A current Italian study informs us that:22

Data comparison demonstrates that the real volume of tourism reaching the Italian coastal destinations is five times higher than what is measured through the official statistics.

But the British case is, overall, particularly problematic, and there is an urgent and recognised need to improve the quality of British statistics to meet the EU standards that are now required by Eurostat. Part of the problem at the local level is the very variable quality of the resources provided by consultants’ analyses. It might be thought invidious to single out and name coastal examples, but a very recent illustration from personal experience in an inland location may be helpful. A consultant’s report on the likely visitor demand for an edge-of-town shopping mall development in a north-western town predicted an annual footfall of eight million. This appeared implausible, not least in the light of data submitted to the Casino Advisory Panel, and the objectors sought clarification of the methodology used. It transpired that the consultants had taken the current annual estimate for Greater Manchester’s Trafford Centre, compared the size of that centre with that of the proposed development, and assumed that visitor numbers could be ‘read off’ pro rata: one-third the area, one-third the visitor numbers. This approach would have predicted eight million visitors even if the proposed development had been on St Kilda or Rockall. The local authority had simply accepted the projection.

That is a reminder that the quality of consultants’ work may vary from the excellent to the flimsy, that the nature and expected scope of commissions need to be carefully specified, and that the outcomes should be analysed critically. It may often be better to do the work in-house, if qualified employees with appropriate skills, contacts and a professional ethic of public service are available. The lack of reliable local tourism statistics makes this problem particularly pressing.

But there is a great deal more to the informed, research-led pursuit of coastal regeneration than the accumulation of quantitative economic and demographic data, important as this is to providing basic information if considered properly in context. Such material can inform policy but should not determine it.

Evidence on the nature and popularity of live entertainment provision in coastal towns is highly relevant, and Stephen Hayler’s assessment of the changing nature of provision and size of audiences, and the role of local authorities in small and medium-sized resorts in trying to meet visitor expectations, provides essential underpinning.²³ The role of live entertainment in regeneration should be an important dimension wherever a coastal destination has an infrastructure, a tradition of provision or a potentially responsive market. Evidence of successful practice and its potential transferability needs to be carefully investigated, as in the case of Blackpool’s Admission All Classes, which during its 2007/8 season effectively combined the traditional, the innovative and the edgy in a setting that does admittedly boast a uniquely strong and full-flavoured reputation for popular entertainment, with a challengingly large number of seats to fill.2⁴ Here as elsewhere, the challenges are to attract new generations and visiting publics without alienating existing visitors and residents, and to sustain the momentum after the completion of a single major project.

Admission All Classes is an excellent example of an attempt to regenerate coastal entertainment provision by building on a tradition while transforming and updating it from within, so as to appeal to an array of niche markets nesting in a broad and inclusive cross-section of popular audiences. This seductive combination of living heritage, including that of the ‘recent past’ and of veteran but still attractive performers, with current technologies, allusions and modes of presentation, contributes to a ‘cultural landscape’ of the sort UNESCO had in mind when constructing new categories for World Heritage Sites.²⁵ The necessary research in such areas entails looking at local live entertainment traditions in a broader context over time and space, thinking about what might be distinctively ‘seaside’ or place-specific about them, becoming aware of what has worked in other places and how its positive outcomes might be transferable, and seeking advice and inputs from people with relevant records of attested achievement in these areas.

Similar points might be made about architectural and town planning heritage, where the relevant expertise is more established and accessible through English Heritage (especially), CABE and campaigning organisations like SAVE Britain’s Heritage.²⁶ Awareness of the distinctiveness, significance and value of seaside architecture as living heritage has increased considerably in accessibility over the last decade, through the expansion of listing and awareness of the ‘heritage of the recent past’. It should form an essential aspect of the necessary research in support of seaside regeneration projects, not least as part of the necessary discouragement of routine, ‘could-be-anywhere’ developments and urban cloning. Coastal towns need to regenerate in ways that respect and build on their distinctive features, otherwise they will fail to attract visitors, residents and businesses that have an unprecedented range of choices of location in an internationally competitive market.27 Public art is also part of this picture, as Chapter 7 in this Handbook underlines.

A further aspect that needs to be considered, however, is what might be called the ‘informal coast’ and the representation of fishing and beach tourism (especially) by artists, photographers and related visual commentators, from Constable and Turner to Paul Martin and Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, in their contrasting idioms, and on to Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr.²⁸ Many resorts have had recent locally organised exhibitions celebrating ‘unofficial’ aspects of their recent remembered past, as at the Blott Artist Studios in Blackpool.²⁹ The tradition of seaside photography has embraced a particularly strong strand of celebrating the untidy, relaxed and spontaneous aspects of ‘ordinary people’ at leisure and play, often affectionate, sometimes incorporating elements of the voyeuristic or censorious, but always creating and sustaining those shared traditions of nostalgia and self-mockery that keep British coastal tourism alive and inhibit attempts to take it seriously. An understanding of this almost anarchic dimension of coastal pleasures and imagery, evident in the ‘plotland’ settlements of the inter-war years and attempts to defend their informality against commercial redevelopment (as at Humberston Fitties, Cleethorpes), is essential to underpin the sort of regeneration that will enliven and not sterilise, and that will liberate a sense of fun and frolic.³⁰ As David Chandler has observed:³¹

Going to the seaside was like going back in time, in a sense, to a country that was still struggling to become modern. ... There’s a sort of abandon about the seaside, you find people performing in a way that they wouldn’t do at home and then in that performance they’re revealing something of themselves that they wouldn’t normally do.

This kind of empathetic understanding, ‘from the bottom up’, will be an essential part of open, participatory approaches to coastal regeneration.

How should we assess the impact of regeneration interventions? The problems of statistical measurement have been discussed above. Moreover, as the Casino Advisory Panel noted in its report, it would be all too easy to identify positive changes that march in step with regeneration initiatives, and to ascribe the former to the latter through a simple, and tempting, ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ argument.³² We need to remain aware of the complexity of the interactions between amenity, recreational provision, ‘natural’ and built environment, security, comfort, tradition, innovation and excitement in creating a ‘spirit of place’ and a ‘place-myth’ that will generate an ambience that will attract and retain the loyalty and affection of a sustainable and renewable sufficiency of people. Such awareness should inhibit us from the uncritical adoption of mechanistic statistical measures of success or failure. We can witness in other chapters of this Handbook that such findings are often at odds with observed reality, and the pitfalls of statistical methodologies are obvious enough to discourage us from discounting the evidence of our own eyes

This is not to advocate the abandonment of quantitative and classificatory modes of analysis. It is to suggest rather that they are not infallible, and that their terms of reference are often ambiguous and value-laden. We need to be able to look holistically at issues, to take account of the unquantifiable and intangible alongside those phenomena that we can legitimately attempt to count, to be particularly sceptical about surveys based on loaded questions or subjective grading on scales of 1 to 5, and to be creatively critical of whatever expertise we buy in.

Above all, we should talk to each other across imagined disciplinary boundaries, liberate ourselves from silo mentalities, and regenerate in fully informed ways that embrace traditions, cultural landscapes, attachment to place and the ‘heritage of the recent past’ alongside, and in dialogue with, the necessary economic, demographic and social indicators that normally dominate such discourses. This chapter is, then, a plea for the eclectic, the interactive and the open-minded.

*** BOXED **** (Resorts of the World)

Development of an Adriatic coastal resort. Portoroz, Slovenia

Portoroz is situated in the northern coast of Istria, a peninsula in the northern Adriatic. Until late 19th century, Portoroz (or Portorose at the time) was only a name for a scarcely populated area covered with olive trees, wine yards and Mediterranean greenery. The development of tourism has significantly changed the scenery of the place. Investments in tourism industry have transformed this area in an important regional tourism destination generating over 1.5 million bed nights. Development of tourism in Portoroz was strongly influenced by political reality. Since the beginning of tourism development, Istrian peninsula frequently passed from one authority to another. Each has distinctly marked its period. Until First World War, Portoroz was a resort in Austria-Hungary. Tourism development was based on climate and spa treatments. The growing number of elite tourism was stopped by the war. After the war the area passed under Italian rule and became one of many Italian seaside resort destinations offering classical sun and beach. Despite investments in tourism the number of arrivals could not match pre-war figures.

Immediately after Second World War, Portoroz was included in a Free Triest Territory (FTT), a temporary entity set up to overcome border disputes between Italy and Yugoslavia. Military government of the area has not stimulated tourism and investments in tourism infrastructure were very limited. After 1954, Portoroz and its surrounding became part of Yugoslavia. Soon after, intense renovation and investments in necessary facilities turned Portoroz in classical mass-tourism destination. The number of arrivals was growing rapidly until 1980's when tourism needed new investments but the funds were not available. Decline of tourism was further accelerated by the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991. The war of independence of Slovenia had a long term effect on tourism. Repositioning of the destination into a congress and wellness and large investments in infrastructure renovation, have accelerated destination's recovery process.

Tomi Brezovec, University of Primorska, Slovenia