A system can only see what it can see. It cannot see what it can't see. Nor can it see that it cannot see what it can't see. Niklas LuhmannWarehouse logistics topography
Travelling in different countries one encounters the ever-same standardized landscapes of shopping malls, car parks and highways, airports, golf courses, and exclusive eco-holiday resorts. These spaces of travel, consumption and exchange have become ‘non-places’, ruthlessly homogenised. (Marc Augé) Once it was thought that infrastructure existed to service human dwellings. By now cities and suburbs are like a byproduct of the global just-in-time-logistics warehouse. Human housing appears like a side effect of a world-wide logistics system. (Keller Easterling) The human being is the annex to this machine. The order of things seems to be upside down, disorientation is the result in an out-of-control system. Territorial policies of neoliberal restructuring are often made in elsewhere land and dictate the interaction between space and society. In the absence of spatial justice, people and biodiversity are being expelled from the landscape to squeeze the maximum out of a terrain. The highest bidder takes all and wins over spatial justice. (Edward Soya)
The right to the city
H. Lefebvre wanted "to reclaim the city as a co-created space—a place for life detached from the growing effects that commodification and capitalism have had over social interaction and the rise of spatial inequalities in worldwide cities throughout the last two centuries." (source) Till today social movements assert a right to their place. After the formal right to mobility was gained, the right to stay would have to be one of the rights of the 21st Century. Displacement by the highest bidder is taking place worldwide. "Your luxury is our displacement" (source)
Bottom up-created shared spaces, especially with people-centred urban designs that measure up to the Human Scale (J. Gehl) are magnets for cosmopolitans and creatives globally. In many cities local people have to flee or are expelled by mass tourism, high rents and exorbitant prices. 'Gentrification' is the expulsion and replacement of one strata of resident by a more cashed up group for the sake of profit. Art, culture and beautification are fuelling this process of "urban colonialism." This valorisation process of the invisible hand of the market starts again on a higher level of the growth spiral.
The "insatiable appetite for Indigenous land and resources" is not confined to events of a colonial past. (source) Settler cultures with their mono-cultural baggage of domesticated species deprive bio-diversity of the right to existence. The multitude of live on spaceship Earth is squeezed out of their homes and finally kicked off the planet.
Overtourism
Overtourism sets in when tourists do not want to visit the site anymore because the place is ruined for both locals and visitors. When it has been consumed - it is time to move on to the next location. The Gold Coast for example derives its fame from its manufactured identity 'tall buildings by the sea'. 'Unattractive and overpopulated' the coast has 'lost its mojo'. (source) Many cities and natural sites are suffocating on their own attractiveness.
Intensification, speed and deregulation serve to colonise the night. The 24/7 parties are thumping away il/legally. Musical events are "vast walk-in advertising experiences...they only exists because of a branding imperative." (source) Fuelled by petrol, speed, bright lights, and pyrotechnics the event areas send neighborhood stakeholders packing.
The drive through ' tourist space' - Scant in man-made wonders
In the absence of any wo/man-made wonders that tourists are drawn to, Bellingen offers 'the drives' through pastoral and natural landscapes. The remnants of 'pristine landscape have been cultured for eons by the first inhabitants. The cultural landscape of settlers is the technosphere. Cultural constructs like the Big Banana at Coffs Harbour, or more accurately The Big Blueberry and extractive industries of the Big Quarry (forestry, mining, water) are geographical high points. The planned Great Koala National Park is expected to boost biodiversity and tourism.
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| “Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.” ― Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead |
Mobile sprawl
The drive is of course the main mode by which the landscape is experienced via the ac windscreen. If one has negotiated the small drive-through town with logging and gravel trucks rushing through and survived the diesel fumes whilst shopping or having a cup. Then it is the wide open roads that are yearning to be widened and become four lane highways. Road construction and congestion are an ongoing feature of private mobility. Roadkill of local wildlife and fast food garbage line the edges. Locals crying out for more parking and more roads and less potholes could easily be satisfied by allowing corporations to fill the holes with their logos.
SUVs plough their way through heritage-listed rainforest and along beaches. Lookouts and viewing platforms lure visitors out of their internal combustion engines and show them where to look. Driving routes to the Gleniffer Reserves picnic spots are leading to the water catchment area which are heavily frequented and have no toilets. Interpretive Signage directs motorists through the Gleniffer Valley elaborating on Gumbaynggirr Homeland and “settler common sense” history.
"Where the bloody hell are ya... Come live our Philausophy”
'Philausophy' is the latest $38 million advertising campaign of Tourism Australia that relies entirely on ordinary Australians and the beauty of the landscape. The dreaming of an all year-round tourist season with plane loads of fly-in fly-out tourists from the Asia-Pacific zone coming to squeeze the last koala or shoot wombats might turn into a nightmare. Deep cruise ship ports, huge airports and self contained resorts run by o.s. interests. Bakers, butchers and supermarkets would disappear and one could choose from the largest variety of souvenirs, proudly made in China. In a world playground populated by theme parks, disneyfication and hyperreality the tourist is mostly not able or willing to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. They desire simulation as the created atmosphere can give them" more reality than nature can" (source).
The touristic gaze and imaginary shape and mediate our knowledge of and desires about the rest of the planet. (Franklin and Crang 2001 PDF )Masses on the move
Tourism is “one of the greatest population movements of all time” (PDF) Once explorers 'discovered' far flung locations in the attempt of empire building for their masters. The wealthy landed gentry in Europe had their Grand Tour. Then Thomas Cook commodified "mass travel" for Brits and the rest is history. Western tourists flying to 'sunny locations' or cultural heritage sites changed the entire fabric of societies. Under the new economic conditions of globalisation the masses on the move that are with or without resources are part of the imperialism then and now. "The seemingly innocent here-and-now of tourist–host interactions is rooted in broader historical trajectories of travel, colonization, global inequalities and privilege." (PDF)
"In this young, mostly white, ahistorical, neoliberal utopia of the imagination, anyone can go anywhere."( source)
Words can be like tiny arsenic capsules; they are swallowed unnoticed, they seem to have no effect, and after some time the poison effect is there. (own translation) Victor Klemperer, Lingua Tertii Imperii LTIFraming semiotic landscapes of the self
Through a schemata of interpretation of events and themes we construct meaningful patterns. A system of 'pigeon holes' /slots ( M. Minsky) activates mental maps or neural networks of associations that make up one's knowledge and feeling towards the world. "Schemata of interpretation" “The schema concept refers to cognitive structures of organized prior knowledge, abstracted from experience with specific instances; schema guide the processing of new information and the retrieval of stored information.”(source) Embodied cognitive structures and interpretation patterns make sense of the self and the world. "Words not only highlight individual concepts, but also specify a certain perspective from which the frame is viewed.' Individuals, groups, and societies engage in frame building. Mass media, politics, advertisement and voci populi. (V. Klemperer)
If we manage to persuade a Democrat every day to use a word we have given him, we can win. Michela Murgia
The frames, or semantic networks
have a plasticity. The coherent structure of reasoning, language,
memory can be re-framed within the cerebral localization. The recipient's internal structures of the mind
can be changed. Agenda setting mainstream media, political campaigns,
ubiquitous ads and think tanks flood our minds. Time poor and desperate
to reduce complexity, we lack the resources to stop, filter and evaluate
our resonance to the information and pictorial avalanche. 'Advertisers '
operating with the power of the narrative reduce complexity for us
and bind the message to our emotions. The in- and exclusion mechanism of
our filter (reframing) and the resulting actions are not always
rational. (source)
Story-telling fiction
The spaces of the landscape and mind travelled through here without
CO2 mileage have aimed to demonstrate that language determines thought and
that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories and
actions. (source) The grand narrative of (neoliberal) economic theory might just turn out to be another story-telling fiction giving legitimacy to the present governance regime.
The
beautification of places and its representation on social media has
become an integral part of driving the growth machine."The
aestheticisation of the economy delivers the motivational fuel. We
could say that homo aestheticus has become homo oeconomicus’s best
friend." (source)
Incalculable risks
Instead
of hastening into more business as usual, one could stop and
examine the underlying presuppositions of life. At the moment we are sawing off the branch we are sitting on in order
to sell it. The happy few benefit from the destruction of our life support system the biosphere. There is a lot of
unfinished
business: Extinction, Hothouse Earth,
confronting the silence of the colonial past,
inequality, depriving future biota, the 'collateral damage' of mass
mobility, the withering of
rights and the nation state and a voiceless nature. At the moment we are
steering head on into incalculable catastrophic risks on a global
scale. (source)
Transformation
“To secure a sustainable future, we
must change how we live. [This] entails major transformations in the
ways our global society functions and interacts with natural
ecosystems.”(source) The possibility of visualising a future at all, a will to care for the self and country. Naming a telos, free speech (parrhesia) and the refusal to react to pressures.
Not in our name!
In various cities (Barcelona, Hamburg, Venice, etc) people resist "turning the whole city into a
brand for the benefit of wealthy residents, business elites and
tourists." Not in our name! is jamming the gentrification machine. (source)
Putting the home and the self under the hammer Pt.I
Links:
Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, NewLiberalSpeak, 2001 Radical Philosophy
Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang, The trouble with tourism and travel theory? 2001 PDF
Victor Klemperer, Language of the Third Reich, LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii. Continuum Impacts. ( A Philologist's Notebook")
Andreas Reckwitz: “Creativity has become a kind of performance pressure”, The Goethe-Institut interview 2013
Spratt,
David; Dunlop, Ian. (2019). 'The Third Degree: Evidence and
implications for Australia of existential climate-related security risk (PDF) (Report). Breakthrough - National Centre for Climate Restoration.
Thurlow, C., and Jaworski, A. (2011). Tourism discourse: Languages and banal globalization.
Vogl, J. (2019).
(History of) Economic Knowledge Freed from Determinism. Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 12(1), 73-92.
https://doi.org/10.23941/ejpe.v12i1.409 (PDF)
Rich Things: How Tourism, Sneakers, and Museums Make the Economy of Enrichment, Interview with Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, 2019, 032c
The fall of Prague: ‘Drunk tourists are acting like they’ve conquered our city’ The Guardian, 2019
Gold Coast has 'lost its mojo' as development and population boom throws character into question, The Guardian 2019
Climate crisis: 11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering’, The Guardian 2019
Flooded Venice had tourists taking selfies and residents in tear, The Washington Post, 2019
Images:
Fibre structure over water, EU
Make Art not War, public mural, EU
Car poster, AU
Tourist gaze, EU
Pixel man, street art, Berlin
Homo sapiens skeleton, church installation, Adel Abdessemed, Berlin
Thylacine hide, EU
Update Nov. 2020:
Ecotourism fans may be in it for the social posts
Justin M. Beall, B. Bynum Boley, Adam C. Landon, Kyle M. Woosnam. What drives ecotourism: environmental values or symbolic conspicuous consumption? Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 2020; 1 DOI: 10.1080/09669582.2020.1825458
Update Feb. 2021
Bellingen Shire branding strategy seeks to capture the spirit of our place. Gumbaynggirr people: ""Truth-telling is what will define our spirit," Bernard said, citing the need for acknowledgement of the old wrongs, like the massacre in Fernmount, the destruction of songlines, the felling of ancient trees.There's also the fact that we have a plaque dedicated to the first white child born in Bellingen, but nothing commemorating the strength of the Indigenous women who have birthed children in the valley for millennia." Bellingen Courier, 6.2.2021
Bellingen Shire Branding Project
