Resort Spatiality: Reimagining Sites of Mass Tourism

Abstract

This dissertation theorises resorts – destinations famous for ‘sun, sand and sex’ mass tourism – as distinct kinds of urban milieux. Taking account of their similarities as well as their differences, I focus on six international destinations: the Gold Coast, Australia; Miami, United States of America; Cancún, Mexico; Ibiza, Spain; and Phuket and Koh Phangan, Thailand. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre, Soja, Massey, Highmore and Deleuze and Guattari, I attend to the material and symbolic production of lived spaces in these resorts. In particular, I consider the mutually constitutive, mutually transformative relations between their spatial formations, built environments, popular imaginaries, representations, narratives of identity, rhythms, and the experiences and practices of both tourists and locals. To investigate these dynamics, I conducted extensive literature research and undertook fieldwork in each of these resorts. My applied methods included a mixture of participant observation, photography, rhythmanalysis, and semistructured interviews with resort residents. Recognising the impossibility of ever comprehensively representing infinitely complex sites such as these, the methods were intended to be impressionistic, partial and to some degree autoethnographic. The places, phenomena, observations and findings I discuss are taken to be ‘examples’ in Agamben’s (1993) sense – singular instances which nonetheless provide insight into wider social and cultural processes.