Vacationscape: Designing tourist regions

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some detail the unpretentious beginnings of their concern with tourism and their early efforts to organize and discuss issues surrounding tourism development. As a consequence, there is sometimes a Rashoman quality to the accounts and occasional redundancies as they chart the linkages forged and the evolving sophistication of conferences expanding the network or probing the phenomenon of international tourism. The volume is not a comprehensive or scholarly treatment of the development of the Coalition, nor was it intended as such. It is rather a book by activists, designed to chronicle the ECTWT certainly, but more fundamentally to motivate others to organize ecumenical or secular offshoots to continue the struggle. Thus, one finds no hint of the organizational turf battles, the frustrations with developing consensus, or the struggle to maintain a balance between Third World needs and input and the public relations, negotiating and fund-raising expertise of Western “fellow travelers.” Georg Pfaefflin’s essay on the development of TEN, the Tourism Ecumenical Network, that operates in 20 European countries, is the only essay that specifically identifies elements of organizational debate. In this case, the issue was how much of the budget should fund levelopment education of the tourist and how much should be spent in Thir’ World host societies. This volume is not a finely drawn and well-documented case study of a movement. It is rather a celebration of the many achievements of the tiny Coalition: a worldwide network that has begun to penetrate the consciousness of the tourism planner and the traveling public, the world’s churches and secular social action agencies, and which through its quarterly Contours has reached both individuals and tourism training programs around the globe. Appendices detail the results of numerous regional ecumenical conferences, correspondence regarding the goals of the coalition, sources of financial support, and information on how to obtain Contours and the many other published resources, films, and slides available from the ECTWT. Finally, Tourism, An Ecumenical Concern is an uneven book that could have used closer editing and better documentation. Researchers will find provocative statistics but few citations. However, such complaints are perhaps petty, given the remarkable achievements of its authors in launching the ecumenical network. 00 Assigned November 1988 Submitted 6 January 1989 Accepted 27 January 1989

Vacationscape:

Designing

Tourist Regions

By Clare A. Gunn, Van Nostrand Reinhold (115 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003, USA) 2nd edition, ISBN O-442-22679-9, 1988, vi + 208 pp. (schematics, photographs, references, endnotes, index) $37.95 (cloth). University

of Southern

Richard Howell Mississippi, USA

Everyone calls it Vacationscape ZZ, and seeing it was like meeting an old friend after 16 years who has shed some excess poundage and shaped up into better health and looks than ever he had before. This allusion is further justified by the Table of Contents, which retains several chapter titles from the original.

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This edition also contains many of the better photos and most of the schematic drawings from the 1972 version (Gunn 1972), but several new ones are added. Most astonishing perhaps is that the second edition has 30 fewer pages than the original, yet loses none of its message. In fact, the message has been restated in more eloquent phraseology. It is a simple message- build better tourism environments through stronger design involvement. This message is similar to the one espoused by Rutledge (1971), Gold (1980), and others for the design of parks and recreation facilities. However, their design concentration was site-specific, and Gunn notes that the complexity of tourism interrelationships requires a regional approach. Gunn packs a large amount of tourism and design lore and philosophy into a few pages. He carries the reader from the role of design in general to the specific challenges presented by tourism growth and development. The functional system for tourism planning is restated. Travel behavior is investigated and translated into characteristics. The public’s role in design is defined. The chapter on attractions covers historic, international, and American concepts, with classifications and commonalities. The author reiterates his tripartite attraction concept. From the concept of attractions, he next targets tourist destinations with a similar logical sequence. Those looking for a full coverage of community tourism development will be disappointed. Gunn sees this subject in three parts: program, organization, and development. For the purposes of this book accenting design, he wisely chooses to address only the development aspect. From destinations, Gunn takes the reader on a purposeful tour of special cases: national parks, coastal areas, and urban waterfronts. He addresses the needs of special populations, and those of all travelers for information and direction systems. The two chapters on design principles and design techniques are fascinating even to a layman, but are aimed at the landscape designer. The latter chapter is filled with the most state-of-the-art techniques in computer-assisted design. The new edition contains ten chapters, varying in length from three to seventy pages. There is only one of the latter length-Chapter 9, “Gallery of Well-Designed Places!’ The “Gallery” depicts 42 examples of places which the author feels are well-done designs, fusing “creative ideas and practical decisions from inception to realization” (p. 123). This section of the book has the “feel” of Davern’s architectural record book, Places for People (Davern 1976). What is heartening is that with Davern’s 60 plus examples and Gunn’s 42, there is no significant duplication. This indicates that some design sensitivity has been effected in this country and elsewhere, although 100 examples are a pitance compared to the thousands of places built in the name of tourism, with little or no sensitivity to environment, people, or purpose. Gunn’s much quoted and copied “functional tourism system” has stood the test of time with only slight changes; “information/direction” has become “information/promotion,” and the model has been separated into a “market side” and a “supply side” (p. 15). Other themes which supported the basic message of the 1972 edition are also carried forward into this edition, although with extensive rewording. One is that hoteliers and airline managers still think in terms of selling rooms and seats rather than an experience which is part of a larger system. In 1972, this was stated as if the author was on a soap box, preaching. Today’s wording is more muted, insightful, and perhaps resigned to the lack of progress made in this area, but there is also a note of hope. The author chides the industry for its apparent myopia of placing promotion above product development and improvement. Gunn makes one apparently contradictory statement, at least from this

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reviewer’s reading, right at the beginning of the book. He states in the first line of Chapter 1 that “The very foundation upon which all tourism rests is the land: soils, hills, valleys, ridges, mountains, streams, lakes, seas and waterfronts” (p. 1). Like McIntosh and Goeldner (1986), Gunn has a strong belief in the power of natural resources as the driving force and basis for all tourism development. Yet, in the Preface to the new book, he states, “ . man-made attractionstheme parks, casinos, race tracks, entertainment, shopping, souvenir and craft sales-are constituting a greater portion of total travel objectives” (p. v). Featured in the Chapter 9 “Gallery” are several notable examples of these new attraction types (e.g., West Edmundton Mall, Walt Disney World, the Dallas Infomat, and New Orleans’ Jackson Brewery). One can argue that everything in the world is based upon natural resources at some level, but it is difficult to justify this absoluteness of statement to tourism, which has become increasingly dependent in some regions upon such attractions as discount shopping, gambling and other indoor entertainment. Gunn’s assessment of Vacationscape’sprimary market -landscape designers is probably accurate. True, the book does not lit neatly as a primary text into any of the courses in most tourism curricula. For those educational programs with a course in Tourism Planning, Gunn’s (1979) textbook of the same title is quite appropriate. For several reasons, however, that book does not lend itself as a supplementary text, especially at the undergraduate level. Vacationscape,on the other hand, is an ideal supplement. It contains many of the basic concepts and systems of the larger text, but presented in a more “sugar-coated” fashion, one which catches the student’s eye and imagination in such an immediate way that he is enthralled before he realizes he is learning something new. Certainly students of tourism management-and they far outnumber those in landscape design-need to understand the relationships among design, development, and management of visitor services and facilities. Finally, for many readers it will not occur until the Epilogue that Vacutlonscupe is more than a book title; it is a concept, a system, an attitude. The author’s final statements are an eloquent statement for the moral responsibilities we all have in seeing to it that the tourism resources are developed to the best use and best good for all. The Epilogue should become required reading for all students and faculty in tourism and hospitality programs, regardless of specialty. 00

REFERENCES Davern, Jeanne M., ed.

1976 Places for Peonle. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1

Gold, Seymour M. 1980 Recreation Planning and Design. New York: McGraw-Hill. Gunn, Glare A. 1972 Vacationscape. Austin TX: University of Texas. 1979 Tourism Planning. New York: Crane, Russak & Co McIntosh, Robert W., and Charles R. Goeldner 1986 Tourism: Principles, Practices, Philosophies (5th edition). Wiley & Sons. Rutledge, Albert J. 1971 Anatomy of a Park. New York: McGraw-Hill. Assigned 29 November 1988 Submitted 17 January 1989 Accepted 3 February 1989

New York: John