Despite the fact that tourism is, by some measures, the largest industry in the world, its academic study can sometimes feel somewhat intellectually stifled. Often, the field of tourism studies focuses on how to fill the maximum number of hotel beds in the off-season or ways to make cruise ship passengers spend more money when they briefly go ashore. This practical, industry-bound research can be a surprise for social scientists, who demand criticality and see copious symbolic meaning in every tourist encounter. Questions of colonisation, modernisation, and cultural authenticity are rife even in tourist spaces like heritage parks, marinas, or waterfront bistros. The new edited volume, Coastal Architecture and the Politics of Tourism: Leisurescapes in the Global Sunbelt, seeks to correct this tendency in tourism studies by fusing observations about global urban growth with sociological questions regarding what ‘leisurescapes’ tell us about class, political ideology, and cultural change.

The book starts with a bold geopolitical move: rather than separating tourism by continent or zone of influence, it proposes the idea of a unitary ‘Global Sunbelt’. This acknowledges increased inter-regional mobility, the prevalence of littoral spaces across the tourism industry, and the growing trend of equatorial geographies where hotel revenue far surpasses agriculture. The global scope also allows the book to engage more fully with non-capitalist urbanisation for tourism, such as in chapters on Estonia and Romania before 1989 by Epp Lankots and Juliana Maxim, respectively. In these spaces, tourism was not just an economic tool but a means to display proper socialist citizenship and belonging to Warsaw Pact societies, both in collective labour and collective leisure.

Tourism frequently functions as a state project meant to represent modernisation, at times a form of development separate from marketisation or opening up to foreign capital, as demonstrated in chapters by Brian L. McLaren and Erica Morawski on Libyan and Cuban tourism. In this sense, tourism is not just a means for countries to catch up with post-industrial economies — in which the service sector is prized — but also a way to demonstrate the state’s ability to provide infrastructure and to promote domestic leisure as an entitlement of the welfare state. The editors rightly point out that during the mid-20th century, tourism was often regarded using a lens of ‘freedom’ in North Atlantic countries, while in the Eastern Bloc, it was framed as successful state provisioning within the concept of ‘plenty’.

Many of the chapters deal with coastal tourism as an integral aspect of post-colonial or post-conflict development. The ability to woo transnational capital meant not only a baseline level of political stability but signified business acumen in an increasingly complex marketplace. Starting in the 1990s, ‘fly and flop’ beach vacations became increasingly global. Attracting beachgoers was no longer a competition between Southwestern Europe alone, but expanded to include places like Morocco, Egypt, and Cyprus — not to mention resort towns further afield in Thailand and Bali — all vying for the same visitors.

In Anoma Pieris’s highly topical chapter on decolonising leisurescapes in Sri Lanka, she argues that tourism functions in a special category of transnational investment and development which is more visible and, potentially, more culturally destructive to destination communities. The greater ‘cultural authority’ of coastal leisure in Sri Lanka was both meaningful to the island country’s economy but also placed greater scrutiny on public–private partnerships. Indeed, this theme is a common one seen in places like post-global financial crisis Spain, or in the aftermath of Brazil’s Rio 2016 Olympics spending spree. It brings up valuable questions regarding whether tourism really prioritises local residents or if spending on housing, infrastructure, and amenities for visitors instead caters to the needs of outsiders, which can be quite different from those who live in seaside communities and often work, for meagre pay, in the tourism industry.

The tension between leisure as a provision for all residents, regardless of class, versus tourism for international visitors is artfully considered in the chapter on ‘First’ and ‘Second’ World tourism in 1960s Israel by Alona Nitzan-Shiftan and Duffy Half, who analyse the construction of the Tel Aviv Hilton (1965) and the Mivtachim Convalescent Home (1968). The former was the most luxurious hotel in Israel, while the latter was sponsored by the General Organisation of Workers pension fund. Remarkably, they were completed around the same period by the same architect (Yaakov Rechter), showing the tension between capitalist and socialist leisure construction.

The book is also helpful in connecting new coastal spaces (as well as environmental damage) to an emerging class of experts who consult on airport design, resort amenities, and road construction. In her chapter, ‘Concrete Shores’, Manar Moursi examines the role of foreign experts in transforming coastal Egypt, echoing other scholars, such as Łukasz Stanek, who make clear that these professionals circulated in both capitalist and socialist countries. In general, the edited volume does a good job of showing multiple pathways to tourism development, not just those rooted in North Atlantic cruise and hotel chains. This plethora of examples challenges some of our assumptions about the ‘Thomas Cook-isation’ of tourist destinations. Sadly, regional or non-capitalist tourist urbanisation has seldom had better environmental outcomes.

While the book considers a number of geopolitical, mostly mid-century, examples of tourism as soft power and an important aspect of Cold War geopolitics, there could have been more engagement with World Systems Theory to more systematically show the colonial, neo-colonial, and spheres of influence dynamics. Tourism is often a product of the semi-periphery where previous development allows for more value-added products to be created and a turn away from the extraction of raw materials; expansion into the services sector is a well-worn pathway in the same direction. Geographically, many of these places are also more easily accessible from wealthy Global North countries that produce the majority of visitors, making them both economically, as well as literally, part of the semi-periphery. This in-between state of development seems both important in terms of national self-image (liminality), as well as for when things go wrong, and blame is assigned to local actors by wealthy lender/visitor countries for corruption, environmental degradation, or public-private collusion.

In the future, the global sunbelt will see not only the scourge of overdevelopment but also the effects of climate change and sea level rise. Local populations will be forced to abandon much of their industry to rising tides, and populations will be driven inland. The ruins of these places may remain on the list of global destinations, but as bizarre dark tourism sites, filled with the rubble of past affluence, rather than spaces of relaxation. In this sense, the architecture of mid-century tourism destinations may be regarded, in the future, as spaces of hubris rather than celebratory examples of economic boot-strapping. More consequentially, residents of these coastal zones may call on their former visitors for economic assistance and possibly even resettlement.