No campers wanted! Urban development and the discouragement of tenth-cloth mass tourism at the Belgian Coast (1930-'80 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Towards New Summers: Past, Present, and Future of Holiday Camps in Europe
in_bo vol. 15 no. 19, 2024
In Italy alone, dozens of abandoned holiday camps for children are scattered throughout the landscape. The size and diffusion of this heritage calls for a scientific debate on the history and future of these buildings, which are often in a state of serious decay. From Alpine valleys to coastlines, former holiday camps for children tell a long story of educational, architectural, health and social experimentation, which has influenced generations of Europeans in the last 150 years. Holiday camps were hosted in traditional or modern structures, built from long-lasting materials such as reinforced concrete or temporary camping tents. Whatever their nature, holiday camps have left both physical and intangible traces on the European landscape and society. With this issue, in_bo engages in a debate on the history of holiday camps in Europe between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular consideration of contemporary reuse and restoration strategies of this architectural heritage.
International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 2013
This paper contrasts the objectives that underlie the development of government-funded holiday camps for family vacations in Belgium with the socio-spatial practices of their initial users. Drawing on oral history, archival material, photographs and site plans, we argue that holidaymakers did not just experience the holiday camp as an environment where they could reconnect with their family and pursue authentic experiences in close contact with nature – as their initiators had intended – but that they also embraced these sites as places where they could recreate a romanticised version of “traditional” community life and experiment with facets of a middle-class, modern suburban ideal. To substantiate our narrative, we focus on two holiday camps in the Campine Region: Zilvermeer and Hengelhoef.
« Les pèlerins de la saison sèche » Colonial Tourism in the Belgian Congo (1945-'60)
Journal of Contemporary History, 2019
Belgium has often been labelled as a reluctant colonizer in the past. Yet, a meticulous analysis of tourist magazines, guidebooks, brochures, posters, and documentaries on colonial tourism in the Belgian Congo tells a different story. Travel literature was often teeming with pro-empire propaganda that emphasized the primitiveness of the Congo and underscored the civilizing mission. Tourism was, in this respect, not very different from the overtly positive framing of the Belgian colonial rule that was propagated by museums, monuments of colonial heroes, exhibitions, movies and schoolbooks. The aim of this article is to take the argument even further. Most research on colonial tourism is focused on the creation of pro-empire propaganda in tourist magazines and guidebooks, while the actual appropriation of this image by travellers of flesh and blood is often tacitly assumed or – even worse – taken for granted. Interviews with ex-colonials show that the reality was much more subtle, as the overly positive propaganda was not always swallowed hook, line and sinker.
The Kaiserpanorama and Tourism in Belgium around 1900
International Journal on Stereo and Immersive Media, 2021
The Kaiser-Panorama is a cylindrical stereo-viewer offering series of 50 topographic coloured stereo photographs to multiple viewers simultaneously. It was conceived, patented and commercialised in the 1880s by the German August Fuhrmann who subsequently developed it into a longstanding transnational media enterprise. Because of its focus on topographic imagery, the Kaiser-Panorama has often been marketed as a medium for virtual travel. So far the Kaiser-Panorama has mainly been studied in the German context and little is known about its development in other countries. This article focusses on the presence and meaning of the Kaiser-Panorama in Belgium. It will do so along two lines. First it maps the introduction and development of the Kaiser-Panorama in Belgium where it emerged at point in time when urban entertainment transitioned from mobile to fixed exploitation. Second, the heyday of the Kaiser-Panorama in Belgium coincides with the increasing democratization of travel. The article will demonstrate how in the Belgian franchise an enterprise whose core business was the promotion of virtual travel, developed into a medium promoting real travel.
A " Noble Prospect " : Tourism, Heimat, and Conservation on the Rhine, 1880 –1914
This paper explores the environmental and socio-cultural effects of tourism in the Rhineland during the decades after German unification. As one of Europe’s classic destinations for romantic nature travel, the Middle Rhine Gorge stretching from Bonn to Mainz offers an iconic example of how industrialized technologies of leisure, particularly steam transportation and mass-produced guidebooks, helped to transform nature from a site of bourgeois privilege into an increasingly democratic terrain of mass recreation. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, David Nye, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, the paper explores the social anxieties unleashed by this “mechanical reproduction of nature,” which tended to create elitist hierarchies of nature appreciation based on a cultural distinction between an ideal male traveler and a feminized, superficial “tourist.” Such elitism tended to ignore the broader ecological effects of industrialization in the Rhine-Ruhr basin and misrepresented local tourists’ complex engagement with the “popular sublime.”