Cultural ecosystem services and placemaking in peripheral areas: a tourism geographies agenda

In a time of rapidly shifting tourism geographies in which rising rents, the COVID-19 pandemic, and rural gentrification have triggered widespread urban-to-rural migration, placemaking in peripheral areas has become an increasingly critical research agenda for tourism geographers. Cultural geographer, Yi Fu Tuan broadly asserted that the geographer’s central task is to contribute to a deeper understanding of how people create and maintain place (Tuan, 1991, p. 684). The authors of this Special Section take on Tuan’s task in their examination of the crossover between placemaking and cultural ecosystem services (CES). While there is a large body of work on placemaking, and growing scholarship on cultural ecosystem services, we know much less about how they intersect in tourism practice. Cultural services account for the non-material ways people value and benefit from ecosystems and can include ‘cultural diversity, spiritual and religious values, knowledge systems, educational values, inspiration, aesthetic values, social relations, sense of place, cultural heritage values, recreation and ecotourism’ (Daniel et al., 2012, p. 8812), among others. In ecosystem services, ecological and economic exigencies are typically more prominent and better funded. Yet Chan et al. (2012, p. 745) implore, that ‘omitting such ubiquitously shared cultural benefits from explicit consideration risks decision-making and planning that is not connected to what matters to many people.’

This Special Section on CES and placemaking draws on multi-disciplinary perspectives to address the role of CES in tourism placemaking in peripheral areas. It pushes CES into new theoretical and empirical terrain by offering a series of agendas that address critical issues for tourism geographies such as the spatial reorganization of center-periphery relations (c.f. Mansilla & Milano, 2019), the reconstitution of geopolitical imaginaries (c.f. Gutberlet, 2019), and the role of seasonality in collective identity formations (c.f. Fusté-Forné, 2019). CES accounts for the intangible value and meaning that people ascribe to place. Places are meaningful for a range of reasons that are often grounded in history and tradition, embodied experience, and individual and collective identities.

The term peripheral area encompasses the locational and functional context commonly associated with remote islands and archipelagoes, desert areas, alpine regions, rural locations, indigenous communities, and other areas at the edge and beyond metropolitan centers of geopolitical and sociocultural power and influence. These areas have been under increasing pressure to accommodate placemaking practices of new residents and investors from urban cores.

The focus of many CES scholars is to identify how places become meaningful and how people value them. While the popularity of ‘place’ has not lost its edge, Tim Cresswell’s (2014, p. 2) observation that ‘no one quite knows what they are talking about when they are talking about place’ continues to resonate with human geographers. This observation has implications for the examination of CES which often requires qualitative participant observation, deep cultural understanding, and longitudinal commitments to the place under investigation. In many ways, the study of CES is also the study of placemaking. John Agnew (2011) defined place as a ‘meaningful location’ that incorporates location, local, and sense of place. This is a helpful conceptualization for tourism geographers who often seek to account for how people, industries, and governments symbolically and materially co-construct the meaning of places in sometimes competing ways. Tourism geographers have long been interested in contested placemaking practices. The articles in this issue focus on placemaking in peripheral areas that often occur through uneven urban-rural and/or center-periphery relations.

Interrogating center-periphery relations is an enduring multidisciplinary endeavor that has substantial implications for tourism geographies scholarship. Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1979) world systems analysis contributed to the popularization of the center-periphery model that describes the exploitation of the periphery and semi-periphery by the core. Like dependency theory, world systems theory argues that core regions exploit periphery nations for cheap land, labor, and resources. In tourism, core-periphery relations often reflect a framework of the core as a tourist-generating area and the periphery as a tourist destination area (Leiper, 1979). Walter Christaller (1964, p. 96) observed how tourism destinations are often on the periphery. Alluding to the seasonal nature of tourism visitation to peripheral areas, his early observations revealed some of the attendant transformations that co-occur with tourism development to shape local people and environments. While the center-periphery model has been widely critiqued for, among other reasons, its hegemonic and overly simplistic tendencies, the central idea of uneven power relations between core and peripheral areas continues to be a useful analytical frame for conceptualizing the geographies of tourism.

Today, residents and environments of peripheral areas around the globe frequently face an array of pressures, including (1) the effects of climate change (Kelman, 2014; Wyss et al., 2015); (2) contested and unequal economic development (Hall & Boyd, 2005; Müller & Janson, 2007); (3) the extraction of natural resources (Carson & Carson, 2011); (4) geopolitical confrontations (Mansfeld & Korman, 2015; Mostafanezhad et al., 2021; Rowen, 2016); and (5) the urban-rural divide (Makki, 2004; Nørgaard, 2011). In these contexts, the concepts of placemaking and cultural ecosystem services have emerged as increasingly interrelated facets underpinning the futures of peripheral areas, and how they develop and employ adaptive responses to rapidly unfolding contexts (Cheer & Lew, 2018; Lew & Cheer, 2018).

Tourism geographers have long been interested in researching how people ‘sense place’ in tourism destinations. A perpetual challenge for scholars has been how to operationalize sense of place in their research. Scholars have addressed this challenge through the examination of how people ascribe meaning to a place as well as how they articulate their embodied experience of it. Alan Lew (2017) notes how placemaking as a planned and deliberate exertion should be distinguished from place-making as an organically-driven, bottom-up process. This characterization evokes a critical distinction reflecting agency, authority, ownership, and ultimately a sense of place.

In this Special Section, the authors focus on tourism placemaking as a planned process that is socially structured with intentional and desired outcomes, while recognizing the ever-present tension between structure and agency that places embody. In peripheral areas, planned tourism placemaking often occurs as part of a deliberate approach to sustainable development and community resilience, driven by pressing needs for economic development, livelihood diversification, and control over future outcomes. These objectives are often grounded in the critical ecosystem services with which peripheral areas are closely aligned.

CES are the essential socio-cultural benefit that an ecosystem provides and constitutes one of the four major components of ecosystem services (Hirons et al., 2016). While urban areas are also situated in an environmental context, ecosystem services research tends to focus exclusively on peripheral natural areas and how they serve human needs. Because of its anthropocentric and utilitarian approach, it has drawn the attention of government funding agencies. And because of that emphasis, tourism is considered an important and quantifiable ecosystem service. However, for human geographers and other tourism scholars, the relationship between tourism and natural and peripheral environments is much more than its quantifiable characteristics . The ecosystem reveals the significance of people and place, making them central to planned placemaking interventions. CES includes human perceptions, attachments, and embodiments that are often intangible, non-economic, aesthetic, and rooted in the existential connections of people and place (Smith & Ram, 2017).

Research into CES necessarily engages a range of ‘disciplines including ecology, economics, and the social sciences’ (Milcu et al., 2013 et al., p. 44). CES are essential to human well-being and are a ‘product of the dynamic, complex, [and] spiritual relationships between ecosystems and humans, across landscapes, and often over long time periods’ (Hirons et al., 2016, p. 548). Properly done, CES research can facilitate a holistic human-in-nature perspective as a base for related aspects of change, well-being, resilience, and vulnerability. These characteristics are pertinent preoccupations in the discourse on the development of peripheral areas and their attendant communities and ecosystems.

Attempts to ground definitions of CES have been challenged by slippery conceptualizations due to variegations in the complicated nature of what we call ‘culture’ and ‘place’ and their relationship to extractive and regulatory ecosystem services (Lew & Wu, 2018). Articles in this Special Section demonstrate how tourism placemaking offers a potent perspective that will broaden and advance the theory and applications of CES.

Collectively, the articles in this Special Section address how peripheral and natural areas engage in planned tourism placemaking as an approach to holistically and environmentally integrated sustainable development. Accounting for these processes provides insights into the implications of change trajectories on fundamental place identities and in situ cultural ecosystem services. By linking cultural ecosystem services to tourism placemaking, the articles assess the ‘human-in-nature’ context and investigate the extent to which cultural variables influence ecosystem services relationships and outcomes critical to the placemaking endeavor and to community resilience building. The authors also respond to Smith and Ram’s (2017) assertion that there is a dearth of research examining cultural ecosystem services and their links to humans in nature. These processes are especially critical in places where change is driven by developments that abut awkwardly and impinge on an established ‘sense of place’ which might include rapid and unsustainable tourism development, economic and cultural globalization, population growth, and the establishment of unprecedented extractive industries.

A critical agenda for tourism geographies

In this Special Section, the authors outline several critical themes for tourism-focused scholars working on CES and placemaking in peripheral areas, including humanist perspectives (c.f. Margaryan et al., 2018), landscape assessments (c.f. Ram & Smith, 2019), and geopolitical imaginaries (c.f. Gutberlet, 2019). Additionally, articles address the seasonality of CES (c.f. Fusté-Forné, 2019), the role of tourism in the spatial reorganization of urban centers (c.f. Mansilla & Milano, 2019), and the greening of urban space through modern romanticism thinking and collective identity formations (c.f. Kitheka). Articles also offer methodologically innovative techniques for examining the spatial and temporal distribution of CES, such as integrating geolocated social media data with biophysical and social infrastructure (Zhang et al., 2020). Collectively, these articles shed critical light on the role of CES and placemaking in rapidly shifting peripheral areas. By taking CES as the point of departure, this Special Section offers novel perspectives on enduring questions for tourism geographies regarding the practices, politics, and ethics of placemaking in tourism.

Joseph M. Cheer
Center for Tourism Research, Wakayama University, Japan; Faculty of Hospitality & Tourism Management, UCSI University, Malaysia;
Faculty of Culture and Society, AUT New Zealand Mary Mostafanezhad
Department of Geography and Environment, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA
[email protected] Alan A. Lew
Emeritus, Department of Geography, Planning and Recreation, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.