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Abstract
Former urban residents frequently establish tourism businesses in smaller settlement areas. This article explores the relationship between these ‘commercial counterurbanites’ and cultural heritage tourism in resource-dependent regions. It seeks to understand the types of counterurbanites involved, their routes to proprietorship, their business activity, and the attitudes of local residents towards their involvement. Brigus, Newfoundland and Labrador is the setting for this study. Once a vibrant fishing community, Brigus has been transformed into a heritage tourism destination that capitalizes on its past. Information gathered from proprietors, key stakeholders and residents reveals the role of in-migrants in this trajectory. We find that commercial counterurbanites are present in Brigus, with three different routes taken to tourism proprietorship. Their activities enhance an existing tourist trajectory, which was initiated by ‘local-local’ volunteers, with the assistance of ‘civic counterurbanite’ stakeholders. Residents acknowledge the positive impacts of tourism, but few benefits directly from this sector. We attribute this to the presence of retirees in Brigus, and the potential for employment in St. John’s. Our findings confirm that counterurbanites are a heterogeneous group, whose commercial and civic activity contributes to heritage tourism development. These findings have implications for communities seeking diversification in the face of declining resource activity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Meghan Shannon is a recent PhD graduate from the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo. Her area of research is rural economic development in post-industrial communities. She is specifically interested in understanding how declining rural and peripheral locations transform into consumption-oriented tourism spaces. Her PhD thesis focused on the role of counterurbanization in mobilizing externally-accumulated social, cultural and economic capital. She is also interested in the impacts that urban to rural migrant populations have on local residents and the networks and linkages they bring with them to these remote and peripheral settings.
Clare Mitchell was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and raised in Kingston, Ontario. She completed her B.A. at the University of Guelph, and M.A and PhD at the University of Waterloo. Before joining the Department of Geography at the University of Waterloo, she taught briefly at the University of Toronto and Wilfrid Laurier University. Her main research interest is understanding the shifting economies of rural places. She focuses specifically on counterurbanites and their role in developing heritage tourism in declining resource economies. She has studied rural communities across Canada, focusing on Ontario, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Yukon Territory and, most recently, Newfoundland and Labrador. Her articles have appeared in a variety of journals including The Journal of Rural Studies, the Canadian Geographer, The Extractive Industries and Society, Population, Space and Place, and Annals of Tourism Research.