Max Holleran - Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union

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The early development of the European Union (EU) was a post-national project that was both political and economic: the EU was meant to bolster European democracy by de-intensifying nationalism, supporting the rule of law, and, most of all, opening internal borders to trade and migration. This book examines how the tourism industry played a key role in that mission as a means to reinvigorate laggard economies as well as a symbol of borderless Europe. Using the two successive cases of Spanish and Bulgarian democratization, integration into the EU, and rapid growth in mass tourism, the project examines how urbanization for tourism was encouraged by the EU cohesion process and how it was interpreted by local residents in coastal areas.

Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union investigates the paradoxical place of tourism in urban economies through comparative case studies of Spains Costa Blanca, after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, and Bulgarias Black Sea Coast after 1989. Drawing on participant observation in coastal communities in the two countries, 150 interviews with developers, architects, and tourism promoters, and analysis of a broad range of primary and secondary written sources, the book shows how intra-European tourism and EU-funded urbanization helped new democracies cast off previous conceptions of living on the political and economic edges of Europe. Local residents first interpreted the ludic spaces produced for tourists by state-developer partnerships as colorful signs of the end of political isolation. However, the economic and political crisis of 2008 profoundly undermined these cities sense of European integration due to corruption, overbuilding, and environmental harm.

In both cases, the aesthetics and international milieu of new leisure spaces, the rapid urbanization of rural lands, and the uneven enforcement of environmental policy were physical changes that were symbolically linked to the political forces of European integration and flows of visitors and capital. I develop the concept of peripherality as a social experience while also tying it to the EU policy prerogative of creating post-national Social Europe, a project currently in dismal condition. Emphasizing that the development of the EU has always been tied to a modernization drive of the near-periphery, fueled by the legacy of dictatorship and communism, I show how residents and those involved in the construction industry reacted to the dramatically changing built environment, both during boom years and after the onset of the 2008 sovereign debt crisis.

The book adds to literature in urban sociology on the experience of living in rapidly growing leisure cities with increasingly cosmopolitan demographics. While the work engages closely with the specificities of the European context, it speaks to the broader global tendency of cities to seek, in tourism and leisure, an elusive integration with hyper-competitive global markets.

I would like to thank the faculty of the Sociology Department at New York University (NYU) where this book was born out of my dissertation. My committee members, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Craig Calhoun, and Lynne Haney, provided outstanding support in my development as a scholar and I am particularly thankful to my advisor, Eric Klinenberg, who shepherded this project to completion. I would also like to thank Iddo Tavory, Neil Brenner, Ruth Horowitz, Tom Sugrue, and George Schulman. I am indebted to the academic community who I worked and studied with at NYU, in particular my fellow graduate students: Daniel Aldana Cohen, Michael Gould-Wartofsky, Caitlin Petre, Anna Skarpelis, Hillary Angelo, Adaner Usmani, David Wachsmuth, Max Besbris, Shelly Ronen, Liz Koslov, Abigail Weitzman, Ned Crowley, Robert Taylor, Naima Brown, Jacob Faber, Michelle OBrien, Adam Murphree, Ihsan Ercan Sadi, Hassan El Menyawi, and Francisco Vieyra. Also, thanks to Gordon Douglas, Becky Amato, Cristel Jusino Daz, Cengiz Haksoz, Mariya Ivancheva, Diana Petkova, Sophie Gonick, Maria Veleva, and Orlin Manolov.

I appreciate the editors of Contemporary European History , Radical History Review , and City & Society who have permitted the reprinting of materials that originally appeared in article form in those journals.

I am exceedingly thankful for the gracious support of my friends who listened to my ideas and talked me through fieldwork: Julianne Chandler, David Snchez Timn, Pedro Rodriguez, Alejandro Lopez, Lauren Roberts, Roy Kimmey, Elana Resnick, Brett Miller, Megan Lessard, Helen Mastache, Laura Graber, Ignacio Hinojosa, Seth Prins, and Sangita Vyas. The biggest thanks is for my family for their unwavering support: Tia Lessin, Carl Deal, Michael Holleran, James Grunberger, and Sam Holleran.