Altourism

While I am in the process of salvaging past writings, I may as well post this project that I wanted a to do nearly 5 years back. I got too busy doing 'real' projects, and never got around to re-visiting what I had written.

The text is still from five years ago, and it is still in a draft copy version. The brief trails off in the ends and needs closure. There may yet be a good project that may emerge out of all this, and if any one sees any potential, please let me know how we can take it forward...

Altourism

Tourism has become one of the most influential stimuli for urban and economic growth. As societies get more and more interconnected, the touristic gaze proliferates, seeking and exoticising difference in a world of blurring differences and global cultures. Tourism, in fact, is as much a globalising factor as it is a reaction to a global mono-culture. In these times of blurring boundaries and identities, the transnational tourist trots the world in search of difference and in a way contributing to the erasure of this very difference.

Countries such as India, and most parts of Asia are increasingly engaging with tourism as a factor influencing societal and cultural metamorphosis. Whereas, tourism in countries such as India is generated by their geographies, architectural and cultural heritage, and exoticised lifestyles, the same factors are destabilised by the forces of tourism.

The project is an exploration in the way tourism can become a trigger for urban, ecological and socio economic renewal in developing countries. Rejecting the utopian notion that total isolation of native communities can exist, or is even desirable in this dynamic global world, the study seeks to define a typology for touristic growth that is also linked to the sustenance of host communities.

Historically, tourism is perceived to operate in two ways. In the first instance it monumentalizes, eternalizes and objectifies cities by the touristic gaze, seeking to fossilize places and cultures in time and space. In this way, Cities and cultures are reduced to being a simulacrum of their former selves.

In the second, tourism as a social and economic force totally reconfigures the existing space, leading to a perceived loss of local cultures and overuse of natural resources. In the first instance, touristic activities are well organized and often state planned or sanctioned, whereas in the second they are often organic and ad-hoc.

In both the cases, tourism is often viewed as a de-stabilizing factor, an external force irrevocably altering the ‘natural’ course of progression. The host community is always positioned as the ‘other’, needing to be protected from the contamination with outsiders, needing to exist in a stasis.

A touristic experience in India and such places is perceived in two distinct ways. On the one hand, there is the experience of the local villages and settlements, where one becomes a part of the place but has to contend with the aesthetic squalor of rampant development. And on the other, the pristine plastic beauty of acres of gated resort spaces, where the (erstwhile) charm of the place and people is simulated.

Economically too, these two developments work in distinct ways. The local economy is a major beneficiary of the touristic euros in Ad-hoc urbanism, which requires small parcels of land and smaller investments, allowing for a greater participation by the local dweller and thus strengthening the local economy. Bigger concerted developments are often built by large corporations, benefiting from tourism subsidies and tax holidays offered by the state.

This research is an attempt to reconcile these two oppositional modes of development. Through an exploration into other models for urban/ touristic development, which are participative and concerted, organic as well as planned, a typology is envisaged which utilizes the potential of tourism to socio-economically empower local communities, while at the same time offering a variegated and participative experience for the tourist. This will also allow communities the access to cater to high end tourism, a market currently cornered by bigger developments.

The thesis of the project is to combine inherent patterns of touristic growth with successful models of community based development (such as the co-operative movement in banking and dairy sectors in most of south Asia). The project has a multi fold dimension, in that, it seeks to strengthen democracy at the grass root community level, calls for a symbiotic relationship between the tourist, the local and the place leading to a sustainable growth, and seeks to invest the economic future of the community with the environmental health of the place.

Through its intervention on an existing urban/ rural scenario in Goa, India, the project will design the framework that allows for sustainable touristic activity to unfold. This framework will range from the political (where it defines the state-community relationship, the public private partnership etc.) to the urban (where it identifies and defines patterns of urban and touristic growth for a particular scenario).

Site

Situated on the western coast of India, and with a touristic reputation that stretches the last five decades, Goa becomes an ideal laboratory for new models of touristic growth in India.

Tourism which contributes for most of Goa’s GDP also contributes for most of its deterioration. Erstwhile villages are transformed into hubs of uncontrolled activity, totally eradicating lifestyles and places that survived millennia. What 500 years of colonialism could not do is being done by tourism in 50 years or less.

The coastline of Goa is dotted with isolated fishing communities that are being engulfed by a parasitic cancerous tourism and these become the site for an intervention. The project involves focusing on one or two such urban situations and developing specific strategies to develop these into sustainable tourist villages.

Typology

The tourist village, while working as a single entity is a cellular structure of semi-independent public and private facilities. In a Deleuzean way, the tourist village is simultaneously singular and multiple. While it is fashioned along the lines of age-old indigenous governance systems of villages like the panchayat or communidade, the village typology operates in a rizhommatic fashion of alliances and agglomerations, and reflects the way contemporary organisations operate.

The typology allows for individual entrepreneurship of the inhabitants, while simultaneously containing it within a framework of overall growth. Whereas certain facilities such as boarding and lodge, Restaurants, boutiques etc could be franchised by individual inhabitants with local licensing fees, facilities such as Basketball courts, swimming pools, water based sports infrastructure and health clubs could be put up by the community on common land, and could also be used by the local populance. A viable sports and recreational infrastructure could be thus available at the grass-roots level.

A coherent development would also give the ecomomic means and incentive for communities to develop eco friendly public sanitation. In this way, a community could add on to its public infrastructure while at the same time economically benefiting from it. Funding could thus be generated for the preservation of architectural heritage, such as churches, old mansions etc, which form an integral part of these settlements.

For the tourist, the tourist village would offer a much-authenticated experience with a more authentic variegated architecture and layering of time and space, than the monster resorts designed by monster architectural firms.

Research

The project addresses issues at two levels, the generic and the specific. At the level of the generic it formulates a model broad enough to be global ( scalable and replicable) and simultaneously, by working on a particular site, it tests the model at the specific level.

The project seamlessly has to blend urban architectural issues with ecolocical and even socio economic issues, and in order for a successful model to emerge, a research in all these factors becomes imperative.

Project

A team of architects/ student-architects will work on different strategies of developing Agonda, a fishing hamlet in South Goa. Being located in South Goa, and close to the popular beach at Palolem, Agonda is slowly waking up to the pressures of tourism. It is only recently, that villages in South Goa have the touristic gaze turned on them, primarily due to the over saturation of the Northern beaches.

Agonda becomes an ideal laboratory because tourism has still not over whelmed the place, but the process has just begun. An intervention in agonda also has great potential for being actually realised...