the role of tourism in natural resource management in the okavango ...

The successful creation or invention of these spaces of consumption was also part
of a wider series of changes by which urban living was undergoing a process of re­
evaluation within all the advanced industrial nations (Smith, 1988; Bagguley et aI,
1990). From the 1930s onwards, cities within the developed economies became
increasingly suburbanised, a trend more apparent in the United Kingdom and
Anglophone countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA. The
suburbs became the home of the urban middle class and many inner city areas
experienced a spiral of decline. However, during the 1970s the mass movement to
the suburbs by the middle classes began to undergo a reversal as people started to
move back into the inner city areas. This became known as gentrification, a process
of the middle class replacing the working class, leading to increasing property
values, alteration in the built environment and the emergence of a new urban
lifestyle (Savage and Warde, 1993).
This re-evaluation of urban life coincided with the invention and development of
heritage and urban conservation movements and the emergence of postmodernism
in architecture and design. According to Judd and Fainstein (1999), the significance
of such developments for tourism should not be underestimated. Zukin (1995; 1998)
for example, notes how gentrification resulted in the development of spaces of urban
consumption which are inextricably linked to new patterns of leisure, travel and
culture.
The same general pattern is present in urban areas around the globe. What is
significant here is the way that the more intangible aesthetic elements of place
became commodified for the purposes of economic growth. Heritage and the
general quality of the urban environment became added value to attract inward
investment (Meethan, 2001).
It is clear that the rediscovery or re-evaluation of urbanisation which began as
gentrification has had significant impacts on not only the pattern of life and culture
within cities, but also in terms of the opportunities it offers for new forms of tourism.
The modernist spaces of mass tourism and consumption are giving way to a more
diverse and fragmented situation, and although such developments are clearly
linked to the need for economic diversification, one question immediately presents
87