When tourist coexistence becomes impossible

While ghettoes can sound pejorative, there is some sense to such places. There aren't residents to bother - a few perhaps, but not many. Inconvenience and annoyance that there may be is therefore between tourists. A need for resident-tourist 'coexistence' doesn't really arise.

Pioneers of post-World War II tourism would have found the notion of ghettoes abhorrent. Vladimir Raitz, for instance, believed that tourism offered a means for peace in Europe. Cultural exchange would occur, peoples from different nations would get to know each other's ways and harmony would prevail. If only.

Cultural exchange was probably never really that high on planners' and developers' agendas. Tourist resorts had two big things going for them - the construction of hotels and the building of homes. Three big things; profit was the third. The thinking had been like this before the war. In Puerto Alcudia, for example, the original reclaiming of the Albufera wetlands had plans for both tourism and residential accommodation. Side by side. The same philosophy supported the later and massive reclaiming in the 1960s. Side by side in perfect harmony.

We can probably look back through rose-tinted sunglasses and believe that there was harmonious coexistence in most (all?) resorts most of the time as they underwent their growth from the sixties. This may not have been entirely so, but the media reach back then wasn't so obtrusive to have informed us. And where the media did reach, the concerns were more to do with overbooking, hotels that hadn't been built, and hotels that were being built (in the summer) right next to ones that had been built. Coexistence, or its absence, was with the construction industry.

Ok, let's be fair, coexistence is a possibility and is achieved. Where it is not doesn't simply boil down to getting plastered and to behaviour of the type to qualify for the Balearic government's tourism of excesses. It is because coexistence has been designed to fail or has been wholly distorted by vested interests.

Resident and tourist can coexist, but not if tourism business craves a proliferation of certain kinds of establishment; readily admits and indeed promotes to a tourist profile who cannot understand the meaning of consideration for others; enables holiday lets where holiday lets simply shouldn't be; says to hell with you, Mr or Mrs Resident, I've got money to be made - by whatever means. Not if urban planning has failed, if ordinance is not enforced (or is unenforceable), if regulation smacks of posturing rather than effectiveness, if the powers of the police are negated in the face of the mob, under-resourcing and that enforceability.

Resident and tourist can coexist and do coexist in those resorts, resort areas and even non-resorts - courtesy of an expansion of an alternative interior tourism - where civility has been maintained. There is give and take. There always has been, and it is necessary. But there is extreme taking, and we know where and by whom, which is the supreme manifestation of a selfishness that cannot contemplate the word coexistence.

A marketing generalisation that is trotted out by elements within the tourism industry is that today's tourists are more desirous than ever before of cultural exchange. They wish to know local ways, get to meet local people. They are tourists of some global responsible tourism movement. And they will exist. Vladimir Raitz would have approved wholeheartedly. But such virtue is all too easily obliterated by evidence to the contrary, and Vladimir, as he came to realise, was partly to blame.

Club 18-30, of which he was a founder, was not originally conceived with the type of tourism it bred in mind. Once it was sold in 1973, the Mark II version of Club 18-30, it might be argued, was when the rose tint began to fade from the sunglasses and when coexistence, facilitated by resort planning, started its decline.

The genie was out of the bottle and the genie was not confined to one nation or indeed to one age group. There again, perhaps it really has always been thus, as one can go back to the 1930s before the Civil War and to a time when a certain type of American visitor to Palma was badly behaved enough to provoke a diplomatic incident.