CASOS DE USO

An understanding of how ideas about space, place, environment and society are produced is important to the analysis of how tourism and real estate development are transforming Gigante and Tola, and helps us to understand

space not only as the physical but also as the social, and to add the dimension of power to the construction of these ideas. This will help us understand how it is that Gigante and Tola have become the ‘Emerald Coast’ and a hotspot for tourists, entrepreneurs, investors and increasingly elites, which is reshaping land tenure, and access and control over resources in the area. To understand how Gigante and Tola are being transformed into tourist spaces, resulting in the representational and physical manifestation of the ‘Emerald Coast’, we must look at how space is produced. Paige West⁷ (2006), borrowing from Lefebvre (1991) and Harvey (1990), has offered an eloquent conceptualization of the production of space, which is highly useful when thinking about how Gigante and Tola became the “Emerald Coast.”

Following West (2006), Lefebvre (1991) and Harvey (1990), it can be argued that Tola, as the “Emerald Coast,” was produced through spatial practice. By this I mean the social production of space. (Lefebvre 1991:33) Space is produced through the combination of different practices that are mental,

material, and social practices, and which Lefebvre characterizes as experience, perception, and imagination. (Harvey 1990:219) These practices are historical, discursive, ideological, legislative, and imaginative. Space comes to be

constituted, produced, and made, through a process that is like a balloon being blown up. It starts from an idea (mental), a location (material), or a

relationship between people (social) and radiates out, all while drawing in particles from similar processes elsewhere, (West 2006:27) hence; “The social production of space examines how new systems (actual or imagined) of land use, transport and communications, territorial organizations, etc. are produced,

7 In her book Conservation is our government now. The politics of ecology in Papua New Guinea (2006), West uses ethnography and political ecology to examine the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. West illustrates the relationship between the global and the local, and between transnational processes and individual ties, in producing space and place.

and how new modes of representation (e.g. information technology, computerized mapping, or design) arise.” (Harvey 1990:222) Then, once brought into the world, space is always in process of becoming something else and contributing to the production of other spaces, objects, subjects and

identities. Lefebvre argues that once space is produced, it “serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power, yet that, as such, it escapes in part from those who would make use of it.” (1991:26) So once the product is out there, it comes to be something in and of itself that works to produce more space, place, people, society, environment, and so on; it comes to take part in the process of production. (West 2006)

It is important that we understand that spatial productions are not “natural” or given, they are not locations that came into being with ecology and evolution, but rather, they are produced by the social and material relations between peoples, (West 2006) and that they are completely saturated with and a product of power relations (Massey 2005). The way in which space is conceptualized is important because it influences how we engage, understand and approach the world, and therefore affects how we perceive the social, political, and

ecological effects of particular processes. Conventional concepts of space assumed it to be a static field in which activities took place and actors existed but which itself was not made or altered by social action. Lefebvre, (1991) and others demonstrated that the nature of space itself was constitutive of those actors and actions. Hence, space has come to be seen as a process.

For the sake of simplicity, I understand places as points on a map that are the

“locus” of particular practices, social relations, and power relations. They represent such abstractions as institutional forms, discourses, imaginaries, sensorial experiences, and the outcomes of particular histories. (Harvey

1996:294) West (2006:30) takes place to be the fixing of a process in time and space, but not necessarily an enduring one.⁸

In all of these examinations of how space is produced dialectical processes between space, place, time, environment and the social are theorized. But how are these processes demonstrated at work? West, (2006) following Arturo Escobar, (2001) argues that by focusing on the specificity of places (natures, cultures, economies, practices), we will notice and track the kinds of

articulations between these specifics of daily social lives and the movements of modernity and capital, (Escobar 2001:141) which calls for the kind of

research that shows the production of place by capitalism and global forces but shaped by particular historical configurations. (West 2006:31)

My argument is that the emergence of the “Emerald Coast” is a process by way of which Tola’s coastal landscape and the families who live there have been folded into a dynamic with tourists, developers, and elites; through

transnational mobility and flows of people and capital, which are shaped by historical, political, social and economic forces. Taking this into account we are able to start tracing the fundamentally socially produced character of the struggles around access and control over resources and uneven development as tourism proliferates along Tola’s coastline.