Back from the beach. Reframing landscape in rural coastal tourism.

Coastal territories have been gaining more attention, and this is partly due to increasing awareness of the potential effects of climate change, including the possibility of it severely affecting coastal territories and having a substantial impact on urbanized regions and natural resources. However, coastal landscapes have long been a place of conflictual space production linked to the overlapping of diverging populations, activities, programs, and expectations. Tourism has been shown to expand and reconfigure the range of conflicting coastal activities beyond the traditional work in fisheries, trade and port activities, urbanization, or even agriculture. This is most evident on the Mediterranean Coast. Coastal tourism has significantly reoriented infrastructural choices; it has changed cultural policies, resulting in overly intensive use of environmental and heritage resources: it has transformed rural landscapes by progressively favouring a temporary and seasonal use of the housing stock and ousting its inhabitants; it has frequently introduced a job market of lower quality; it has sometimes generated conflicts in the appropriation of public space and reduced the quality of the welfare state. Nonetheless, whilst that narrow strip of the coastal environment that is in direct contact with the sea has commonly been the target of tourist activities, the agricultural inland has only started to gain attention in recent decades. In these contexts, tourism has increasingly been perceived as a significant economic opportunity that may serve as a solution to a variety of issues, from repurposing abandoned buildings to providing a new market for local goods. Yet the expectations raised by the economic sector of tourism are frequently grounded on contrasting and conflicting hypotheses about the future of the landscape. These hypotheses originate from an aim to reinterpret maritime tourism, which has proven to be extremely efficient/profitable, in order to carefully develop rural tourism comprising high-standard agricultural production. Meanwhile, the offer for cultural tourism strictly linked to the exploration of the rural inland has been continually growing, thus casting a new light even on forgotten places. Currently, the rural landscape in peripheral landscapes – where fragility is an environmental, demographic, and social issue – has the potential to address its future according to the prospect of multifunctional agriculture which sees tourism as an essential economic activity as well as a drive for change. However, the transition does not come without risks, nor is it a streamlined process: it requires careful rumination regarding transformation strategies and planning tools.