Recreational Land Use

Abstract

A general survey of the origins of the problem of recreational land use reveals the following relevant stages of development of many industrialized countries during the last century or so:

• 1. Large numbers of peasants and peasants’ sons gave up their ancient relationship to the soil and village, leaving their rural environment to concentrate in towns and seek employment in industries and services. Overnight, small urban or rural settlements grew enormously, both in area and in density of habitations, so that huge tracts of the surrounding landscape underwent urbanization. This expansion of urban political and economic power into the countryside, and urban methods of production and commerce, led first to a growing economic utilization of rural resources and later to a gradual deterioration of the rural and indigenous landscape by deforestation, mechanization of agriculture, parcellation, introduction of monocultures, faulty methods of cultivation, mining, and construction of industrial and power plants. Soil erosion, disturbance of the water cycles, and loss of fertility and of beauty of landscape are the symptoms of man-made land disease.

• 2. The still increasing urban population, compressed in quarters where unhealthy conditions prevailed, remote from the open country, began to sense what it had lost and raised a demand for temporary environmental compensation. The rural and indigenous environment became for the urbanite a recreational environment. The peasant sons still wished to return to the country for a holiday. Gradually the need for recreational facilities to maintain the health and efficiency of the urban population became recognized. However, during the period of urban expansion the original cultural landscape had been largely defaced and turned into the “steppe of culture” — as the Dutch call the new rural pattern. Only isolated parts — often spots of economic decay — had kept their original rural character.

• 3. Pressure of vacationers on the remaining rural and indigenous places and on newly established resorts became violent. This very pressure destroyed these places as true resources for restful recreation. In the attempt to escape overcrowding and noise and to rediscover landscape, holiday-makers were driven ever farther away from the cities. Gradually, social and medical demands for recreational areas for the inhabitants of big cities became incompatible with the physical limitations of, or distance to, recreational land. The recreational movement of the population was hampered, and, as the crisis became obvious, there originated the problem of recreational land use.