CLASS RELATIONS AND TOURISM URBANIZATION - THE REGENERATION OF THE PETITE-BOURGEOISIE AND THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW URBAN FORM

The last few decades of the twentieth century have been a time of very marked urban change, with one of the most striking of the new urban forms being tourism urbanization; an urbanization of rapidly developing cities and towns specially built to enable large numbers of people to visit for a short period so they can consume some of the many pleasurable goods and services on sale. Paralleling these urban - as well as regional, national and international - developments are changes to class relations and thus to class structures. One striking but rarely acknowledged class change is the recent regeneration of the petite bourgeoisie. This paper attempts to see whether a link exists between tourism urbanization, as a late twentieth-century urban form, and this recent regeneration of the petite bourgeoisie. Empirically, it focuses on the Gold Coast, the largest centre in Australia devoted to tourism, and the city most clearly epitomizing Australian tourism urbanization. A comparative analysis clearly shows this city has a strong petit bourgeois presence, this being because the industries forming this city's economy are those traditionally involving the petit bourgeois. Moreover, the actions taken in this city by this class essentially have been attempts to counter factors perceived to threaten the livelihood of this class, a response paralleling that of the rural petite bourgeoisie under similar development experiences.