ABSTRACT
There are strong and complex links between tourism and wastelands, the most traditional and best studied example of which are the tourism development of wastelands. Rural wastelands are transformed into “stations vertes” (green resorts/natural tourist areas), urban brownfields become heritage sites and the wastelands of colonial plantations come to serve as tourist paradises. Wastelands thus appear to be a favoured site for tourism development. This has been exploited by discourse on local development and the conversion of these places that promotes tourism as a sort of last chance, a miracle allowing distressed locations to recover their former dynamism. However, tourism may not be the ultimate stage of territorial development. Tourist activity can also decline, which, in some places, might produce touristic wastelands. Ski stations, hotels, resorts and residences, sometimes deserted while still under construction. Many kinds of abandonment affect resorts. The exit paths of the wasteland state (when such paths exist, as there are definitive failures) are diverse. From squatting to a clean slate or rehabilitation, they can significantly give rise to a new tourism era (green tourism succeeding climate and health tourism in mountains or thermal areas, for example) or lead to bifurcations towards a more permanent suburban and/or senior citizen residence. Far from being the ultimate stage of territorial trajectories, tourism offers a range of possibilities. This chapter presents several examples from French Polynesia.
