ABSTRACT
Famagusta’s coastline was the center of a booming 1960s tourism industry advanced by the young state of Cyprus as a tool of national modernization and decolonization. Behind the celebrated branding of that coast as a “Mini-Miami in the Middle East,” there is a complex history of concurrent input from the UN and Republic of France experts, who advanced competing development strategies that resonated with Marshall Plan geopolitics and European narratives on the social and spatial potentials of leisure. This essay traces the influence of these divergent development models that promised the industrialization of leisure and urbanization of the island, and which were, in turn, metabolized by an intricate socio-political landscape: a looming intercommunal conflict between the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot communities, speculative development, land ownership patterns, and state-sponsored policies. The resulting combination of modernist tower hotels with low-density distributions of tourist accommodations reshaped the relationship of the waterfront to the city fabric and also embodied the ideological and formal contradictions of that era’s tourism development. Seen in retrospect, long after the halt of Famagusta’s development as a result of the island’s division, the complex entwinements of international expertise, market pressures, and the state’s mediating tactics foreshadowed future paradigms of tourism-induced commodification of culture and nature.
