Speaker
Description
The extremely popular German holiday island of Sylt is the most expensive place to live in Germany. As in other holiday resorts on the North and Baltic Seas, more and more permanent housing on Sylt is being converted into temporary accommodation for tourists or second home owners. As permanent housing becomes scarcer, it also becomes more expensive. Consequently, more and more locals are being displaced to the mainland.
In our research, we consider Sylt, in the sense of Adorno (1969: 736), as the “most advanced (German) observation post”, where the effects of the structural shortage of permanent housing on the local economy and society of small tourist communities manifest themselves particularly clearly: It leads to the (involuntary) out-migration of the population (and especially of families), to a serious shortage of much-needed permanent and seasonal workers, to problems in maintaining basic public services (fire protection, local amenities, health and education), to the erosion of local culture and tradition, and to strong feelings of alienation among long-time residents. These developments ultimately affect the quality and quantity of the tourist offer: It is feared that they will jeopardise the island's tourist function and thus its economic vitality.
These problems, often referred to as 'Syltification', are not unique to this island, but can be observed in many other small German and European tourist destinations. They raise the question of why politicians and planners find it so difficult to take decisive action against the loss of permanent housing, even though this is recognised as harmful by all political parties. Our empirical material suggests that a) the planning instruments available for the preservation and creation of affordable permanent housing are not used, or are used only reluctantly, by those responsible for policy and planning, and b) the rules and regulations enacted for these purposes are often not enforced or violations are not punished. These failures suggest that the islands lack the political will or the political power to act decisively against the obviously destructive developments in the housing market. How can this be explained, given the magnitude of the problems and the urgency of their resolution?
In my presentation, I argue that the reasons for the lack of determination to implement and enforce measures to regulate the housing market are primarily to be found in the social and governance structures and processes that are typical of small towns and municipalities. In fact, Sylt and almost all other vacation resorts on the North Sea and Baltic coasts are peripheral small and micro towns. The characteristics of small town governance include honorary mayors and local councils, less professionalized and conflict-avoiding local politics, planning administrations with few resources, and strong social and personal ties between relevant local actors and with the population. I will show how these structures make it massively more difficult to effectively counter the profit interests of large and small providers in the housing market. These include powerful investors as well as fellow islanders, for whom it is also much more lucrative to rent out their homes temporarily rather than permanently.
Finally, I will discuss the practical policy implications of these findings. If the assumption that the "small town character" of politics and administration is a decisive key to understanding the problems of small tourist destinations in creating and securing permanent housing proves to be viable, this would have consequences for the search for solutions: These would have to come much more "from the outside" or from higher levels of governance.
The research presented combines several fields of research, including spatial and planning research, governance studies, small town research, and urban and community sociology.
References
Adorno, T. W. (1969) Wissenschaftliche Erfahrungen in Amerika. In: Tiedemann, R. (Ed.) (1997) Gesammelte Schriften 10/2. Frankfurt. Suhrkamp. 702–740.
| Keywords | small tourist destinations, crisis of permanent housing, small town goverance |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
