Model of Urban Tourism for Small Caribbean Islands

Abstract

RAPID urbanization and the emergence of tourism as the dominant regional economic activity were two significant trends during the past thirty years for the Caribbean islands. The proportion of population that was urban rose from 36.5 percent in 1960 to an estimated 57.5 percent in 1990. The urban average annual growth rate was 3 percent, far in excess of the rural rate of 0.7 percent (Hope 1989). Expansion of the tourism sector was even more dramatic: the number of international stayover tourists to the islands rose 8 percent annually, from approximately 960,000 in 1959 to 10,166,000 in 1989 (Caribbean Tourist Association 1960; World Tourism Organization 1990). The number of cruise-ship excursionists increased from 808,000 to 6,532,000 (World Tourism Organization 1990). This article focuses on tourism to the small Caribbean islands, which are defined as ones with a population of less than 400,000. The patterns of urban and tourism development on these islands differ from those found on the larger, more populated islands, and a distinct small-island urban tourism has emerged. The purpose of this article is to provide a model of that tourism. The empirical evidence on which the model is based came from St. John's, Antigua; Nassau, Bahamas; Bridgetown, Barbados; Roseau, Dominica; Castries, St. Lucia; Plymouth, Montserrat; St. George's, Grenada; and Kingstown, St. Vincent. On the small islands, the main centers are accessible to most stayover tourists. These centers range in metropolitan population from about five thousand in Plymouth to almost one hundred thousand in Bridgetown and in Fort-de-France, Martinique. They possess a broad array of functions and facilities that is disproportionate to urban size. Nevertheless, the overall volume of activity and the physical space in which it occurs are constrained. The potential for tourist-local interaction is enhanced, and tourism assumes a high profile both physically and economically, even when the actual volume of the visitation is not high. The principal centers are always ports, which indicates the importance of cruise-ship activity as a factor in determining the geographical patterns. As with the status of each island's urban center, the status of the tourism sector in general is exaggerated by the limitations of setting and the economy. International tourism receipts account for approximately one-third of the cumulative gross national product (GNP) of the small islands. Relative tourism contributions to the individual economies in the group range from less than 10 percent of the GNP for Guadeloupe and Martinique to more than 60 percent for Anguilla, Antigua, and the British Virgin Islands (World Tourism Organization 1990). Absolute numbers of arrivals that appear modest may mask very high host-tourist ratios because of the small resident populations on the islands. In both social and economic terms, tourism is likely to act, directly and indirectly, as a pervasive force on a small island. The contemporary dominance of tourism is not surprising when patterns of historical development and limited resource endowment are considered. The small Caribbean islands were initially colonized as specialized agricultural peripheries, with plantation economies to supply western European powers with tropical products. After World War II, the regional potential for beach-based tourism became more apparent (Anglo-American Caribbean Commission 1945). Labor and capital were increasingly diverted from the chronically depressed agricultural sector to tourism. The resort hotel gradually replaced the plantation as the primary mode of production in an economy still organized by the principles of the plantation monoculture (Harrigan 1974; Hills and Lundgren 1977). That transformation did not occur uniformly throughout the small-island group. Destinations such as Antigua display much greater reliance on plantation tourism than does Dominica, at the other end of the spectrum, which emphasizes locally controlled, dispersed, small-scale accommodations and so-called ecotourism attractions (Weaver 1988, 1991). …