Kystbyen til forhandling: Designinterventioner som katalysator for nye relationer mellem turisme og steder i Hvide Sande

In 2019, there were 4 million commercial overnight stays in Ringkøbing Skjern municipality, a number expected to grow 15% by 2023. Many tourists visit Hvide Sande in connection with their stay in the area. Hvide Sande is a port town on Holmsland Klit with more than 3000 inhabitants. During the Ph.d., I have numerous times been one of these visitors in Hvide Sande.

Tourism and places
Tourism is a significant and growing economic sector and a primary transformative driver. Tourism is increasingly applied as a catalyst for growth in the peripheral zones of Denmark. My research focusses on the complex relationships between tourism and places. This site-specific meeting can be both negative and conflictual, or it can appear insignificant, irrelevant, and unengaged. Simultaneously, the intersection between tourism and places holds a constructive and innovative potential for new meaningful relationships between hitherto unrelated actors. The capacity in the meeting between diverse actors can be described as site-specific positive interference.

The project raises a theoretical and empirical critique of the distinction between the tourist and the local, between everyday life and tourism. This distinction is of great importance for the commercial and quantitative focus of tourism development. Here, the place is primarily considered as a destination that must meet the demand of the tourist. In this approach, there is a risk that the place will be flattened into a product that will attract customers, which can be done with generic and singular commercial solutions. This approach entails a simplification of the place for the purpose of effective and targeted branding. Along the west coast, this distinction materializes, among other things, in the solitary cottage typology, which physically separates from the complex urban landscape of the coastal cities.

With the concept of positive interference, an alternative approach is presented, which, based on site-specificity, engages in more complex urban situations. This approach focuses on the coastal town of Hvide Sande - not as a destination for tourists, but as a hybrid urban landscape that consists of and interests many different actors. The hypothesis is that an increased focus on positive interference in the coastal city's transformation process is an attraction with broad appeal and thus overrides the distinction between tourist and local - between everyday life and tourism.

Interdisciplinary research project
The Ph.D. project is part of the interdisciplinary research project "Rethink Tourism in a Coastal City - Design for New Engagement." Through qualitative methods, site-specific behavior, situations, controversies, and potentials are investigated and decoded to contribute to a more nuanced debate on coastal cities' development, with tourism as an integrated actor. In addition to the interdisciplinary research group, the project has had numerous stakeholders related to the tourism sector and Ringkøbing Skjern municipality.

Research purposeThe purpose of the Ph.D. project is to investigate how we can use site-specific design interventions to map and describe the diverse actors and their dynamic relationships that constitute the coastal city. This inquiry implies a focus on positive as well as negative interference. The studies seek o contribute to a better and broader understanding of transformation processes in the coastal city and contribute to qualifying strategic design measures within integrated tourism and urban development.

Research designThe research is situated within Research through Design. The research design revolves around a dialogical process between design-based action research and a theoretical framework. The theoretical framework consists of two main tracks. A) a review of three key concepts: the Place, the Tourist, and Affordance. B) Actor-network theory as a theoretical-methodological framework to analyze and understand the broad transformative impact of design interventions.The dialogue has at times been initiated by the explorative and situated design interventions, whereby the theoretical concepts have served as optics of understanding the empirics. Other times, the theory has been a guideline and framework for the design interventions, which have tested or challenged the theory.

A pivotal for the PhD project has been the situated trajectory of design interventions in Hvide Sande. Five site-specific design interventions have been developed, focusing on activating and articulating alternative gazes and affordances in the port area in central Hvide Sande. Through design distortions (of function, location, visual expression, user group) of well-known physical elements in the port environment, the design intervention trajectory has engaged and influenced many diverse actors in complex negotiations about the agility of the place. The long-term engagement onsite has clarified how the field of maneuver for transformations has developed and expanded over time.
By using actor network theory as a theoretical-methodological framework, the project clarifies how the physical transformations of design interventions have constructed new relations between diverse actors who have challenged and blurred the distinction between tourist and local. Likewise, the project points to a fluid threshold between everyday situations, industrial areas, and experience landscapes. This finding illustrates the potential for positive interference by a multidimensional densification strategy.