Coastal Fortresses: A Cross-Case Analysis of Water, Policy, and Tourism Development in Three Gulf Coast Communities

• Main Author: Krupa, Kimberly A
• Format: Others
• Published: ScholarWorks@UNO 2019
• Subjects: Gulf Coast; coastal communities; Bayou Petit Caillou; Chauvin; Cocodrie; Terrebonne Parish; Biloxi; Back Bay; East Biloxi; Harrison County; Apalachicola; Franklin County; cross-case analysis; policy; tourism; fishing; environment; casino gambling; economic development; conflict; adaptation; Louisiana; Mississippi; Florida; Urban Studies and Planning
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2617; https://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3786&context=td

As a result of development pressures and water resource struggles, once rural, spatially segregated coastal commercial fishing villages along the U.S. portion of the Gulf of Mexico are increasingly tourist frontiers for elites and the emergent businesses that cater to them. Over the course of the twentieth century, water events, from coastal land loss to hurricane destruction to natural disaster, have fast-tracked development projects that have allowed for the expansion of the tourism sector, and relaxed policies to encourage bold new economic development initiatives that often put poor coastal communities and their environment in jeopardy. This outcome is not universal across the northern Gulf Coast, but contingent on a number of local factors overlooked in the literature on coastal tourism and water policy development. This paper investigates the local nuances that have emerged as responses to global and regional development pressures by focusing on the ways in which local values and policy decisions have influenced the spread of coastal urbanization. An intensive analysis will examine the layered effects of changing land-use patterns and tourism growth pressures on three at-risk coastal communities in Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida, in the United States. This paper will test the hypothesis that coastal communities affected by a similar set of development pressures respond to these forces in different ways, depending on complex local and regional variabilities. The paper’s focus is centered on Northern Gulf Coast tourism growth patterns from post-World War II through 2018, and employs a mixed method, multiple-sited case-study design.