Fields of Green and Gold: Territorial hunger, rural planning, and the political ecologies of high-end golf

Sammanfattning: Fields of Green and Gold is a multiple case study analysing the placing and establishment of two large-scale, high-profile, upmarket golf developments with the aim of exploring a political ecology of high-end golf. The cases studied are Bro Hof Slott Golf Club in Upplands-Bro, opened in 2007, and Trump International Golf Links Scotland in Aberdeenshire, opened in 2012. Reading these two cases together permits shedding light on the radical but multifarious environmental transformations undertaken to produce landscapes for the production and selling of upmarket golf experiences. The cases together also provide an opportunity to analyse the complex planning processes which these high-profile developments are enmeshed in, and the ways through which planning practices are reshaped in dealing with developments potentially reorganising rural landscapes and local/regional economies in new ways. Identifying a gap in how tourism studies has generally not engaged with political ecology and in how political ecology has seldom engaged with tourism or leisure the dissertation concludes that the laborious socio-ecological orderings necessary to establish spectacular golf landscapes are almost illegible from the standpoint of prominent tourism studies strands. Bro Hof Slott and TIGLS are – in their respective ways - constituted through a variety of political, economic and socio-ecological connections. The production of golf experiences is made possible through radically remaking established planning practices, but this is never uncontroversial. We thus encounter struggles concerning how legal and planning frameworks should relate to each other in governing rural socio-ecologies, for whom and what purposes the countryside should be ordered, and what the socio-ecologies transformed actually are. While built on landscapes shaped by myriads of forces – human and non-human throughout history the developments also spur novel visions, both utopian and dystopian, for the countryside.