The Weekender Effect
Hyperdevelopment in Mountain Towns — Updated Edition
About the Book
A passionate plea for considered development in mountain towns and for the preservation of local values, cultures and landscapes.
As cities continue to grow at unprecedented rates, more and more people are looking for peaceful weekend retreats in mountain or rural communities. More often than not, these retreats are found in and around resorts or places of natural beauty. As a result, what once were small towns are fast becoming mini-cities, complete with expensive housing, fast food, traffic snarls and environmental damage, all with little or no thought for the importance of local history, local people, and local culture.
This updated edition of The Weekender Effect looks at how things have changed, grown, and morphed in numerous mountain communities in North America. Offering suggestions for residents, tourists, and planners who love mountain places, Robert Sandford tackles some of the issues facing small communities on the edge of the Anthropocene and looks forward to a future when the “commodification of place” is no longer the driving factor in human geography.
Reviews
“Robert Sandford writes passionately, insightfully and alarmingly about the scope and scale of development pressures in Rocky Mountain towns that are subject to uber-tourism. Through displacement, crowding and overpricing, original residents are in danger of being overrun by the “weekenders.” Robert details how everything changes in proportion to the number of people who seek out the unique quality of a place, irrevocably affecting the original values, virtues and attractions of that place. The Weekender Effect contains some useful philosophical thoughts from which others might benefit.” —Lorne Fitch, retired provincial Fish and Wildlife biologist, former adjunct professor at the University of Calgary, author of Streams of Consequence: Dispatches from the Conservation World