Leisure Space

Dinner at Australia Square’s revolving Summit Restaurant, sipping cocktails at the Chevron in Potts Point, hanging out at a Skyline drive-in … Mid-twentieth-century Sydneysiders embraced leisure like never before. Leisure Space details the architecture and design that transformed their city – through its new hotels, motels, restaurants, bars, clubs, shopping centres, drive-ins and golf courses, including landmark buildings such as the Gazebo and the Wentworth Hotel. With stunning images from Max Dupain, Mark Strizic and other outstanding Australian photographers, Leisure Space explores a dynamic period in Sydney’s history and the dramatic impact of modernism on the city’s built environment.

Consumption is well established as a key theme in the study of the eighteenth century. Spaces of Consumption brings a new dimension to this subject by looking at it spatially. Taking English towns as its scene, this inspiring study focuses on moments of consumption – selecting and purchasing goods, attending plays, promenading – and explores the ways in which these were related together through the spaces of the town: the shop, the theatre and the street. Using this fresh form of analysis, it has much to say about sociability, politeness and respectability in the eighteenth century.

This book explores, from a leisure studies perspective, the central role that leisure has to play in positive psychology, exploring themes such as flow, fulfilment, altruism, well-being, and interpersonal relationships.

Sex and the sexual have for far too long been consigned to the dark corners by social scientists in general and tourism and leisure scholars in particular. Sex and the Sexual During People’s Leisure and Tourism Experiences seeks to begin to rectify this situation by bringing the position and nature of sex and the sexual into the light of academic debate. As such, this book is designed to highlight cross-disciplinary emerging work on sex and the sexual in leisure and tourism and provide the readers with insights into this social realm. It encompasses a broad array of sex-related issues and tourism and leisure environments from across a variety of countries. The book should appeal to researchers and students across the humanities and social sciences both for the value of the research in its own right and the ability of it to be used as a lens through which to view the position of sex and the sexual as well as tourism and leisure in today's world. Overall, it is argued that sex and the sexual should play a part in the academic discourse, especially if we wish to describe what is actually happening out there as far as tourism and leisure are concerned.

This landmark publication brings together some of the most perceptive commentators of the present moment to explore core ideas and cutting edge developments in the field of Leisure Studies. It offers important new insights into the dynamics of the transformation of leisure in contemporary societies, tracing the emergent issues at stake in the discipline and examining Leisure Studies’ fundamental connections with cognate disciplines such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, History, Sport Studies and Tourism. This book contains original work from key scholars across the globe, including those working outside the Leisure Studies mainstream. It showcases the state of the art of contemporary Leisure Studies, covering key topics and key thinkers from the psychology of leisure to leisure policy, from Bourdieu to Baudrillard, and suggests that leisure in the 21st century should be understood as centring on a new ‘Big Seven’ (holidays, drink, drugs, sex, gambling, TV and shopping). No other book has gone as far in redefining the identity of the discipline of Leisure Studies, or in suggesting how the substantive ideas of Leisure Studies need to be rethought. The Routledge Handbook of Leisure Studies should therefore be the intellectual guide of first choice for all scholars, academics, researchers and students working in this subject area.

Wide-ranging and challenging, this book offers a host of new insights into how leisure theory has handled the question of gender difference and inequality. Providing a critical introduction to the leading positions in leisure theory, Betsy Wearing guides the reader through their strengths and weaknesses from a feminist perspective. This book draws attention to the various leisure experiences that women encounter and construct in their everyday lives and the meanings that these experiences have for them. Her perspective takes into account such poststructuralist ideas as multiple subjectivities of women and multiple femininities; the possibilities of resistance to male dominance in leisure; the potential through leisure of rewriting masculine and feminine scripts; and leisure as a site of struggle to challenge hegemonic masculinity.

This book explores the meaning of leisure in the context of key social formations of our time. Chris Rojek brings together the insights of feminsim, Marxism, Weber, Elias, Simmel, Nietzsche and Baudrillard to produce a survey - and rethinking - of leisure theory. At the same time he presents a radical critique of the traditional ′centring′ of leisure, on ′escape′, ′freedom′ and ′choice′. Revealing how leisure practices have responded to living in a risk society, he shows that ′free′ time becomes something very different when simulation and nostalgia lie at the heart of everyday life.

The book presents current sports buildings, which stand out for the quality of their construction, their integration into the urban context, and their objectives. Sport today means lifestyle and fun and is associated with joining an association and social inclusion as well as with individualization and health awareness. The spectrum of examples from all over Europe ranges from school gyms to urban open spaces that can be used by anyone at any time. The visibility and presence of spatial forms for activities such as skateboarding, jogging or fitness today are radically different from the gyms of the past, providing rich and aesthetic contributions to their surroundings.