1210 | 819 | Spatial planning instruments facing the challenges of unlimited tourism growth and environmental protection in Bulgaria: between legality and spatial practice. Analysis at local level. | Velislava Simeonova (1); Pavel Yanchev (2); Nikolay Naydenov (3)
Bulgaria’s tourism development has positioned the country among the top international destinations in Central and Eastern Europe. Since the 1960s, Bulgaria has been committed to a sun and sea and mountain tourism models, the result of which is an asymmetric map of the distribution of tourist occupation. An example of this is the number of overnight stays concentrated in the main tourist complexes of national importance, a large part of which are located on the Black Sea Coast._x000D_
Today the municipalities that concentrate a large part of the tourist activity continue their unlimited growth at the expense of destruction of natural landscapes facing spatial and environmental challenges. The latter cover a wide range of legal, governance and articulation problems between the three main areas: land use planning, environmental management (protection of territories of natural value) and sustainable tourism (structural sector of the national economy). Citizen mobilizations of green activists closely follow these processes and protest against the pressure of further expansion of tourist infrastructures into protected landscapes._x000D_
The paper analyzes various cases at the local level where the approval of municipal planning and urban planning plans have been followed by a series of controversies and speculation, generating malpractice for more than two decades. _x000D_
Velislava Simeonova (1); Pavel Yanchev (2); Nikolay Naydenov (3)
(1) University of Barcelona; (2) Independent researcher; (3) University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy, Sofia.
ID Abstract: 819