Recreational geography in the German Democratic Republic

This paper is a short report on concepts, methods, definitions and fields of geographical research into tourism and recreation in the GDR. Main centres of research are the Dresden College of Transport, the Dresden College of Education and the Geography sections of the Universities of Berlin and Greifswald. After the Dresden Conference on Geography of Tourism in 1965 the Greifswald Geographical Symposium on Recreational Geography in 1978 was the second decisive GDR conference. Than it became quite clear that the emphasis in research has shifted from tourism to territorial problems of recreation, primarily the various forms of outdoor recreation. The theoretical approach is shown as Greifswald model of recreational geography (Fig 1).