MEMR 9 - Lectures in Urban Tourism

1. Dr Antonio (Paolo) Russo

Room H 12-31 russo@few.eur.nl

2. Lecture scheme
Definition of tourism and structure of tourism systems Urban cultural tourism Dynamics of tourism systems Sustainability and policy concerns Planning and management Case studies

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3. Readings
COMPULSORY
Jansen-Verbeke, M. (1986), Inner-City Tourism: Resources, Tourists and Promoters. Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 13 (1), pp. 79-100. Russo, A.P. (2002a), The Vicious Circle of Tourism Development in Heritage Destinations. Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 29 (1), pp. 165182. Russo, A.P., and J. van der Borg (2002), Planning Considerations for Cultural Tourism: a Case Study of Four European Cities. Tourism Management, Vol. 23, n. 6, pp. 631-637.

CASE STUDIES
Russo, A.P. (2002b), A Stakeholders Approach to Tourism Policy in Bruges, in Tourism Studies in Bruges, ed. by WES, Bruges. Berg, L. van den, J. Van den Borg, and A. P. Russo (2002), The Infrastructure for Urban Tourism: a European Model? A Comparative Analysis of Mega-Projects in Four Eurocities", in The Infrastructure of Play, ed. by D. Judd. M.E. Sharpe, Chicago.

SUPPLEMENTARY
Douglas, N., N. Douglas and R. Derrett (2001), Special Interest Tourism. John Wiley and Sons Australia, Sydney. Chapters 6 (Heritage Tourism) and 18 (Urban Tourism). Chang T.C.; Milne S.; Fallon D.; Pohlmann C. (1996), Urban heritage tourism: the global-local nexus. Annals of Tourism Research Vol. 23, n.2, pp. 286-305.

4. Introduction: WHAT IS TOURISM

Definitions (official and conventional)

Counting tourists Knowing the kind of visitor (e.g. motivation, length of stay, origin market, type of accommodation) has great importance from the point of view of the analysis of impacts and sustainability. Sometimes these official definitions are a bit meaningless. They make sense from statistical point of view but we need to be critical, e.g., consider space scale. Tourists can (MUST) be counted. It is also important to count tourist expenditure. In fact tourists bring benefits, of different nature, to places. On the other hand it implies costs, also of different nature and sometimes very difficult to assess. Costs and benefits from tourism can compared and tourism planners are able to know what to expect from tourism development, how to capitalise on the existing assets (culture, landscape) and how to motivate investments. More later. But how does one count tourists? Who is to be considered a tourist?

Identifying different categories and have different patterns and impacts. The most important distinction is for length and characteristics of stay. LINK TO SLIDE 5

The tourist market

Structure: demand and supply

LINK TO SLIDE 6

There are some peculiarities that make tourism an atypical industry.

Processes: production exchange consumption

The tourist system

Market +

Place Community(ies): Stakeholders

LINK TO SLIDE 7

5. WTOs definition of visitors 6. Tourist supply & demand

Tourist supply

The iceberg of the tourist economy The tourism industry can be conceptualised as an iceberg. You have the industry itself, and around it or below it, all the economic sectors that are indirectly involved. The typical sectors included in the tourism and travel industry are: Transport, guides and information hospitality catering attractions and events

The tourist value-chain We can consider the tourist value chain as every sector that contributes to the production of the tourist experience, and their interconnections. There is a parallel with normal production processes, which have a functional and spatial dimension, with inputs, processed into intermediate goods and outputs in different plants or places. In particular any stage of the production processes has elements upstream (providers) and downstream (consumers, final buyers) as well as parallel organsations doing the same job, with a web of links between them [disegnetto]. In tourism, there are difficulties from the fact that the main inputs are intangible (information, values, cultures), largely non tradable and public, and the spatial dimension where products are assembled and sold is increasingly a no-place (the web, the suburban mall-agent) or anyway a different place from those in which they are consumed.

Tourist products as complex commodities The tourist product is essentially a complex set of goods. The production process of tourism involves not only producing all the goods and services that are necessary to the visitor, but also make them available all together in a coordinated way, and producing an experience. Culture is in important part of cultural tourism, but it is impossible to offer a visit to a museum to a visitor, for instance, without also organising hospitality and an interpretation service.

Tourist demand
Different tourists travel for different reasons: People travel for different reasons. They are enabled to do so, for the changes in the demographic and economic structure of the population worldwide, for the abating costs (direct and indirect) or travelling, and for the generalised cultural development (and interconnection) that stimulates the desire to travel. The very act of tourism consumption is problematic in economic terms.

bundled consumption localised consumption experiential goods: tourists as prosumers

7. The Tourist Region

END 1ST HOUR

8. Focus on URBAN TOURISM

Cities as tourist destinations

Interesting (cities as attractions) Cities are the places where culture has accumulated in ages, and those places that are most attractive for artists, managers, and merchants, who keep culture production an ongoing process. Big (cities as windows) Cities have a critical mass to offer additional elements of a tourist experience that even cultural consumers increasingly ask for: restaurants, bars, nightlife, meeting-places, galleries. Accessible (cities as gateways) Cities are air, rail and road hubs. They are the entry gate for wide regions. They are therefore visited also by those travellers that are not interested in cities as such. And they may be discovered by them: Toronto, Glasgow, Palermo

The spatial organisation of tourism

Tourist attractions, clusters and quarters Cultural attractions and activities tend to cluster is city centres, that were historically the places where culture was produced and staged; and where other tourist services can be consumed in conjunction. Landry studies the economic geography of culture. he concludes that clustering gives dynamism and enhances innovativeness to culture as an urban function. He describes a process of convergence between the cultural and the economic realm: more and more culture is commodified in the capitalist system (e.g. through tourism) and more and more capitalism produces semiotic and symbolic content. Ashworth and Tunbridge describe the process of development of the socalled tourist historic city as a dual development of partial de-franchising between the part of the city that is economically viable and the part of the

city that is culturally rich. The overlapping area is the part of the city where the heritage is put to value by the tourist industry. Culture and tourism in the space This dynamics shows that there are elements of the urban tourism supply that are immobile, irreproducible and fragile; and others that are footloose and can be moved or changed to accommodate evolutions in market requirements. This dualism as we will see is at the base of tourism development in cities. It is also reflected in diverging (spatial and economic) strategies of different actors involved in the tourist system.

9. How BIG and IMPORTANT is urban tourism?

There is a paucity of data. Information is in publications from:

WTO (World Tourism Organisation) - excludes day visits OECD (Org. for Economic Co-operation & Devt.) Accommodation use (misses VFR & camping) Arrivals (frontiers and gateways) (a surrogate for urban tourism)

Sources on urban tourism:

WTO;

FECTO/FOTVE; ATLAS; UNESCO

We only know from research and surveys that tourists are increasingly attracted by urban areas, especially those who rate high culture as a motivation for travelling.

10. Tourism as an URBAN DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY

Why YES:

Direct, indirect and induced economic multipliers Larger in cities because urban areas are export economies and are large and complex enough to internalise the benefits from tourism in their economic structure Intangible effects tourism as a driving force for urban regeneration

Controversial, because cities are living communities that can easily gain but also easily lose from tourism

Why NOT:

Impact assessment methodologies are insufficient. This makes long-term impacts of tourism development difficult to evaluate. Preservation of resources tourism as a self-defeating strategy (= non sustainable) There are theories that point to the fact that because tourism development is based on the economic exploitation of a mostly public good (culture and place atmospheric elements), this leads to an abuse of these goods, and to their destruction therefore tourism leads to sharp product cycles; but the problem is that these products are living communities and their heritage, that have an ethical more than economic value. How to conceptualise this problem, that has markedly characteristics? We refer to the concept of sustainability. spatial

The capacity of systems (economic, social, ecological) to endure in time subject to outside shocks and internal, endogenous evolutions.

11. Sustainable cities

Cities contribute to the worst threats to the ecological environment (concentrating consumption and pollution agents) and at the same time in cities the technological, social and cultural innovation that can be conceived as antidotes to unsustainable development are found. Given this great importance of cities as far as sustainable development is concerned, the general belief is that cities have to be sustainable to have a sustainable world.
To be sustainable, cities have to be: Economically consistent (long-term competitive) Spatially harmonious (mixed use) Culturally and socially equitable (maintaining and developing their identity)

There are conditions that can be seen as general guidelines for sustainability and all refer to some concept of violation or resiliency (what would happen if rule violated): Intragenerational equity: no social groups should be worse off as a result of growth; otherwise social unrest sets in. A very complex and strong rule: inequitable development is not enduring. Intergenerational efficiency: our children should enjoy the same utility as we do and because we do not know what their preferences are we should act under a Cautionary principle. interscalar balance: no territory should be worse off as a result of some else growing. Think global, act local.

12. BUT tourism generates externalities

PHYSICAL / ENVIRONMENTAL Degradation of environment from traffic and congestion, aggression to the integrity of heritage assets and landscapes SOCIAL Erosion of local culture, crowding out of local population CULTURAL Commodification of culture, McDonaldisation of places BETWEEN GENERATIONS Our children WITHIN GENERATIONS Between tourist-dependent and tourist-adverse groups (e.g. the elderly) ACROSS TERRITORIES Between centres and cores of FTRs Tourism generates all sorts of pecuniary and intangible benefits to localities, such as jobs and revenues (especially important because they cover also the unskilled end of the labour market), as well as cultural development and

social cohesion through community pride. Finally it should be taken into consideration that tourism guarantees some form of economic use of the heritage, therefore generating value that can be destined to its own preservation. That is, in many circumstances without tourism the heritage, and especially the built heritage that has no more economic use for a community, but also languages, costumes, etc., would be abandoned. That is why international organisation such as UNESCO are interested in developing tourism, which is also seen as a powerful vector for the resolution of regional conflict and the establishment of world peace. However, tourism also generates costs, again, both pecuniary and intangible. These costs are of heterogeneous nature; they are difficult to quantify and to delimitate in the space; and they tend to become evident only when nothing can be done for their recovery. Why tourism can be unsustainable The delicate balance of costs and benefits generated by tourism, and their allocation in time and space (and across the society) determines the sustainability of tourism. Just apply the dynamic efficiency rules as en exercise.

13. Relation between tourism and urban development

Tourism is an urban function

Dynamic Maybe too much embedded in local society More than others depends on urban speciality globally articulated the industry is global transversal and interrelated to other urban functions the networks of tourism and culture are rich

How does tourism interfere / contribute to (sustainable) urban development?

14. Cultural tourism as threat or opportunity?

Castells: heritage as a bridge between space and place Therefore efforts to institutionalise heritage as an entrepreneurial activity is functional to hook local knowledge to the global networks Chang & c.: tourist city as a nexus between local and global Which may suffer or thrive depending on how the balance is managed Martinotti: the tourist city as a place with multiple populations Which needs to make space for everybody Ashworth & c.: the tourist-historical city as a dual development Van den Berg & c.: tourist landmarks as catalysts for development opportunities END 2ND HOUR

15. Sustainable tourism made operational

SPESP project: tourism development & sustainability in the use of local assets Two extremes:

Opportunities for development not reaped Excessive pressure

16. Map of European Cultural heritage sustainability

There are areas where pressure is excessive but also areas where there is potential for tourist valorisation of the heritage.

17. Tools for the analysis of sustainable tourism

The tourist area life-cycle (TALC)

Scheme by Richard Butler Attracted criticism

18. Tourism area life-cycle (Butler)

Tourism as an evolutionary process Destination rise and fall in popularity Decline in avoidable if cycle is not properly managed Anticipatory actions required

Smooth the peaks in the cycle and achieve more enduring growth. This is possible, TALC seems to say, if a critical threshold of CC is not reached.

19. Regulating visitor flows

Optimal visitation levels and carrying capacities

Physical

carrying capacity Socio-economic CC Economic-psychologic CC

Planning visitation levels: selective marketing Enlarging capacity constraints

Consequences of violation are important. Link CC with TALC

For this, it is necessary to have some economic theory, a model that explains this link: how the evolution of the market determines the long term competitiveness of a destination. For this we need to recognise that different actors behave differently, moved by diverging interests and subjects to different rules.

20. Stakeholders and strategies (I) 21. Stakeholders and strategies (II)
The tourist region is relevant as a strategic space
So also TALC can be reformulated in terms of different types of visitors with different spatial characteristics and different impacts.

All actors in TR behave strategically:

industry local communities and their governments visitors

22. The dynamics of tourist destinations: The Vicious Circle scheme

From the vicious circle to a policy rule Tourism management and regulation Access management Quality management Cultural planning in the visitor-friendly city

23. Tourist policy Breaking the vicious circle I

Step 1: visitor management in the destination

expand central capacity when possible

rationalise / de-concentrate visitor flows diversify accommodation supply

Step 2: mobility management in FTR

keep excursionists time budgets high enough separate tourist traffic from residents inform tourist in advance on routes / opportunities

24. Tourist policy Breaking the vicious circle II

Step 3: penalise strategic behaviour

regulate quality (patents, labels) inform visitors (listings, open-mall)

Step 4: make culture matter!

promote / manage / sell attractions as a system enhance value of culture through planning and IT provide interpretation services / stimulate curiosity organise supply in the space

END 3RD HOUR

25. Case study of Bruges Facts and figures

> 300 protected monuments 9,000 tourist beds (average price 100 $) 5-10% of population employed in tourism 1/4 of population lives in historical walled city Tourist pressure leads to concentration model

26. Strengths and weaknesses of the concentration model

Strengths:

Effectiveness of visitors management maximized Confrontation with rest of inner city marginal Opportunity costs for alternative development minimized Control on tourism development achieved to some extent

Weaknesses:

Decline in quality from monopolistic positions Tourist pressure continues to increase Under-utilization of resources Poor score of cultural institutions

27. Towards a new strategy for sustainable tourism development

Huge demand basin to be turned in a source of opportunities Re-focalization of role of cultural heritage Diversification of cultural supply Constraints to policy action

28. Case study of Bruges Stakeholders analysis

With respect to 7 main issues, stakeholders have

EFFECTIVE POWER to influence the decision-making process

depending on

their SALIENCE on the issue (private interest) and their

CAPABILITY

29. Case study of Bruges General results of analysis

Municipal tourism policy blamed for being not bone nor flesh Lack of leadership and of a vision for future development Private sector divided and poorly co-operative Priorities are the re-organisation of the system of auditing, with inclusion of cultural producers

30. Case study of Venice 31. Venice: tourist attractions 32. Case study of Venice Tourist stress 33. Case study of Venice Time-budgets and structure of visits
34.

Case study of Venice Restructuring the cultural-tourist sector

Marketing

Co-ordination in promotion and integral approach to the market

Infrastructure

Soft infrastructure for networks and along the chain of value

Products

Diversification, attention to emerging market segments

35. eTourism projects for sustainable Venice

3 IT&T projects:

ALATA partnership to manage visitor flows in occasion of holy year through an integrated DMS involving the whole of Venices FTR Venice Card to selectively market Venice, distributed for free to advance bookers in a number compatible with capacity limits Virtual laboratory, a digital gateway to Venice to create awareness among visitors and spur up an efficient organisation of the visits

IT&T projects integrate one another and contribute to a smarter, softer Venices economy They are not necessarily successful: organisational conditions and a business model must be looked for

36.

Conclusions:
Tourism development in cultural destinations

The performance of tourism depends on a number of factors Some under the control of tourist planners some not A visitor-friendly city excels in each aspect Integral planning required for culture to realise its value