Cultural Sustainability, Tourism and Development

(Re)articulations in Tourism Contexts

Nancy Duxbury, Nancy Duxbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429533969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Cultural Sustainability, Tourism and Development considers how tourism provides a lens to examine issues of cultural sustainability and change. It discusses how cultural and natural assets, artistic interventions, place identity, policy strategies, and community well-being are intertwined in (re)articulations of place and local dynamics that occur in tourist locations.

With a primary focus on culture in sustainable development, the book clarifies connections between culture as a core dimension of local sustainability and cultural dimensions of sustainable tourism. It highlights the roles and place of cultural expression, artistic activity, and heritage resources in local or regional sustainable development contexts. Chapters critically examine the dimensions of tourism-invoked dynamics of change and the cultural impacts of tourism-related activities. The book concludes with proposals for new culture-informed and creativity-based approaches, mediations, and relations to encourage a better balance between visitors and residents' quality of life and the broader sustainability of the area. Interdisciplinary and international in scope, contributions reflect on communities and rural areas located in Brazil, Canada, Croatia, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and the United States.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of cultural development and policy, heritage studies, cultural tourism and sustainable tourism, cultural geography, and regional development.

1
Cultural sustainability, tourism, and development

Articulating connections

Nancy Duxbury

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 provided a stark moment of renewed reflection and contemplation on the realities of our interconnected world. It highlighted the necessity of working together on both a local community and global scale to improve our quality of social solidarity and support for one another, and to advance ideas and practices that can renew and provide mutual benefit, contribute to local vitality and a diversity of life practices, foster the sharing of ideas and cultural expressions, and redirect travel and tourism to meaningful and responsible ends. In our individual pods of isolation, the level of virtual reaching out and sharing was heightened, and the importance of cultural practices in crafting these bridges and inter-locale connections was underscored. At the same time, it was a stark reminder that what was experienced online reflected a privileged segment of humanity, and it further emphasized that we live in a very unequal world.

Moving forward, there is a sense that this pandemic may change the way we act in future – individually, collectively in our geographic communities, and more widely in our national and international networks. As this book is being finalized, cultural researchers are examining the effects of this period on artists and cultural organizations, while tourism researchers are monitoring the impacts on the tourism sector. Suggestions for post-pandemic recovery strategies and actions are being floated, while a general sense of uncertainty prevails. There are also growing calls for enhanced joint efforts to confront the continuing challenge of tackling climate change, and to seriously consider the major behavioural and systemic changes that will be required to address this too.

It is clear that countless families and communities internationally will be profoundly affected by illness, deaths, and changed realities. As we move through this experience and forward, attention to individual and collective health and well-being (both physical and mental), the revitalization of traditions that connect and provide continuity, and the use of artistic processes in therapeutic care to assist with processing, meaning-making, and self-expression can make valuable contributions to our re-grounding and re-connecting efforts.

In this context, travel and tourism will resume but are likely to be profoundly changed. Travellers may increasingly seek out places of beauty, of respite, of renewal. Domestic tourism will be re-emphasized. Connections with others may be re-conceived and fostered on a more humane basis as co-travellers on a closely interconnected planet. A sense of rebuilding and renewal may prevail. How can we use this dreadful situation to put ourselves on more humane and sustainable pathways forward, in which holistic visions of well-being, vitality, and sustainability explicitly include cultural diversity, meaning-making through art, and social connecting through cultural exchange, rituals of remembrance and resilience, and moments of celebration?

* * *

Tourism represents a multifaceted system that can provide not only economic benefits for local communities but also opportunities for lifelong learning, intercultural exchange and dialogue, revitalization of cultural traditions and stories, sources of inspiration, and the expansion of mindsets to embrace new possibilities and perspectives. As a few visitors multiply into tourism flows, tourism dynamics and development processes play a growing role in influencing or even propelling changes in local living situations, in both positive and negative ways. Even if relationships are amicable, “the constant passing of strangers takes a toll on local communities” (Taşcu-Stavre, 2018, p. 171).

The excesses and damages that have been caused by mass tourism serve as stark warnings to places in which tourism has been emerging and expanding.¹ Growing attention to responsible tourism and related modes of tourism aim to counteract ‘traditional’ damaging approaches through developing alternate tourism pathways that emphasize community benefits, mitigate damages, and inspire new types of relationships and approaches. The emergence of the notion of ‘regenerative tourism’ (Cave and Dredge, 2020) further deepens this resolve to change the traditional path of tourism to re-emphasize and centralize travel-related actions and dynamics for local benefit.

We can observe the emergence of city-based initiatives that re-conceive the idea of tourists or visitors and re-position them as short-term residents and temporary citizens, with responsibilities, simultaneously working out what this means in practice (see, e.g., Aarø-Hansen, 2017; Richards and Marques, 2018). Tourism trends to seek out connections with ‘authenticity’ and ‘the local’ are aligning with a growing interest in tourism in smaller places, which are building on their “endogenous resources, both tangible and intangible,” and leveraging their unique cultural characteristics to offer “place-based experiences” to tourists (Scherf, 2021, pp. 12, 2). In many rural situations, the attraction of visitors and the conversion of them into more permanent residents is a core objective to obtain a sustainable community (see Campbell and Maclaren in this volume). As is evident in many of the chapters in this book, as culture–tourism linkages are explicitly taken up to strategically guide and propel local development, political and economic aspects also come into play (see Tomaz in this volume).

Within the sustainable tourism context, attention to culture has been largely directed to the sustainability of cultural tourism (e.g., EENCA, 2019; EU, 2019), with related research focusing on alleviating tourism pressures on heritage sites and cultural assets (e.g., Pedersen, 2002; García-Hernández, De la Calle-Vaquero, and Yubero, 2017; Imon, 2017) or on the local cultural impacts of tourism activity (e.g., external cultural influences and clashes with local cultures; Glasson, Godfrey, and Goodey, 1995; Cooper et al., 2013; Zhuang, Yao, and Li, 2019). Other research has emphasized issues of commodification and the risk of ‘cultural appropriation’ of intangible cultural heritage for tourism development (e.g., George, 2010); promotional representations of culture, often reproducing stereotypes (e.g., Daye, 2008; Salazar, 2009); and the sanitization of history and ‘museification’ of heritage and cultures for the consumption of tourists (e.g., Loulanski and Loulanski, 2011; Stylianou-Lambert, Boukas, and Bounia, 2015).

While all these issues continue to be salient, they are increasingly intertwined with additional dynamics arising from situations of ‘new tourism’ in which in situ ‘unique’ and ‘alternative’ experiences and relationships are highlighted, where travellers aim to experience the local ways of life by ‘living as a local’, seeking ‘back door’ moments, and interacting with residents. This situation brings a more detailed focus on the local residents and the ways in which they act in tourisminfluenced contexts that affect community dynamics – bringing both opportunities and concerns (see Richards in this volume). This trend dovetails with expanding understandings of culture as ‘a way of life’ (Baycan and Girard, 2013; Duxbury, 2020), cultural planning and culturally informed planning approaches based on broad notions of ‘cultural resources’ (Mercer, 1991; Bianchini and Ghilardi, 2007; Young and Stevenson, 2013), and related efforts to identify, understand, and strategically mobilize the ‘cultural DNA’ of a place (Ghilardi, 2017).

A cultural sustainability perspective focuses on considerations of cultural vitality, adaptation and change, and continuance over time. This approach explicitly recognizes the plurality and diversity of cultures, perspectives, experiences, and memories that inform and shape collective ways of life, forms of expression, and ever-evolving imaginaries of place, community identities, and proposed future trajectories. While highlighting cultural considerations, this approach is intimately linked to broader social conditions and interactions, from local and regional connectivity to more global flows of persons, information, and ideas.

In the research and policy-related literature, cultural sustainability tends to be defined in two ways:

On one hand, it refers to the sustainability of cultural and artistic practices and patterns, including, for example, identity formation and expression, cultural heritage conservation, and a sense of cultural continuity. On the other hand, cultural sustainability also refers to the role of cultural traits and actions to inform and compose part of the pathways towards more sustainable societies. Culture lies at the core of practices and beliefs that can support or inspire the necessary societal transition to more sustainable living. These narratives, values, and actions contribute to the emergence of a more culturally sensitive understanding of sustainable development and to clarifying the roles of art, culture, and cultural policy in this endeavour.

(Kangas, Duxbury, and De Beukelaer, 2017, p. 130)

This collection aims to link these perspectives, while attending closely to the processes of change, resilience, and continuity that are entangled within various tourism contexts. While primarily focusing on the first of these definitional approaches, the chapters within this book also aim to highlight approaches and ‘seeds of change’ that enable alterations in mainstream tourism practices in order to engender more place-specific and culturally sensitive patterns to form and sustain.

The book’s chapters consider cultural sustainability as embedded in the active processes through which cultures are sustained. As Aleida Assmann (2019) explains,

Cultures depend on forms of transmission through recovering, reworking, revaluing, reanimating and restructuring the collected and collective heritage of the group. But this also means that the future of cultural memory and heritage is always precarious. It relies on renewed acts of attention, interest, remembering, preservation, transmission and discussion.

(pp. 27–28)

This approach aligns with Sacha Kagan’s (2019) argument that:

Any culturally meaningful approach to sustainability should work with a “procedural” definition of sustainability (Miller, 2011) where “sustainability is the emergent property of a discussion about desired futures” (Robinson [2004] in Miller, 2011, p. 31). … A procedural definition recognizes and works with the unavoidable and necessary conditions of emergence, unpredictability, uncertainty and “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 1988)… . [It] engages in a process of articulation, (re)interpretation and negotiation of cultural difference …

(p. 131)

The contributors to this volume provide in situ insights emanating from diverse contexts but similarly adhering to the contention that it is necessary to foster “an integrative understanding of sustainable development which regards culture as a fundamental structure of societal action and thus as a dimension of sustainable development itself” (Holz and Stoltenberg, 2011, pp. 15–16, cited in Meireis and Rippl, 2019, p. 254).

This book

The origins of this book are found in the international, interdisciplinary conference “Culture, Sustainability and Place: Innovative Approaches for Tourism Development,” which was held from October 11 to 13, 2017, in Ponta Delgada, São Miguel Island, Azores.² The event was organized within the context of the UN designation of 2017 as the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development. The conference explored the place and roles of culture within sustainable tourism for local development, bringing together both critical examinations of this issue as well as innovative approaches and practices. Beyond these beginnings, additional authors were invited to submit contributions to this volume, and the collection has evolved since that time.

This book is an effort to examine the dynamic connections between cultural sustainability, tourism, and development through investigating how changing situations bring re-articulations and local change in specific locales. More specifically, its aims are threefold:

• To examine the cultural dimensions of tourism-invoked dynamics of change and cultural impacts of tourism-related activities;
• To draw attention to the roles and place of cultural expressions, artistic activities, and cultural heritage resources in local and regional sustainable development contexts linked to tourism; and
• To propose and highlight culture-informed generative approaches that encourage a better balance between visitors and residents’ quality of life; attend to local cultural stewardship, vitality, and sustainability; and consider the broader holistic development of the place being visited.

The chapters are interdisciplinary in scope, bringing together authors from an array of fields and experiences. They are informed by both academic and pragmatic work advancing perspectives on the roles of culture in local sustainable development and taking action to this end. The chapters are rooted in a deep appreciation for learning from practice through careful observation, analysis, and reflection on the contexts in which practices (and issues) arise. The varied perspectives and contexts provide a rich milieu from which to consider the complexities of culture–tourism relationships and broader dynamics.

The contributions to this book examine and reflect on situations in primarily smaller communities and rural areas located in Brazil, Canada, Croatia, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and the United States. The situations presented in the chapters contribute to understanding how tourism and development dynamics are playing out outside of more prominent urban centres of ‘global culture’, shining a light on less-examined situations within global and regional tourism flows. The chapters explore and illuminate the complexities of circumstances and place-specific dynamics of various configurations of transition. The connection among these diverse contexts is the relationship between local cultures, tourism, and local sustainable development, from efforts to strengthen connections to concern about discord between them.

The authors provide insights derived from examining and working in very different situations in which culture-based and culture-implicated tourism has introduced opportunities, challenges, and a lens to examine and build community futures that include culture and tourism-related components. Collectively, they indicate some of these possible pathways forward while also warning of some risks and concerns in this process. While some chapters are positioned as counteractions to prevailing patterns (see, e.g., Chaturvedi, and Žuvela and Portolan in this volume), they do not represent locales undergoing wide-scale place reinvention, but rather initiatives that aim to influence and provide additional options for development trajectories. In some cases, these initiatives can inspire and help propel associated developments in the locale, if nurturing conditions are present (see, e.g., Qu and Funck, Beaudette, Almeida, and Musaró and Moralli in this volume).

The book is divided into four sections: Relational modes of tourism and culture-informed placemaking dynamics, Artistic interventions for regional revitalization, Le...