Tourism, Creativity and Development

Greg Richards,Julie Wilson

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134090129
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Physical Sciences
• Thema: Geography

Destinations across the world are beginning to replace or supplement culture-led development strategies with creative development. This book critically analyzes the impact and effectiveness of creative strategies in tourism development and charts the emergence of 'creative tourism'. Why has 'creativity' become such an important aspect of development strategies and of tourism development in particular? Why is this happening now, apparently simultaneously, in so many destinations across the globe? What is the difference between cultural tourism and creative tourism? These are among the important questions this book answers.

It critically examines the developing relationship between tourism and creativity, the articulation of the 'creative turn' in tourism, and the impact this has on theoretical perspectives and practical approaches to tourism development. A wide range of examples from Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and Africa explore the interface between tourism and creativity including: creative spaces and places such as cultural and creative clusters and ethnic precincts; the role of the creative industries and entrepreneurs in the creation of experiences; creativity and rural areas; the 'creative class' and tourism; lifestyle, creativity and tourism and marketing creative tourism destinations. The relationship between individual and collective forms of creativity and the widely differing forms of modern tourism are also discussed. In the concluding section of the book the contribution of creativity to tourism and to development strategies in general is assessed, and areas for future research are outlined.The diverse multidisciplinary contributions link theory and practice, and demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of creativity as a tourism development strategy and marketing tool. It is the first exploration of the relationship between tourism and creativity and its consequences for tourism development in different parts of the world.

1
Tourism development trajectories

From culture to creativity?

Greg Richards and Julie Wilson

The growing synergy of tourism and culture has been one of the major themes in tourism development and marketing in recent years. Tourism destinations seeking to distinguish themselves from their increasingly numerous competitors have turned to culture as a means of distinction, and culture has increasingly been linked to tourism as a means of generating income and jobs (Richards 2001). The growth of ‘cultural tourism’ has been one of the major trends in global tourism in the past three decades and is still seen as one of the major growth areas for the future (European Travel Commission/World Tourism Organization 2005).

The apparent success of culture-led or cultural development strategies has encouraged more cities, regions and nations to use the combination of culture and tourism. Richards (2001) shows that the supply of cultural attractions grew faster than cultural demand during the 1990s. This has led to growing competition between destinations for cultural consumers, stimulating the creation of more distinctive and more impressive cultural developments. There is an increasing problem of ‘serial reproduction’ (Harvey 1989; Richards and Wilson 2006) or ‘McGuggenheimization’ (Honigsbaum 2001) of culture, and it can be argued that cultural development alone is no longer sufficient to create distinction between destinations.

Destinations are therefore beginning to replace or supplement cultureled development strategies with creative development. Florida’s (2002) concept of the ‘creative class’ has been wholeheartedly embraced by a wide range of different regions seeking to capitalize on their creative resources. Creativity is also increasingly being applied to the tourism sphere. VisitBritain (2006), the national tourist office for Great Britain, has now identified ‘creative tourism’ as a major growth area. Questions about the development of creative tourism have also been asked in the British Houses of Parliament (Hansard 2006). The European Travel Commission/World Tourism Organization report on City Tourism and Culture (2005) also underlined the development potential of ‘creative cities’ as tourism attractions. Creative approaches to tourism are also being actively developed by commercial operators, in countries as far apart as New Zealand (see Chapter 9), South Africa (Chapter 15) and Spain (Chapter 8).

Why has ‘creativity’ become such an important aspect of development strategies in general, and of tourism development in particular? Why is this happening now, apparently simultaneously, in so many destinations across the globe? What is the difference between cultural tourism and creative tourism? These are important questions we will seek to answer in this chapter, before exploring different aspects of the development of creativity in tourism in the chapters that follow. The aim of this volume is to examine critically the developing relationship between tourism and creativity, the articulation of the ‘creative turn’ in tourism, and the impact this has on theoretical perspectives and practical approaches to tourism development.

Until relatively recently, the tourism industry had apparently made relatively little use of creative approaches to development or engaged in real innovation (Chapter 8). The majority of tourism products continued to be based on relatively static modes of consumption, and tourism remains largely based on models emphasizing traditional factors of production (such as sun, sea and sand). In recent years, however, signs of change have emerged as more attention has been paid to experience production and creativity as an element of both tourism consumption and production. In effect, there also seems to have been a shift in the power relations in the tourism production system, with the role of the consumer changing from that of mere receiver of ready-made products into the co-producer of tourism experiences. In this new scenario, the consumer is able to exercise more creativity and consumption skills, which in turn forces the erstwhile producers to be more creative in (co-)producing tourism experiences. To examine the reasons why creativity has become such a popular development strategy, it is useful to examine the reasons why culture and tourism have become so closely integrated in recent decades, and why the ‘cultural turn’ in tourism later developed into the ‘creative turn’.

From cultural to creative production

As Evans outlines in Chapter 4, culture-led development first came to prominence in the late 1970s, as a wide range of places, most significantly large cities, were struggling to deal with the consequences of economic restructuring. The need to replace ‘traditional’ jobs in manufacturing (or in the case of rural areas in primary industry) led to a search for alternatives. These were invariably found in the rapidly expanding service sector, with areas such as culture, tourism, banking and finance, and research and development being among the most important. Hannigan shows in Chapter 3 how the entertainment industry provided one potential redevelopment strategy, as cities built shopping malls, theme parks and other relatively safe forms of consumption. However, as the ‘fantasy city’ model began to show signs of waning, culture, creativity and tourism in particular became sectors favoured by a large number of cities and regions. As well as being growth areas, they also offered the potential to develop employment and project a new image of the region to the outside world. Glasgow, Toronto, Barcelona, Singapore and Sydney are just a few of the cities examined in this volume which have employed culture in their restructuring strategies. In many cases, the development of culture and tourism went hand-in-hand, as cultural facilities became important flagships which attracted tourism, and tourists contributed the money which supported the expansion of culture. The apparently flawless symmetry of this couplet led many other cities and regions to adopt the culture-led or culture and tourism-led regeneration model. In addition, cultural and tourism bodies threw their weight behind such models (cf. UNESCO’s Cultural Tourism Programme, cultural tourism developments funded by the European Union and the White House Report on Cultural Tourism in the USA). Cultural tourism arguably became a ‘good’ form of tourism, widely viewed as sustainable and supporting local culture (Richards 2001). Cultural tourism also became equated with ‘quality tourism’; a factor increasingly important in areas which are experiencing decreasing returns from traditional forms of mass tourism (see Russo and Arias Sans, Chapter 10).

The expanded role for culture in tourism development mirrored the growth of culture as a factor of development in general. Zukin (1995) showed how the growth of culture-led development was tied to the workings of the symbolic economy. Culture provided the symbols, such as museums, art galleries and iconic architecture, which could be used to increase land values and stimulate business activity. This growth in turn supported employment in the cultural sector, strengthening its lobbying for more investment in culture. This produced powerful arguments to preserve the heritage of the past and expand contemporary culture in order to maximize the ‘real cultural capital’ of places. Culture has therefore come to play an important role in distinguishing places from each other. This is increasingly essential in a globalizing world where place competition is fierce, and cities and regions strive to create distinctive images for themselves (Richards and Wilson 2004a).

One of the problems inherent in cultural distinction strategies is that many places adopt similar strategies (often copying or ‘borrowing’ ideas from one another), and therefore even ‘culture’ begins to lack distinction. The growth of ‘serial reproduction’ of culture epitomized by McGuggenheimization (Honigsbaum 2001) and the spread of signature architecture to cities around the world makes it harder and more expensive to use material culture to distinguish places (Richards and Wilson 2006).

In the McGuggenheim marketplace, it is no longer enough to have culture – one has to have a cultural brand in order to compete (Evans 2003). The need to bundle and identify cultural resources led to the development of ‘cultural quarters’, ‘cultural districts’, ‘creative clusters’ or ‘creative districts’, where cultural and creative producers were clustered in order to generate a ‘buzz’. In such a climate, the ‘creative turn’ became almost a logical successor to the cultural development process of previous decades.

The creative turn in culture-led development was therefore stimulated by a number of basic factors. First, the development of the symbolic economy (Lash and Urry 1994) privileged creativity over cultural products. Second, regions and cities have increasingly used culture as a form of valorization (Ray 1998). Third, the sheer proliferation of ‘real cultural capital’ created the need to find new cultural signs to create distinction in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Finally, places which do not h...